Albums for Life: 7: Peter Gabriel: So

and I am walking and looking

and this is no dream

just my oily life

where the people are alibis

and the street is unfindable for an

entire lifetime

Anne Sexton (From 45 Mercy Street)

I've always loved Gabriel's voice, from early Genesis onwards. As with Costello; I lean towards the quieter moments; which probably says more about me than it does about either singer. I'm a sucker for tender and there's tenderness aplenty on this wonderful record.
'Sledgehammer' does what is says on the tin and sold the album, but there's plenty of hush here too.
I love it when Gabriel does 'intense'.

Amazing to think that initially the album wasn't well received. The Guardian's Alexis Petrides condemned 'So' as "an album packed with ultra-commercial priapic cod-funk" and "a ruthless bid for mainstream success." The Fairlights do flicker and Daniel Lanois' production is unusually robust for him, but it's still a co star, vital to the musical broth; flavoured by African rhythms, techno, prog, pop and soul. A seemingly rich stew but tasteful and (at times) surprising delicate. I never tire of the duet with Kate Bush on 'Don't Give Up', but for me the high point of many high points will always be 'Mercy Street'. I know that I've posted about this song before (with the recent release of a box set of the remastered 'So', complete with a couple of discs featuring live versions of the songs; 25 years old if you can believe it...) and I don't want to suggest that the album is grand for this track only but... 'Mercy Street' is without doubt my favourite Gabriel moment; one of my favourite ever songs; it highlights that wonderful timbre. Interesting, as I could not so easily choose just one finest moment from other favourites, the likes of Waits/Buchanan/Springsteen/MacAloon all have back catalogues to die for but (aside from maybe 'Thunder Road' and 'Born to Run') it's hard to nail them to one song.

'Mercy Street' is sublime on so many levels; the writing, arrangement, recording, performance.

It's perfect, just perfect.
The song was inspired by poet Anne Sexton. 

Sexton was troubled, lost, crippled by depression and tried to recognise and shape her history using poetry as therapy. She wrote essentially for herself and found an empathetic audience only after her suicide. Her search for relief took her in search of the house where she once lived with her father as a child, 45 Mercy Street. 

She walked the streets but couldn't find the address. 

Her search for identity and 'home' are elements picked up by Gabriel in his beautifully empathetic song.

It's emotional presence may be better felt after reading Sexton's poem:

45 Mercy Street

In my dream, drilling into the marrow of my entire bone, my real dream, I'm walking up and down Beacon Hill searching for a street sign - namely MERCY STREET. Not there. I try the Back Bay. Not there. Not there. And yet I know the number. 45 Mercy Street. I know the stained-glass window of the foyer, the three flights of the house with its parquet floors. I know the furniture and mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, the servants. I know the cupboard of Spode the boat of ice, solid silver, where the butter sits in neat squares like strange giant's teeth on the big mahogany table. I know it well. Not there. Where did you go? 45 Mercy Street, with great-grandmother kneeling in her whale-bone corset and praying gently but fiercely to the wash basin, at five A.M. at noon dozing in her wiggy rocker, grandfather taking a nap in the pantry, grandmother pushing the bell for the downstairs maid, and Nana rocking Mother with an oversized flower on her forehead to cover the curl of when she was good and when she was... And where she was begat and in a generation the third she will beget, me, with the stranger's seed blooming into the flower called Horrid. I walk in a yellow dress and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes, enough pills, my wallet, my keys, and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five? I walk. I walk. I hold matches at street signs for it is dark, as dark as the leathery dead and I have lost my green Ford, my house in the suburbs, two little kids sucked up like pollen by the bee in me and a husband who has wiped off his eyes in order not to see my inside out and I am walking and looking and this is no dream just my oily life where the people are alibis and the street is unfindable for an entire lifetime. Pull the shades down - I don't care! Bolt the door, mercy, erase the number, rip down the street sign, what can it matter, what can it matter to this cheapskate who wants to own the past that went out on a dead ship and left me only with paper? Not there. I open my pocketbook, as women do, and fish swim back and forth between the dollars and the lipstick. I pick them out, one by one and throw them at the street signs, and shoot my pocketbook into the Charles River. Next I pull the dream off and slam into the cement wall of the clumsy calendar I live in, my life, and its hauled up notebooks.

You can gauge the song's effect on folk from this 2003 clip, taken from his legendary 'Growing Upwards' show in Milan.

The singers and players are as moved by the power of the song as the audience are.
I've followed it by the official video of the song.
I've then done the same thing (official video/Growing Upwards performance) for another highlight, the album's magnificent opener 'Red Rain'.