Up is the seventh studio and thirteenth album overall released by the English rock musician Peter Gabriel. The album rose to number 9 in the US, number 11 in the UK, and captured the number 1 position in Italy. Most critics reviewed it positively, though Rolling Stone said Gabriel was "out of touch".
Gabriel supported the album with a world tour in 2003 called Growing Up, his first in ten years since the Secret World Tour. Gabriel's Growing Up tour included backing vocals by his daughter Melanie, age 26–27. Select dates were filmed and released as Growing Up Live.
Background
Gabriel started work on the album in the spring of 1995. He and engineer Richard Chappell travelled between different locations during the initial writing stages of the album using a portable setup (recording at Real World Studios in between): the first two months were spent in a rented chalet in Méribel, then three months in Senegal starting in October 1995, followed by another trip to Méribel in Spring 1996 and a brief recording stint on a friend's recording-studio-equipped boat along the Amazon in Summer 1997. From then on, the rest of the album work was based at Real World Studios, where further writing, recording, overdubbing, editing and mixing took place over the next four to five years. At one point, work was being done simultaneously on both Up and the OVO soundtrack for a few months, separately by engineers Chappell and Richard Evans (respectively). However, in November 1998, both engineers decided to focus on completing the OVO soundtrack, so work on Up was temporarily put on hold.
By late 2000, work on the album was finally gathering renewed pace, with a string section recorded at AIR Lyndhurst Studios in London amongst other things. Renowned mixer Tchad Blake was invited to Real World Studios in early 2001 to begin the final mixing stage. He would work on the mixes in the Big Room in Real World Studios, while Gabriel and Chappell continued recording in the Writing Room. Between them they'd figure out which of the newly recorded parts would be used in the mix or not.
Its name was Up from the start, though at one point the name I/O was considered: "I think 'I/o' is a good title because I noticed a lot of the songs were about birth and death and a little bit of in and out activity in between." In 1998, Gabriel learned that R.E.M. also intended to release an album bearing the same title, but decided to keep it after consulting with the band and much consideration: "I have been living in an 'Up' world for four years now and have no wish to come down." In the months preceding the album's release, video clips of Gabriel talking about the songs as well as short demos of each song were released at the coming of every full moon on Gabriel's official website.
Songs
The album's lyrics deal mostly with birth and especially death. The opening track, "Darkness", is a song about overcoming fears. "Growing Up" is a summation of life put to a pulsating beat. "Sky Blue", according to Gabriel, was the oldest song from the album, dating back to the Us recording sessions. The track "No Way Out" is the first track to deal with death solely, though death is a common theme across the entire album. "I Grieve" was conceived after Gabriel looked over his catalogue of music as if it were a catalogue of emotional tools. He found one major missing tool to be one to cope with death and therefore "I Grieve" was born. Gabriel performed the song live on the television show Larry King Weekend on the first anniversary of September 11 attacks in the US, during which Gabriel said that his two daughters were living in New York City and he could not contact them for some time, and that this song was for people who did not hear anything from their relatives then. It was not, however, written specifically for 9/11, having appeared in an earlier version on the City of Angels soundtrack in 1998.
The first single from Up, "The Barry Williams Show" is a down-beat, jazzy song dealing with reality talk shows such as Jerry Springer (in fact, The Brady Bunch star Barry Williams appeared as an audience member in the Sean Penn-directed music video for the song with Requiem for a Dream actor Christopher McDonald playing the titular talk show host).
The song "Signal to Noise" features guest vocalist Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, whose vocal performance was salvaged from the VH1 performance on 28 April 1996 following his death in 1997. Originally he performed the song in a "much starker" form, before Gabriel transformed it into a strings-oriented piece as the cornerstone of the album. Finally, "The Drop" consists of only Gabriel and a Bösendorfer grand piano.