Peter Gabriel's latest single, the nine-minute epic-sounding One By One, reintroduces his Mozo character to his modern-day i/o and o\i world.
Mozo is a recurring, fictional outsider character that Gabriel used in early songs such as Here Comes The Flood and Down The Dolce Vita from his 1977 debut album and On The Air and Exposure from 1978's Peter Gabriel 2/Scratch. Gabriel returned to the character on 1986's So, with both Red Rain and That Voice Again.
“This is another song that comes out of the brain show that I am working on and the character has been effectively torn apart and is trying to reassemble himself one piece at a time. I needed a character for the story and I'd always wanted to do a little more with Mozo, who I had introduced many years back, and I thought, well, let's give him another blast here. He's been brought back from the dead.
“What was interesting for me about Mozo was that he was not fully of the world and not fully outside it. For the original second album narrative, he was found on this waste tip, and there was a reference to alchemy, and how you only really get the opportunity to create gold out of the lowest material; shit. In Japanese culture, they also have kintsugi (kin: gold, tsugi: repair) where a broken cup is repaired with gold or precious metals and the repaired cup with its faults showing ends up more valuable than the original. It's a beautiful symbol for humanity, because we're remarkably easy to break and trying to reassemble self, psyche and sanity, is really the journey of the song.
“There are two or three story songs on the record, and I actually like the length of time they occupy, and I like the fact that you have to stay in it for the ride to understand the story. It's like when you arrive in some hut in the woods, and it takes a while just to settle in and get yourself tuned in to the pace of that place. I wanted a bit of that in the song. If people are on for the full ride, they're going to take it through to the end. It's a long journey, but I think its place in the show, which is percolating in my head, it'll be towards the end, if not the end.”
As he did with 2023's i/o album, Gabriel is releasing a new track every full moon. One By One is the eighth track he's released ahead of his upcoming album, o\i, which is due out later this year.
He's also highlighting the work of an artist he admires with every release. For One By One, it's Pieces by Canadian sculptor David Altmejd, which you can see below. Gabriel had discovered David Altmejd’s work through his 2022 piece, 9x9x9, and then asked him to create a new work in response to the music.
“One of the things I loved about what David does is that he seems to get these images and ideas and then cuts them up and reassembles them," says Gabriel. "Almost like moments of time or maybe like an old-fashioned flick book where you get just an incremental movement from one image to the other. It looked like David had a similar direction in that he's taking the same thing and cutting it up and reassembling it. That worked perfectly for this song and I was excited that David was happy to be part of this project.”
“One By One evokes a kind of spiritual evolution by piecing together the broken parts of oneself,” adds Altmejd himself. “This resonates deeply with me because I understand my sculptures as being made the same way. They start by forming themselves in matter, then they are destroyed, and finally reassembled in a way that makes them transcend materiality.”
