Peter Gabriel – Family Snapshot
Guest post by Michael J Roberts,
Author of “33 Great Songs 33 Great Songwriters”
Peter Gabriel – Family Snapshot
Peter Gabriel left the successful Prog-Rock outfit Genesis in the mid 70’s to pursue a career as a solo act and produced the astonishing Solsbury Hill to kick it off. The song was a key marker in Gabriel staking out his identity, separate to the persona he’d been known for in the band, and identity would play a key part as subject matter for a lot of his work. Gabriel complicated things for his record company by insisting all his albums be called Peter Gabriel, a nightmare for marketing and commercial purposes, but having done so for his first two albums he managed to get them to accede to his wishes a third time. The streak was broken when his US record company called the 4th Peter Gabriel album Security, although it was called Peter Gabriel everywhere else. Like The Beatles 1968 double album, which was commonly called The White Album, Gabriel’s first 3 albums are known widely by the images on the front, as in Car, Scratch and Melt.
Musically speaking…..
Gabriel constructs the song in three parts, the first slow and pretty in Ab major, a piano dominated background that does not utilise 3rd notes in the chords, keeping the tone neither major nor minor behind the diatonic melody, before it moves to a darker Gminor for the bridge section. The heavier middle section details the build up to the pulling of the trigger, before the scene freezes and the narrative describes the final moments across a spare and haunting bass. Some of the lines are chilling, “I don’t really hate you. I don’t care what you do, we were made for each other me and you” as Gabriel digs into the psychology of the protagonist. “I want to be somebody, you were like that do, if you don’t get given you learn to take and I will take you”, is the gut wrenching summation.
This is an excerpt from my 33 Great Songs 33 Great Songwriters book available everywhere eBooks are sold.
