Listening Wind — Peter Gabriel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ2omdkdk2k

An entire album — Scratch My Back — of sublime, beautiful, prolonged and slow covers of songs from the past thirty years or so — some modern, some ancient, from Bon Iver to Bowie, Radiohead to Regina Spektor to Paul Simon. And they're all so, so wonderful, but Listening Wind is the largest jump up from weird, etherial Talking Heads song to something transcendental, updating the timbre and tone for modern listeners, making it slow and dramatic and tense, a horror movie of a song — is the man building a bomb? What is going on? Who's being driven away? And it builds in tension and harmony and beauty, the determination of the man and the strings and the soft horn in the back swelling until you can't break away, you stop what you're doing and stare, thousand-yard-stare, out the window, and it builds and builds and builds, and the song is so quiet and gentle, Peter Gabriel is soothing, but the music is not, like a horror soundtrack, building in swells and sweeps, always harmonic, — and then it breaks out, and you're left hanging over a canyon, only echoes.