After a full year of teasing, Peter Gabriel will soon be releasing his highly-anticipated tenth studio album I/O. It will be Gabriel's first full-length album of new original material in over 21 years since 2002's Up, marking the longest gap between two studio albums in his solo career.

Ever since he started off his career in the 1960s with Genesis, Gabriel has been pushing the boundaries of music. After leaving Genesis in 1975, he launched an extremely successful solo career with "Solsbury Hill" as his first single. His fifth studio album, So (1986), is his best-selling release and is certified triple platinum in the UK and five times platinum in the US. Gabriel has also been a champion of world music for much of his career, co-founding the WOMAD music festival in 1982 and promoting world music through his Real World Records label.

Ready to dive into Peter Gabriel's mind? Here are our 10 favorite songs from the English creative!

10. "I Don't Remember"

A standout from Peter Gabriel's 1980 LP Melt, "I Don't Remember" is a sultry jam with punk rock embellishments.

Gabriel channels fear into each David Byrne-style shriek (who would later cover the song) as he plays a character with amnesia. Although she didn't cover the track, Kate Bush also offered up her own vocal take of "I Don't Remember" with Peter Gabriel on May 12, 1979. They sang the song together at a memorial concert at the Hammersmith Odeon for Bill Duffield, a lighting director who died during Bush's Tour of Life tour.

9. "Biko"

Gabriel's anti-apartheid song is very respected among fans. The track pays homage to South African anti-apartheid activist Stephen Bantu Biko, who died in 1977 while in police detention. In 1980, the song reached the top 40 in the UK and almost did the same in New Zealand.

Besides Gabriel's vocals and raw lyrics, "Biko" features clandestine recordings from the funeral of Steve Biko. This opening song, “Ngomhla Sibuyayo,” was one of the many Apartheid songs, sung by the Africans living in South Africa as a coping mechanism. There's also the phrase "Yihla moja, yihla moja" in the chorus, which translates to "come spirit" in Xhosa.

8. "Red Rain"

So is Peter Gabriel's magnum opus album, and it opens with this song. "Red Rain" features drumming from Steward Copeland — drummer for The Police — and is a deep, dark, echoey tune about a recurring dream Gabriel had. In that dream, he swam in a pool of red wine, then saw wine bottles shaped like people falling off a cliff. Once the bottles smashed to pieces at the bottom, they would leak a red fluid, which it then began to rain – the “red rain.”

Several years before its release (in the late ‘70s), Gabriel had an idea for a film titled Mozo, for which “Red Rain” was to be the theme song. In the film, a group of villagers would be punished for their sins by enduring a blood-red rainstorm. The film never came to fruition, but there are other traces of it in his songs “On the Air,” “Down the Dolce Vita,” “Here Comes the Flood,” and “Exposure.”

7. "Big Time"

"Big Time" is considered an underrated song in Gabriel's canon. High energy, great rhythym, and a catchy chorus help to communicate how BIG of a fun TIME this song really is! This track is notable for using both bass and bass synth instead of just one or the other.

"Big Time" was released as the third single off So. In this song, Gabriel describes a person who has great ambitions in life, though not necessarily positive ones. Tony Levin, who played bass on most of So’s tracks, only worked the frets on the bass while drummer Jerry Marotta hit the strings with drumsticks. The result is a very strange percussive sound. Levin would eventually go on to create Funk Fingers: wooden attachments that allowed him to do it alone.

6. "Shock the Monkey"

Many people believe this is an animal rights (or animal cruelty) song, and while there are a lot of animals mentioned in this track – like apes, foxes, and rats – "Shock the Monkey" is actually about jealousy. The "monkey" in this song refers to human impulse, and the term "shock the monkey to life" actually refers to those moments that surprise us, and help us come to conclusions or decisions because our fears or insecurities are confirmed.

With its drum machine programming and sleek synths, “Shock the Monkey” is Peter Gabriel at his most new wave. It's also extremely catchy. And it's by far the best song on Gabriel's 1982 album, Security.

5. "Games Without Fronteirs"

This is a fan-favorite Peter Gabriel bop. "Games Without Fronteirs" comes from his self-titled third studio album from 1980. The title is a reference to the European game show Jeux Sans Frontières, and the song itself uses references of globalization and the military industrial complex.

There are plenty of poetic lyrics in this piece, but the most notable is the first verse, in which Gabriel uses children's names as references for countries. (Adolf is obviously a reference to Germany, and Enrico could be a reference to Enrico Fermi, who worked on the Manhattan Project.) "If looks could kill, they probably will" is a metaphor for countries' military strength and how they show it, while "whistling tunes" could be a euphemism for machine gun fire. That latter expression certainly makes the cheerful whistling throughout this tune more sinister.

4. "Don't Give Up (feat. Kate Bush)"

"Don't Give Up" was the fifth single released from So. It's an emotional ballad about staying strong during hard times, and has helped many people overcome their problems.

The song is inspired by the Depression-era photography of Dorothea Lange. Gabriel discovered her photography through a book of FSA photography titled In This Proud Land. He saw a parallel between the ravaged Depression-era farmers and those suffering from the economic downturn in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain – he wrote the song as the narrative of a man who’d lost his job to Thatcher’s economic policies.

Probably the best part about this song is Gabriel's duet with the one-and-only Kate Bush. She sang backup on Gabriel’s third album, Melt. Peter Gabriel’s original choice for the duet was Dolly Parton, but she turned the offer down – something he was later thankful for in light of how well the song turned out with Bush’s vocals.

3. "Solsbury Hill"

Rustic and timeless, "Solsbury Hill" feels like a classic through and through. It was written shortly after Peter left Genesis, and is thought to be Peter’s way of coming to terms with his leaving Genesis and getting better opportunities to express himself artistically. He was inspired to write the tune after meditating at Little Solsbury Hill in Somerset, England.

"Solsbury Hill" was the lead single of Peter Gabriel’s 1977 debut self-titled solo album, also known as Car, and became a top 20 hit in the UK, Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands. It also peaked at #68 on the US Billboard Hot 100. We love the gentle guitar plucking and the unusual 7/4 time signature. It's like you can hear the sounds of endurance and time passing when you listen to this thing.

2. "In Your Eyes"

One of the most heartfelt ballads ever created. "In Your Eyes" was released in 1986 as part of So and is famously featured in the movie Say Anything. (You know...that iconic scene of John Cusack holding up the boombox?) This song features Senegalese superstar Youssou N'Dour singing through the coda – he sings parts of the chorus as translated into his native Wolof. The love song is said to be written for Rosanna Arquette, with whom Gabriel was romantically involved with throughout the 80s and early 90s.

What makes "In Your Eyes" so romantic are the dreamy keys, the twinkling noises in the background, and Gabriel's reverbed vocals. The build-up that occurs in the pre-chorus ("And all my instincts they return / And the grand façade, so soon will burn") never fails to stir our hearts.

1. "Sledgehammer"

For a song called "Sledgehammer," this song sure does have a banging reputation! "Sledgehammer" was released in 1986 as part of So. It placed #1 on the music charts in both Canada and North America that year, and was a big hit in the UK alongside "Games Without Frontiers." Gabriel's only Billboard Hot 100 hit is centered around Gabriel trying to woo someone, and uses a LOT of sexual innuendo – if you couldn't already guess from the very phallic title.

“Sledgehammer” was heavily influenced by 60s soul, specifically songs released by the Stax label, to the point that Peter Gabriel hired Wayne Jackson of Stax’s Memphis Horns to lead his horn section for this song.

Of course, we can't talk about "Sledgehammer" without mentioning the iconic music video. The music video for this song was extremely influential in the 1980s, and is MTV’s most played music video to date. The video is almost entirely stop-motion animation, created with the help of Aardman Animations: the company that would later make the Wallace and Gromit films. "Sledgehammer" would go on to win a record nine MTV Video Music Awards at the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards, and Best British Video at the 1987 Brit Awards. The song also saw Gabriel nominated for three Grammy Awards for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance, Record of the Year, and Song of the Year. Like the tool itself, "Sledgehammer" really did BREAK through records!

Check out our selection of free stations streaming Peter Gabriel music at Live365.com.

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_{Article Image: With a full moon behind him, Peter Gabriel sings at a 2023 concert in the Netherlands. (benhoudijk via Depositphotos.)}