Peter Gabriel’s latest project didn’t go exactly as planned. In 2010, he released Scratch My Back, his first studio album in eight years, which collected skeletal covers of songs by the Arcade Fire, Radiohead, David Bowie, Bon Iver, and Paul Simon. It was part of a concept where each of the artists he covered would then cover his songs on a follow-up titled And I’ll Scratch Yours. As he told The Guardian three years ago, “Rather than having a passive project where you do your own thing with people’s songs, I wanted to see if I could interact with the people who wrote them, so they had to be living and amenable, or initially amenable.”
That last phrase proved crucial. Gabriel’s peculiar musical choices-- slowing every song down to a uniform crawl, setting them in bleakly orchestral arrangements, intoning the lyrics in a near-spoken cadence-- alienated many long-time fans as well as some of the artists. Most notably: Radiohead, upon hearing Gabriel’s rococo-minimalist version of “Street Spirit (Fade Out)", decided they were no longer amenable and backed out of covering “Wallflower”. Bowie, Neil Young, and Ray Davies also declined to participate, so Gabriel recruited Feist and Joseph Arthur as replacements. Neither of their covers proves particularly revelatory: Backed by Timber Timbre on “Don’t Give Up”, Feist can’t quite muster the desperation and intimacy of the original, although Arthur’s decision to slow “Shock the Monkey” to half-speed plays out surprisingly well.
Originally, both of these albums were intended to be released simultaneously in 2010, but it took three long years to finally scratch their backs. During that time Gabriel and the other artists released some of the tracks via iTunes and Record Store Day exclusives, which means nearly half of I’ll Scratch Yours has long been available. Bon Iver’s “Come Talk to Me”, released on a split-7" with Gabriel’s version of “Flume”, sounds weirdly faithful to the original, yet it’s so muted and understated that it ends up missing the point of the song: rather than an open line of communication, it’s a busy signal. David Byrne sounds similarly noncommittal on “I Don’t Remember", his voice alarmingly thin and even sickly. At least Stephin Merritt has a good time with “Not One of Us”, injecting some much-needed humor into the song, and Lou Reed takes the piss out of the hoary “Solsbury Hill”, a rom-com staple that ends up squatting in a Bronx tenement ca. 1976. Slowed down and skeezed up with sneers of distorted guitar, it’s nearly unrecognizable delivered in Reed's supremely stoic voice.
The familiarity of these songs drains much of the surprise and novelty from the album, yet the new songs prove just as uneven and in many cases noncommittal, as though the artists were embarrassed to be included on the tracklist. The Arcade Fire, long rumored to be only initially amenable, turn in a cover of “Games Without Frontiers” so obligatory it sounds like they changed their minds and decided not to participate after all. It lacks the earth-rattling pomp of their original material and, worse, the sharp derision of Gabriel’s 1980 version. On the other hand, you can’t fault the match of Randy Newman with “Big Time”, off Gabriel’s 1986 album So. It’s so perfect I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already, and Newman sings the line “My ass is getting bigger” like he wishes he’d written it himself. It’s too bad, then, that the production is so stiff, ratcheted to rigid beats that constrict his vocals considerably. He sounds like he wants to cut loose and jazz the song up in the style of Mose Allison, yet has to remind himself to adhere to the strict meter.
Who knows how I’ll Scratch Yours would have sounded if it had been released as planned, on schedule and with all artists amenable? Gabriel intended this pair of albums to be an exercise in mutual interpretation, emphasizing not only the songwriting but the distinctive tics and traits an artist naturally brings to lyrics and melody. There’s something charming about the clunkiness of that concept, especially the way it ignores the realities of dealing with artists (“like herding cats,” he told The Guardian) and releasing music in a digital era. As a double album, Scratch might have produced something like an elaborate mixtape with originals on one side of the Maxell and covers on the other. In execution, however, I’ll Scratch Yours plays like another artifact of the 90s, this one less fondly remembered. It's a tribute album-- or, better yet, a self-tribute album. This is Gabriel scratching his own back.
