There are albums that arrived fully formed and changed the room they played in, and So is one of them — but what gets lost in the mythology is how close it came to being a very different, much smaller record.
Peter Gabriel had spent four albums building a reputation for being difficult, artistically serious, and commercially unpredictable. His label was patient but not infinitely so. When he walked into Ashcombe House, his own converted studio in the English countryside, in 1985, he was working with a producer named Daniel Lanois, who had just finished helping make The Unforgettable Fire for U2 and was about to become the most quietly influential man in popular music. Gabriel wanted atmosphere. Lanois gave him architecture.
The Room It Was Built In
Ashcombe House is central to what this record sounds like. It’s not a clinical room. Gabriel had spent years developing a working method that treated studio space as an instrument, and Lanois understood that instinctively. Engineer Kevin Killen, who had worked with Lanois and would go on to shape Kate Bush’s The Sensual World, captured a low-end warmth on this record that still sounds expensive.
The drum sound on “Sledgehammer” is not a loop. Manu Katché — a young French drummer who would become one of the most sought-after session players of the next two decades — is playing live, and you can feel the room around him. Tony Levin is on bass, as he had been for much of Gabriel’s catalog by then, and his work here is elastic and exact at the same time.
Stewart Copeland plays drums on “Big Time.” That’s not a small detail. Copeland had just finished the Synchronicity tour with The Police and was looking for exactly this kind of lateral move. The song has a slightly unhinged quality that makes more sense once you know who’s behind the kit.
What Lanois Actually Did
Daniel Lanois has spoken in interviews about wanting to record Gabriel’s voice in unusual positions — standing in stairwells, close-miked in corners — to find sounds that didn’t exist in normal tracking rooms. Whether all of that survived into the final mix is a question, but the vocals on “In Your Eyes” and “Mercy Street” have a quality that feels less performed than lived-in.
“Mercy Street” is the record’s real center of gravity, even if “Sledgehammer” is the one everyone knows. It was written for Anne Sexton, whose 1975 suicide Gabriel had been thinking about through her collected poems. Lanois built the track around texture rather than rhythm, and the result sits somewhere between a lullaby and a vigil.
Youssou N’Dour appears on “In Your Eyes,” which became the closing track and the one most people remember. Gabriel had seen N’Dour perform in Paris and understood immediately what that voice would do in this context. He was right. N’Dour’s contribution elevates the whole architecture of the song without overpowering it.
Kate Bush sings the other half of “Don’t Give Up.” That’s Gabriel on lead, Bush on the harmony and response. The song is about unemployment and exhaustion and the specific kind of despair that doesn’t make noise. It is also one of the least showy vocal performances Bush ever recorded, which makes it quietly devastating.
So went five times platinum in the United States. It launched an era of stadium-sized art-pop that nobody else has quite replicated since. Put it on after ten at night and it rewards the attention.