By JON PARELES
For many singer-songwriters there comes a time to make an album of other people’s songs. That’s what Peter Gabriel does with “Scratch My Back” (Virgin), which was recently released. It’s his first solo studio album in eight years in a multitasking career: technology projects, musical collaborations, humanitarian initiatives, parenthood.
“There’s a Slow Food movement,” he said in an interview during a New York City stopover. “I think I’m part of the Slow Music movement.”
A covers album can be a tribute or a miscellany, a throwaway or a statement about what a songwriter holds dear. Mr. Gabriel chose his material in a kind of social-networking experiment. “Scratch My Back” got its title because when Mr. Gabriel picked a song, he also asked the songwriter to record a Gabriel song in turn.
The original plan was to release two albums in tandem. The songwriters agreed - except for David Bowie, whose collaborator on “Heroes,” Brian Eno, will participate - but the deadlines came and went. “We may not get everybody, but I hope we will.’’
Mr. Gabriel’s voice is the most recognizable aspect of the new album. It’s the ancient-mariner baritone that lent gravity to the early Genesis, to Mr. Gabriel’s 1970s and ‘80s hits like “Solsbury Hill” and “Sledgehammer,” and to “Down to Earth,” the Oscarnominated song he wrote with Thomas Newman for the soundtrack of “Wall-E” in 2008. But on “Scratch My Back” Mr. Gabriel has placed his voice in a new wilderness.
The material is by rock songwriters, including Mr. Gabriel’s fellow arena veterans like Neil Young, Radiohead and David Bowie, along with indie-rockers like the Arcade Fire and Bon Iver. But the songs don’t rock: mostly they hover. Only one song, Randy Newman’s despondent “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” resembles the original. Mr. Gabriel’s other cover versions are slow, moody and willful .
“I was trying to make a grownup record,” said Mr. Gabriel, 60. “This is treating people as if they can handle difficult music and words. Not that I’ve courted the lowest common denominator before, but there’s a playfulness and childishness in some of my older work that isn’t present on this record.”
Many of the arrangements are eerie and astringent, and the mood, even in love songs, is desolate. “Happy music that is genuinely joyful is probably the hardest music to write,” Mr. Gabriel said. “I think miserable stuff is more natural to the human condition and maybe more cathartic.”
Mr. Gabriel self-consciously set himself limits and conditions because, he said, he finds obstacles more helpful than complete freedom. “I’m better trying to get around something than building something,” he said.
Every full moon Mr. Gabriel plans to release a two-song digital download on iTunes. The series started in January with his version of “The Book of Love” by the Magnetic Fields paired with the Magnetic Fields performing “Not One of Us.” Stephin Merritt, the Magnetic Fields’ songwriter, said he chose that as “the one where I felt most comfortable doing my evil-dwarf chorus.” The second matches Mr. Gabriel’s “Boy in the Bubble” with Paul Simon’s take on “Biko.”
Mr. Gabriel entrusted the vocal tracks to the arranger John Metcalfe, a former member of a postpunk band, the Durutti Column. Mr. Gabriel and Mr. Metcalfe shared a taste for Stravinsky, the mystical Minimalist Arvo Part and American Minimalists like Steve Reich and Philip Glass, along with the British composers Elgar and Vaughan Williams.
Mr. Gabriel egged on his arranger. “The more out there it was, the more he enthused,” Mr. Metcalfe said.
Along with the cover songs Mr. Metcalfe said he is reworking Mr. Gabriel’s older songs with “no drums, no guitars.”
Mr. Gabriel said: “I’m often guilty of overcooking and too much arrangement and throwing too much at it. But I think as I get older, I’m learning better when to be empty and when to be full.”
