Overview
Peter Gabriel is the fourth studio album by the English rock musician Peter Gabriel. In the United States and Canada, the album was released by Geffen Records with the title Security. Some music streaming services refer to it as Peter Gabriel 4: Security. A German-language version, entitled Deutsches Album (German Album), was also released. The album saw Gabriel expanding on the post-punk and world music influences from his 1980 self-titled record, and earned him his first US top 40 single with "Shock the Monkey".
Songs
The songs of this album cover a wide variety of subject matter. "The Rhythm of the Heat" is based on Carl Jung's experience while observing a group of African drummers. "San Jacinto" reflects on the fear and pain experienced by an Indigenous American man who sees his culture overwhelmed by modern white society, its lyrics based on a story told to Gabriel by an Apache member. "Shock the Monkey", a meditation on jealousy, uses imagery of a primate to describe personal anxieties. "Lay Your Hands on Me" deals with a theme of healing, through trust, which is further explored on later albums. "The Family and the Fishing Net" is a song comparing a modern-day wedding with a voodoo sacrifice. "Wallflower" is about the treatment of political prisoners in Latin America during the 1980s.
Larry Fast, who played synthesizer, mentioned during a presentation on Moog synthesizers that the working title for "The Rhythm of the Heat" was "Jung in Africa", the working title for "Shock the Monkey" was "Black Bush", and the working title for "Lay Your Hands on Me" was "93" – this was the number of the Linn LM-1 pattern used on the track.
In The South Bank Shows documentary of the album's recording, the working title for "I Have the Touch" was shown to be "Hands".
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).