Peter Gabriel – A Hard Lesson (Dark-Side Mix)
The Dark-Side Mix of “A Hard Lesson” arrives tonight on the new moon of June 15th, timed to the same lunar logic Peter Gabriel has been running all year with his o\i project. Tchad Blake handles the mix, the counterpart to what we got with the Bright-Side Mix (W23) on May 31st.
Having the lyrics in front of you now makes it clearer what Gabriel means when he says the song is about trying to find where you fit. The verses pile up navigational instruments across four stanzas: compass, gyroscope, mirror, map, then magnets spinning around a wheel, one body circling another. None of them work. The person keeps losing their bearings and landing in someone else’s lap. What the chorus offers instead of instruments is desire, the search for love known in dreams, something you can’t locate with a map by definition. The bridge is the sharpest image in the song: walking across ice, not knowing which way to turn, waiting to hear the crack. After three-plus decades in a drawer, a song about disorientation arriving via that kind of incremental assembly makes a certain kind of sense. The outro dissolves into a wash of indistinct talking, which I think is the point.
The production reflects the long accumulated history: David Rhodes, Tony Berg, Richard Evans on mandolin, Mike Elizondo co-producing with Gabriel, Abe Rounds on percussion. Blake’s mix is reason enough to return to it even if you’ve already spent time with Spike Stent’s version.
