There’s been some talk about whether or not these songs are being released in the running order or reverse order to mirror I/O. So here are those two scenarios and then my own running order if I were laying out the record. Not getting into the Bright or Dark side mixes, just the songs.

O\I (In order)

Been Undone

Put The Bucket Down

What Lies Ahead

Til Your Mind Is Shining

Won’t Stand Down

A Hard Lesson

I Belong To The Sky

( 8 )

( 9 )

( 10 )

( 11 )

( 12 )

This is probably what we’re going to get.

O\I (mirror)

( 1 )

( 2 )

( 3 )

( 4 )

( 5 )

I Belong To The Sky

A Hard Lesson

Won’t Stand Down

Til Your Mind Is Shining

What Lies Ahead

Put The Bucket Down

Been Undone

This version is very exciting to me because the promise of the “strongest” cuts ahead. And I love Been Undone as the closer. Now let’s just dream.

O \ I ( my version)

A Hard Lesson

I Belong To The Sky

Won’t Stand Down

Put The Bucket Down

( 12 )

( 11 )

What Lies Ahead

( 10 )

( 9 )

Til Your Mind Is Shining

( 8 )

Been Undone

Obviously we don’t know what the remaining songs are but I really like Been Undone as the closer. And I think the last three songs we’ve gotten make a strong opening statement.

Just some fun to play with until the moon is bright in the sky!

I've been wondering whether Peter Gabriel's i/o and the upcoming o/i might be influenced by the philosophy of Dataism (as described by Yuval Noah Harari), or at least by a very similar worldview.

Here are a few examples that stood out to me:

• "And Still" – When his mother's spirit seems to become music, electronic voices are mixed into the song, blurring the boundary between spirit and information. It feels as if her spirit is being reimagined in informational rather than purely spiritual terms.
• "I Belong to the Sky" – The lyric "the image is loading" immediately evokes the language of computing. It almost suggests that reality, consciousness, or even identity is being instantiated through information, as if existence itself were something that can be processed or loaded.
• "Panopticom" – Lyrics like "Panopticom, won't you show us what's going on?" suggest a system capable of acquiring a form of higher knowledge, one to which humans increasingly turn in order to better understand themselves and the society they live in. The line "We got all the information flowing" recalls the Dataist ideal that increasing the free flow of information leads to greater collective intelligence and understanding.
• "i/o" – The line "I'm just a part of everything, stuff coming out, stuff going in" seems to portray the individual not as an isolated self, but as a node in a larger system of flows—essentially an interface processing inputs and outputs. That resonates with the Dataist view of humans as information-processing systems embedded within a much larger network.

Another thing that makes me wonder is Gabriel's long-standing involvement in the Interspecies Internet project. Its goal is to explore technologies that could enable communication between humans and other species. That seems remarkably consistent with a Dataist worldview, where intelligence is understood less as a uniquely human attribute and more as participation in ever-larger networks of information processing and exchange. In a sense, it echoes the broader Dataist vision of an ever-expanding network of information processing that transcends species boundaries.

Taken together, these examples suggest more than a recurring technological vocabulary—they point toward a coherent worldview in which information is treated as one of the fundamental building blocks of reality.

Even the titles i/o (input/output) and o/i reinforce this image of reality as continuous exchanges of information rather than separate, autonomous beings.

Of course, Gabriel's vision feels much more spiritual and humanistic than Harari's description of Dataism. It's not a cold, reductionist philosophy. Instead, it seems to merge spirituality, ecology, technology, and information into a single worldview.

Am I reading too much into this, or do you also see a genuine "information ontology" running through these albums? Has Peter Gabriel ever mentioned philosophical influences that might support (or contradict) this interpretation?

I belong to the sky
I belong to the sky
All the blue and the white
All the stars in the night
And the sun shining

The sun paints a smile
From the east to the west
Quiet now
As dreams leave their nest
Leave their nest

As dreams leave their nest
Leave their nest

This dream to life
This dream to life
In its place, in its station
This dream to life
Bringing the dream into life
The image is loading, loading
This dream to life
Bringing the dream into life
The picture is falling

I belong to the sky
I belong to the sky
You can go anywhere
You can be anyone
Move your mind
As you learn how to fly

The sun paints a smile
From the east to the west
Quiet now
As dreams leave their nest
Leave their nest

This dream to life
This dream to life
In its place, in its station
This dream to life
Bringing the dream into life
The image is loading, loading
This dream to life
Bringing the dream into life
The picture is forming

We're watching the flame
From the biggest bangs
From the edge of the universe
Where it all began

We're watching the flame
From the biggest bangs
From the edge of the universe
When it all began
When it all began
When it all began

This dream to life
This dream to life
In its place, in its station
This dream to life

This dream to life
Here come the pictures
We're bringing to life
[?Here come/Here’s all] the images loading
Here come the pictures
We're bringing to life
See how
We're bringing them down

Bringing the dream into life
The image is loading, loading
Bringing the dream into life
The picture is falling

Bringing it down, down, down, down, down around us
Down, down, down, down, down around us
Down, down, down, down, down around us
Down, down, down, down, down around us
Down, down, down, down, down around us
Down, down, down, down, down around us

Bringing the dream into life

The picture is falling

Here it is!

https://youtu.be/6HDrigtTWM0

Just started listening to it... I've been enjoying dark-side mixes of O/I much more than for I/O. This one doesn't seem to be as impactful as the bright-side one, but maybe it will build up in the end section.

there is so much raw energy it raises the hair on my neck: songs I knew and loved forever that are performed in public for the first time and take up a completely different feel; mixed and mastered beautifully, no apparent post-production, none of the 1980s "plastic" treatment, just pure live music, warts and all.

It’s official, the new track has inspired a new piece of artwork. I finished my maquette yesterday and am excited to work on it larger scale!

I’m participating in a show/challenge at a creative reuse center and the new song inspired me to make this nest from a piece of Mylar wallpaper.

I’ll be making a bigger nest and the origami cranes, folded from paper with dreams when onto them, will have wire supports so they appear to fly from the nest.

You can read more about it on my IG.

Okay, i am not bashing him. It's a genuine question

I found this today, by accident, and I've just given it its first 5-star rating. Weirdly, it is entered into Spotify twice, with different descriptions, different top and tail, and titles as follows:

• Peter Gabriel: Reflects on Life, Music, and the Making of So: A 1988 Interview
• Peter Gabriel: An interview

It states the interviewer is Rhona Elliott, but a few searches reveal this is more likely Rona Elliot (if so, they've managed a typo in both her names!). The Spotify publication date is 29 May this year.

I've saved you the bother of finding the differences, by listening to both! Some observations:

The one with the longer title claims to be an "album party" and is introduced by the interviewer. It is signed off as NBC Radio Entertainment. I find it hard to believe it was recorded in 1988. It sounds like So has only just been released at the time of the interview, so I'd say the title is two years out.

The one with the shorter title has a strange introduction by a man with a northern English accent saying "I'm Peter Gabriel" (you can't fool a native Brit, sorry!) but then cuts to exactly the same interview, although this time it's branded as "One Media Rock Star Interviews".

All that said, the interview is WONDERFUL! It showcases PG at his philosophical best. Great questions and insightful answers. Both versions have all the same PG content, and are well worth a listen. Enjoy!

I've seen a vinyl copy of PG at the Roxy on my local fb marketplace. I don't own a record player, but I'm starting to collect physical media, in case of sudden enshitification of Spotify (even then, at least I'll still have bandcamp!).

Wondering what your thoughts are on this bootleg? I don't know much about it, or the whole bootleg thing in general. Are they hard to come across? What price (please name your currency) would you pay for it? I'm sure it's a great example of early PG. Anyone know what the great man himself makes of it?

It's hard to put into words but I feel as if the o\i project has finally been justified.

Don't get me wrong, o\i has had its highlights so far - Been Undone has been a slow grower on me since it unsuspectingly dropped this January (though it seems like many here immediately gravitated towards it). Bucket is great and feels up to snuff with any of the i/o tracks - a sure sign that that song almost made that album, guaranteed, and just barely missed because the other 12 were just that important. And the others have been nice to have. But I Belong To The Sky just feels modern and exactly what a song in 2026 should sound like. That groove, man.

I like A Hard Lesson, but then when Gabriel started talking about it in terms of just "being a track that *almost* made a lot of albums", it deflated a little bit of my own personal excitement about a very good song. When an artist talks down about their own craft, the feeling becomes contagious, no matter how good the product really is sometimes. In my opinion we'd just come off of two whiffs and then followed it up with a song that Peter was talking about almost as an afterthought.

Then we get this. And it makes all the difference in the world.

It sounds, and feels, like a bright sunny day with only a smattering of small little clouds in it. It also feels like a culmination and a mission statement of everything Peter has learned at Real World Records. The rhythm is layered and light and bouncy. The instruments soar with airiness. The optimism is downright groovy, and I've not felt that way in a good long while. Maybe not since Olive Tree or Road to Joy really has music directly improved my mood. Listening to Road To Joy feels like a great party from a few years ago that you can still crank at any moment. Olive Tree feels like a jeep drive through a friendly and oft-toured, off-road safari, splashing through puddles as you say hello to the predators and prey. But I Belong To The Sky feels like a nice, much needed, stretch.

I hope Dark-Side doesn't trade in the catchy, windy beats for something too dramatic or theatrical. The point of the song, seems to me, to be the whimsicality of the music, the freeness of the feel, the breathing of the beats, the breeziness of the performance. Loose, full of fun sounds, light on your feet. If the rest of Side B is on this level and this mood, I'll be happy as a bird.

photo: Larry Fast

The new song typically appears at midnight in New Zealand’s Chatham Islands time zone. That was over 45 minutes ago. It’s now past midnight in New Zealand and still nothing.

Is there anyone living in New Zealand who could confirm that they’re also not seeing anything? I’m wondering if they figured out how to prevent us from VPNing in and listening via YouTube. The paranoia is strong this morning haha… but all the other tracks have been quite consistent.

Hoping it shows up soon…

I've been meaning to record a video to share my progress in recreating/reconstructing Lead a Normal Life from PG3/Melt for some time and tonight I'm feeling anxious to hear the new song, so decided to kill some time by finally doing a screen recording and adding some annotations to explain it.

Still very much a work in progress. No work done on the ending, need to record guitar, and need to try and recreate Peter's vocals (what you hear in the video is Peter's actual voice extracted from the album track). Having a lot of fun trying to recreate the song and capture the vibe of the original.

Maybe Big Pete lost track of the days watching the World Cup 👀

Picture taken in Boston this Wednesday. It's Sunday now and full to bursting.

Hoping to see songs new and familiar soon!