Damn, there's a song off the latest Peter Gabriel record that has been getting to me lately, "More Than This". It is an ecstatic expression of the metaphysical revelatory experience.
I love the way the song builds with a disjunct, mechanical keyboard riff starting it off behind the image of waking up before dawn and walking out the door, then turning metaphorical, almost mystical, walking till "I couldn't walk anymore, to a place I'd never been."
With the chorus, the rhythm eases off and smooths out with the first "more than this", and builds to the revelatory "so much more than this, there is something out there, when all that you had has all gone."
The second verse is all descriptive about the way we live our lives and the struggles we face to learn from and get past to a higher understanding, "now we're busy making all our busy plans on foundations build to last, but nothing fades as fast as the future, and nothing clings like the past until we see more than this."
The chorus builds again to the line "and more than this, I stand alone and so connected." I love that line because of juxtaposition of being alone and also being connected, seeming opposite, but in the revelatory sense, that's what it's about.
In the bridge, he brings things down to reality a bit, "it's alright, when with every day, a little bit falls away, and like words together, we can make some sense," going straight into an extended chorus and the coda "much more than this, way beyond imagination, much more than this beyond the stars." I like that because of the scale, human imagination is unlimited, and he's saying that the "more than this" goes way beyond that.
Maybe it's because I relate to this and his images, "with my head so full, so full of fractured pictures." It is precisely how I feel, that reality is so much more than the thin slice of it that the physical (re)presents, and it is with taut ecstacy to feel that, to feel that connection with the universe that simultaneously makes you feel important as hell and insignificant as an ant. It's frustrating and wonderful, it's an overload that makes you want to burst out of your skin and get to what's next or be in a different slice of it.
Out for pizza with Amy, Lisa, and Melissa down the street from Zeitgeist in the Mission. They have paper tablecloths and provide crayons for drawing.
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