ARTIST: Peter Gabriel

CREATOR: Daniel Corey

SONG: Secret World FROM Us

Video info:

Secret World has been with me for 33 years, ever since I first heard it on Us, my favourite Peter Gabriel album. The song has always held deep meaning for me, exploring the distance between who we are, what we hide, what we share, and what we lose. I’ve always been drawn to the emotional gravity of Peter’s music and have always loved the cinematic textures he creates with producer Daniel Lanois, whose work I also deeply admire.

With this project, I wanted to imagine an entire secret history behind the Secret World—a hidden mythology—and use that as a metaphor for our own personal journeys through life, love, and relationships. I built the visuals using photos from my archive, layering and animating them with tools like Photoshop, Midjourney, and Luma AI Dream Machine to create a dreamlike, immersive experience. This piece is both a tribute to the song and a reflection of what it’s meant to me over decades of listening.

Song info:

Secret World is a track taken from Peter Gabriel's album Us, released in September 1992.

Words and music by Peter Gabriel. Produced by Daniel Lanois and Peter Gabriel.

Published by Real World Music Ltd. / Sony Music Publishing.

“Sometimes, when you look around, everything seems still and calm on the surface and then you detect a little disturbance and you know for sure that underneath the surface lies some other secret world”

-pg

ARTIST: Peter Gabriel

CREATOR: Michael Rhoades

SONG: Road to Joy (Bright-Side Mix) FROM i/o

Video info:

In line with the title, the creation of the video for ‘Road to Joy’ was truly a joyful experience and much was learned and expressed in the process.

The video is not intended to create a narrative interpretation of the music. Instead, it is meant to intricately interact, on equal perceptual terms and in counterpoint, with the music. As such, the dance of the visual objects might aptly be thought of as a set of musical instruments meant to extend the depth and breadth of the music. Often for artists the line between expressive mediums blurs into a singular perspective.

Song info:

Road to Joy is a track taken from Peter Gabriel's album i/o, released on 1 December 2023. This is the Bright-Side Mix, by Mark 'Spike' Stent.

Words and music by Peter Gabriel. Produced by Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno

Published by Real World Music Ltd. / Sony Music Publishing.

‘I'm working on a project which is partly a story focused around the brain and how we perceive things and this song connects to that. It deals with near-death experience and locked-in syndrome situations where people are unable to communicate or to move. It's an amazingly frustrating condition. There have been some great books and films about this subject, but at this point in our story the people looking after our hero manage to find a way to wake him up. So, it’s a lyric about coming back into your senses, back to life, back into the world.’ - pg

ARTIST: Peter Gabriel

CREATOR: Daniel Leighton

SONG: Playing for Time (Bright-Side Mix) FROM i/o

Video info:

I’ve been drawn to the concept of memory for as long as I can remember. In my teens, I wrote essays and created diagrams exploring how memory works. Around that same time, I built my first database— an early attempt at organising and making sense of what we hold onto and what we lose. My art, my programming, and my healing have all lived in that same territory: how we store experience, how it shifts, how it lives not just in the mind but in the body.

‘Playing for Time’ struck me the first time I heard it—an unfinished version at the Hollywood Bowl in 2012, with wordless vocalizations and fragments of sound. Even without lyrics, it resonated deeply. It stayed with me. When the final version was released, it carried an emotional landscape that felt uncannily familiar. It echoed something I’ve lived with: the complexity of time, memory, and the spaces in between.

To explore that, I began with three of my original paintings. They served as emotional anchors, but also as the foundation for much of the imagery—created in Procreate, adjusted in Photoshop, and then fed through AI tools like Deforum and Kaiber to generate video content. The resulting footage was layered and transformed further through an intensive editing process in Final Cut Pro. I iterated on the material multiple times—generating, reworking, compositing—trying to reach a place where the imagery sparked real feeling in me. Each pass deepened the emotional texture of the piece.

There’s a kind of emotional territory I return to in my work—a feeling I don’t always have words for, but I know it in my body. This video touches that place. It’s about memory. About time. About the things we carry and the things we come back to. And maybe, in that return, something softens. Maybe we find a kind of presence. Maybe we find ourselves.

Song info:

Playing for Time is a track taken from Peter Gabriel's album i/o, released on 1 December 2023. This is the Bright-Side Mix, by Mark ‘Spike’ Stent.

Words and music by Peter Gabriel. Produced by Peter Gabriel.

Published by Real World Music Ltd. / Sony Music Publishing.

Some songs arrive very quickly, Playing for Time was not one of those. I had been working on it, on and off, for several years and have sometimes performed it live, without lyrics.

It's about time, mortality and memories and the idea that each of us has a planet full of memories which get stashed inside the brain. Just like the hit songs of their youth which trigger extraordinary responses in dementia patients, I am fascinated by the mechanisms, smells and sounds which allow memories to reopen.

-pg