ARTIST: Peter Gabriel

CREATOR: Ernie Button

SONG: This Is Home (Dark-Side Mix) FROM i/o

Video info:

I was drawn to work with the song This is Home because the idea of "home" intrigues me.  It’s a word that typically evokes comfort and belonging - rarely is it used in a negative sense.  That emotional weight made the song a compelling foundation for visual exploration.

Travel and photography are two of the great joys in my life.  They allow me to connect with places on a personal level.  The more I return to certain locations, the more those places begin to take on the quiet, familiar feeling of home.  I’ve often noticed the presence of a painted stick-figure on sidewalks and platforms of places I travel to, guiding travelers from one point to another - an anonymous, inanimate travel guide.  That figure became a kind of symbol for me: a silent companion across different destinations.

Train travel holds a unique resonance for me.  Where I live, it’s not a common mode of transportation, so when I travel by train, it feels both novel and deeply reflective.  It’s a shared experience, yet also intensely individual - each of us moving along the same track, heading to vastly different destinations.  It offers space for contemplation, for imagining what it means to return - to oneself, to others, to a place that feels like home.

In this project, I’ve used only my own still photographs that I have taken from some of my most meaningful travels to create all of the AI-assisted video sequences.  Paired with Peter’s lyrics “There's nowhere else I’m going, I know this is home, and home is where I have to be… I know this is my home… you are my home” - the imagery becomes a meditation on what “home” truly means.  For each of us, that meaning varies.  It might be a person, a place, a memory, or a feeling.  But the desire is universal - the need for a space, physical or emotional, that offers us comfort, connection, and belonging.

Song info:

This Is Home is a track taken from Peter Gabriel's album i/o, released on 1 December 2023. This is the Dark-Side Mix, by Tchad Blake.

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

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

“This Is Home is a love song. It began with inspiration from some of the great Tamla Motown rhythm sections so we’re trying to recreate that in a modern way, complete with the tambourine and handclaps. The groove I like a lot, Tony Levin does a great bass part there.

I did an unusual thing for me in that I tried doing this low voice / high voice thing, so you get this almost conversational voice at the beginning and the second part is a higher, more emotional voice. I thought that would be both intimate and emotive to put the two side by side.”

-pg