I’ve written about some albums so often that I’m just shy of covering the whole tracklist. I’ll be filling in the gaps on some of those in the coming weeks, so I can add them to the Albums page.

Peter Gabriel’s So has been one song short of 100% coverage for about a year now. I was seven-for-nine as of June 2022, before posting ‘That Voice Again‘ last October.

Any guesses as to which song remains?

If you said ‘This is the Picture (Excellent Birds),’ give yourself a gold star (and yes, I know the title is up there at the top of this post, killing the suspense, but humor me).

It’s no surprise this collaboration with avant-garde artist Laurie Anderson is the last to draw my interest. It’s the album’s weakest point and maybe the one thing keeping So from perfection.

Gabriel and Anderson initially recorded this track for her 1984 album Mister Heartbreak. It appeared there under the title ‘Excellent Birds‘ in a slightly different arrangement.

A couple of years later, Gabriel had eight tracks in the can for his upcoming album and decided this would make a fitting closer. He added additional percussion and guitar parts, funking things up a bit, and retitled it ‘This is the Picture (Excellent Birds).’

Space constraints kept the track off of the vinyl release, but cassettes and the relatively new CD format included it as the final song. So was my first CD purchase (along with albums by Paul Simon and U2), and I’ve only ever known the album with this as the closing track.

I’ve always dismissed ‘This is the Picture (Excellent Birds)’ as a bit of silliness that diminishes an otherwise flawless album, but listening to it now (for the first time in years) I’m kind of digging it. The spoken-word parts (“watch them fly, there they go”) are still weird but the track’s vibe and groove feel more of a piece with the album than I remember.