Blue Moon Brings ‘A Hard Lesson’ from Peter Gabriel’s o/i Project

Peter Gabriel released another single on Sunday, May 31, aligning with the blue moon. “A Hard Lesson” is the latest from o/i, the album he has been unfurling track by track with every full moon. The project will continue through 2026, a slow release calendar Gabriel used before with 2023’s i/o.

The song itself is much older. Gabriel has said it was written in the late 1980s or early 1990s during a stay in Senegal. “I was falling in love with the music I heard there,” he wrote on his website. The track draws on polyrhythms, the threes and fours that he heard in local music. He describes the result as “a quirky, strange and long track” about finding one’s place. R&B and folk references filter through.

As with the other o/i releases, “A Hard Lesson” appears in two versions. The bright-side mix, by Mark “Spike” Stent, landed on the full moon. A dark-side mix by Tchad Blake is promised for the next lunar cycle. Gabriel acknowledged the song’s long dormancy, writing, “Some things will mature and evolve spontaneously and some will just stay hidden-away in a box until their moment in the light appears.”

The staggered release of o/i mirrors the patient logic of the music itself, decades in the making and tied to a celestial clock.