Peter Gabriel Stopped Time at American Airlines Center, His First Dallas Show in 12 Years

“Good evening, Dallas, it’s been some time,” Peter Gabriel said Thursday, as he appeared on a North Texas stage for the first time in a dozen years. “Talking about time — maybe time is the big boss that has all of us in its claws. Maybe there’s one way to get out of its claws, and that’s imagination.”

While Gabriel used that opening Thursday night as a springboard to a delightfully off-kilter narrative (which involved, among other things, a meteorite, the evils of artificial intelligence, apple trees, the creation of visuals from MRI scans and a half-dozen other topics that make my notes look like the scattered thoughts of a lunatic), it was also an explicit acknowledgement of the evening’s inescapable, unavoidable theme: time and its relentless passage.

Time was an omnipresent motif from the opening minutes through to the final seconds of Gabriel’s stop at the American Airlines Center, his first arena-scale concert in the area in over 20 years. You saw it in the artful preshow image on the enormous circular video screen dangling above the stage — an analog clock with its hands being continually painted, erased and repainted as the hour drew closer to 8 p.m.

This penultimate U.S. performance on his tour supporting the yet-unreleased i/o — his first album of original material in 21 years, due out Dec. 1 — was an extraordinary testament to the durability of his catalog and to the vibrancy of his creativity. The young man he was when we first knew him is very much present in the older man we see now.

At 73, the Grammy-winning Gabriel could very easily assemble a 90-minute set full of hits, tuck in a couple of deep cuts, tour relentlessly and drift off to sleep atop a pile of money high enough to scrape the heavens. Instead, he’s taken what’s considered a more daring approach: make the familiar a reward for indulging in the unknown. The whole of Gabriel’s Thursday night set was over 2.5 hours long but split in two by a 15-minute intermission. The first set was roughly 70 minutes in length, and the second set a bit longer at 75 minutes or so.

Through it all, Gabriel gave the  enthusiastic, if largely sedate audience — large swaths of the upper-most deck were curtained off, and there were significant pockets of empty seats elsewhere — a potent dose of his present concerns: anguishing over the insidious overreach of technology, but dazzled by its possibilities nonetheless, hoping for peace but girding for conflict, and agitating for a better tomorrow.

The masterful songs were matched by the striking staging, which drew upon collaborations with contemporary visual artists (Gabriel namechecked David Spriggs, Cornelia Parker and Ai Weiwei, among others), displaying images above, behind and beside the musicians.

More often than not, Thursday’s showcase evoked a handsomely mounted art installation as much as it did a rock concert in a sports venue. (Or to borrow a line from “i/o,” it was the epitome of “Stuff coming out/Stuff going in/I’m just a part of everything.”) Gabriel was joined onstage by one of the most extraordinary collection of musicians to pass through town thus far this year, many of whom have collaborated with the singer-songwriter for the better part of four decades. The octet comprised bassist Tony Levin, drummer Manu Katche, guitarist David Rhodes, brass player Josh Shpak, keys and synth player Don-E, guitarist Richard Evans, cellist-pianist-backing vocalist Ayanna Witter-Johnson and violinist-backing vocalist Marina Moore. Gabriel called out the performers early and often, providing the understatement of the night amid the first encore: “This is one great band.”

“Great” felt like damning with faint praise — they were absolutely phenomenal, matching Gabriel step-for-step, and modulating to fit the mood of the song almost as one living, breathing organism. The musical textures, tastefulness and towering skill on display was mind-boggling — to say nothing of the fact that Gabriel’s baritone seemed hardly diminished, capable of hitting notes he first sang in the mid-1980s with no drop-off in either power or feeling. It was flat-out incredible.

Whether it was a hushed, pared-back reading of “Washing of the Water” to open the show, or the kinetic ferocity of “Digging in the Dirt,” or the plainly joyful readings of “Big Time” and “Solsbury Hill,” these musicians locked into something transcendent (and, remarkably for an arena, delivered it with appreciable clarity and fidelity).

As wonderful as the well-known material was, the songs from i/o, which have been released in a steady trickle all year long, were arguably even more so.

“Panopticom,” a plea for sanity in a world where reality has become fungible — “In the air, the smoke cloud takes its form/All the phones take pictures while it’s warm,” the song begins — was a searing highlight, as was the title track, and the deeply poignant “Playing for Time,” an ode to memory’s pleasures: “Any moment that we bring to life/Will never fade away.”

The cumulative effect of Thursday’s performance was extremely canny: Gabriel put the audience’s attention right where he wanted it, focusing us on where his head and heart are now. The trade-off, of course, was that the energy levels, while palpably high onstage, were more of an ebb and flow off-stage.

The audience sat largely still for the first nine songs of the opening set, only to spring out of their seats with a visceral roar as Gabriel launched into “Sledgehammer.” (Times may change, but this much is certain: More than most places, Dallas audiences want to hear what they know to the exclusion of almost anything else.)

That galvanized sensation was applied a little more evenly in the second set, which struck a better balance between the familiar and the fresh, and also found Gabriel far less long-winded. For whatever reason, the singer felt compelled to provide anecdotes after nearly every song of the first set, which gave it the air of a lecture punctuated with music rather than a rock concert.

As ever, Gabriel was on his own timeline and wavelength, and there was little to do but surrender yourself to the peculiar rhythms.

But when everything clicked, and the audience in front of the stage was as ecstatic as the players upon it — the video screens frequently captured the smiles and laughs of the musicians throughout the night, even Gabriel’s — the feeling was nothing short of blissful, a vivid moment in time, one to be fondly remembered in the days and weeks to come.