Passion (re-released as Passion: Music for The Last Temptation of Christ) is an album released in 1989 by the English singer-songwriter Peter Gabriel. It was the first Peter Gabriel album to be released on Real World Records, Gabriel's second soundtrack, and his eighth album overall.
Passion was originally composed as the soundtrack album for Martin Scorsese's film The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), but Gabriel spent several months after the film's release further developing the music, finally releasing it as a full-fledged album instead of a movie soundtrack. The album was released in June 1989 (almost a year after the theatrical release of The Last Temptation of Christ in August 1988) as a vinyl double album and a 1-disc CD.
Later in the year, a companion album was released, Passion – Sources, featuring additional songs on which Gabriel does not perform. Gabriel described this album as "a selection of some of the traditional music, sources of inspiration, and location recordings." Although no singles were released from the album, an animated promotional video for "Zaar" was released in 1988, directed by Stefan Roloff, using footage from his earlier short film Lunch.
Passion is seen as a landmark in the popularisation of world music, and won a Grammy Award for Best New Age Album in 1990. It was remastered with most of Gabriel's catalogue in 2002.
Overview
Peter Gabriel's first film soundtrack, Birdy (1985), comprised original material and instrumental rearrangements of songs from Gabriel's earlier albums. Passion, on the other hand, contained music entirely original to Gabriel's catalogue.
To record the soundtrack for The Last Temptation of Christ, Gabriel used the resources of WOMAD, an organization he founded, to bring together musicians from the Middle East, Africa, Europe and South Asia. He worked with them to create music meant to enhance the mood of the film, but he also added a modern ambient musical touch to the original pieces, producing a musical work that has influenced many musicians. Passion introduced many listeners to such artists as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Youssou N'Dour, L. Shankar, and Baaba Maal. N'Dour and Shankar had provided contributions to Gabriel's previous album, So (1986); Passion also features other musicians who had worked with Gabriel before, including David Rhodes, Manny Elias, David Bottrill, and Manu Katché.
The delay of the album's release was due to Gabriel's schedule with the Human Rights Now! tour for Amnesty International in 1988 and to the truncated production time allotted by Universal Pictures for the soundtrack: Universal cut the recording time for Gabriel from 10 to three weeks, leaving Gabriel very little time to complete all the pieces he wanted. After the film's mix was finished, Gabriel had unfinished ideas he wanted to develop and took extra time to complete the album. Gabriel took a further four months to complete Passion, building the pieces and developing the musical textures as part of his stated desire for the album to stand as a piece of work in its own right.
The cover art for the album, Drawing study for Self Image II (1987), is a mixed media composition by the artist Julian Grater. When re-released in 2002, the album was titled Passion: Music for The Last Temptation of Christ due to "legal barriers" according to Gabriel in its liner notes. Reflecting on the album in 2007, Gabriel told Uncut that "Passion may be the best one I've ever done. I wasn't working with a producer, and as I was serving someone else's vision, that gave me freedom in a strange way. Some of the 'Sledgehammer' fans wouldn't be into it – a bit too 'out there' for them."
Recording
Several tracks on the album originated from improvised seven-minute sketches from which Gabriel would pick the sections that he felt best aligned with the film and later layer in additional instrumentation. He explained his compositional approach for Passion with Keyboard magazine, saying that "seven minutes is the time I start getting bored. Obviously, a lot of ideas don't sustain that long - but it's good for me to give myself that much room. I tend to want to over-record at first."
David Bottrill assisted with the creation of some drones, which he achieved by overdubbing various sound sources onto a 24-track tape machine and using the freeze function on a Quantec Room Simulator to create sustained chords. Bottrill used various sound sources to create these chords, including a Prophet-5, Fairlight CMI, a Vox bass guitar, Fender Stratocaster, and Gabriel's voice.