Originally Posted by Trollheart
Most songs written by Collins tell a story? What about Gabriel's storytelling prowess? Have you listened to "Trespass"? The songs "White mountain" and "Visions of angels" certainly tell a story, as does "The knife". Then there's the seminal "Nursery cryme", with the magical adult fairytale "The musical box", the mythological "Fountain of Salmacis" and the science-fiction-themed "Return of the giant hogweed", not to mention the hilarious "Harold the barrel"!
Moving on, you have the FULL "Lamb lies down on Broadway", a double album of one single story/journey, then of course there's "Supper's ready" from "Foxtrot", plus the amazing sci-fi "Get 'em out by Friday" from the same album, and so on.
As for Collins writing songs, let's be clear here: most of the songwriting on albums post-Gabriel (and pre-) was a JOINT effort, and is credited to all the band. Collins wrote two tracks on "Duke", one on "Abacab", and a few more. He didn't write "Keep it dark" (which I hate, as it goes) and had very little solo writing input to any of the Genesis albums, pre or post Gabriel. I'm not saying the one is better than the other --- Collins wrote some fine solo material, although he did also write "Sussudio"/"Who said I would?"/"Like china" etc --- but it seems he had little solo input into Genesis while with them. In fact, Genesis have pretty much always been about the "group writing", but I think you can see Gabriel's hand in most of the first five albums --- even "From Genesis to Revelation" has his lyrical handprints all over it.
You have to take Genesis's output overall as a body of work: certainly, from 1969 up to 1974 it has Gabriel's style, concept and feel about it, whereas the two albums "in the interim", "Trick of the tail" and "Wind and wuthering" still sound to me more like Collins singing Gabriel material. It's not until "And then there were three" that you see a major shift in Genesis's style, and this continues on into "Duke" and "Abacab", replacing the more heavy progressive rock songs and longer compositions with shorter, snappier, more commercial material, which of course then leads to their biggest hit singles. But again, that was a band decision, though I do still hold Collins to account for the godawful "Abacab"....
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