Songfacts®:

• This perceptive dissection of love's simplicities is the first single from English musician Peter Gabriel's eighth studio and fourteenth album overall, Scratch My Back. The record consists of Gabriel covering twelve songs by various artists, using orchestra and voice rather than normal rock instruments. Gabriel's plan was for another album, I'll Scratch Yours, to be released at a later date, on which the twelve artists that the former Genesis frontman covered in turn perform one of his tracks.
• This song is Gabriel's cover of a Magnetic Fields song from their 1999 three-volume concept album, 69 Love Songs. The Magnetic Fields is the principal creative outlet of singer-songwriter Stephin Merritt and "The Book of Love" is backed by Merritt's cover of Gabriel's "Not One Of Us." The single was released digitally on January 30, 2010, the day of January 2010's full moon.
• Gabriel originally recorded this song for the soundtrack of the 2004 movie Shall We Dance.
• Gabriel told "The Quietus about this string-laden cover: "I was introduced through a friend to the Magnetic Fields, and really fell in love with the song writing and the quirky way the band interpreted their material. This wonderful lyric is deeply romantic and a little cynical at the same time, which opens it to an audience that wouldn't buy slush. This was the track that stood out to me on 69 Love Songs and we were working on the strings for my track 'Signal to Noise' at the time. I thought it would be great to hear this performed on strings and just managed to get it arranged in time and recorded during the 'Signal to Noise' session. Claudia from the Magnetic Fields tells me that they're getting a lot of requests now for this particular version for wedding ceremonies, and it was used on the last episode of the Scrubs TV series, and seems to have generated its own cult following as a result."
• The song also features the vocals of Gabriel's daughter Melanie. It was she who persuaded her father to cover the Bon Iver track "Flume" on Scratch My Back.