4 of the Best Phil Collins Songs That Came Out of His Genesis Days

Before he was writing the Tarzan soundtrack, drummer and artist Phil Collins was a member of the English rock band Genesis. Here are some of the best songs from the band that Collins had a hand in writing.

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“Misunderstanding”

“Misunderstanding” was one of those songs in which Collins drew inspiration from his divorce from his first wife, Andrea Bertorelli. It was also a solo write for Collins, and one of his first at that. The song sings about being stood up by an ex-lover.

“Now it’s not like me to say the right thing / But you could’ve called to let me know / I checked your number twice, don’t understand it / So I went home.”

“Invisible Touch”

It might be the band’s biggest hit, but according to Collins, writing “Invisible Touch” was a lot like improv.

“‘Invisible Touch’ is my favorite Genesis song and it came more or less out of nowhere,” he explained to The Guardian. “We would arrive in the studio every day and just start playing. One day [Genesis guitarist] Mike Rutherford played a riff on the guitar, with an echo, and I suddenly sang, ‘She seems to have an invisible touch – yeah!’ It came into my head fully formed. I’m sure people have all kinds of ideas about how we wrote these songs they love or loathe, but really, our writing process was close to jazz. We improvised.”

“Turn It On Again”

“Turn It On Again” was another song that came out of the throes of Collins’ divorce from Bertorelli. While keyboardist Tony Banks and Rutherford remember working on the song as being a good time, Collins was still recovering from the aftermath of his divorce.

“I was living on my own… things had gone off the rails a bit, drinking too much,” Collins admitted of the time they wrote the song. “But I have very fond memories of those rehearsal days.”

“Mama”

When writing “Mama”, Collins took inspiration from a David Niven book called The Moon’s A Balloon. The song, like this book, follows the plot of a guy falling for a prostitute, who does not feel the same way about him. Apparently, when Rutherford and Collins wrote this one, they had Cuban brothels in mind.

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