The “deeply questioning” album David Bowie called “traumatic” to finish
No project David Bowie ever worked on came easy.
The whole point behind his music was always about finding that one flavour of rock and roll that no one had touched on before, and while not everything knocked it out of the park every single time he made a record, he would rather have gone down trying than playing the same glam-rock pastiches for the rest of his life. But aside from the odd album that didn’t hit the mark, Bowie wasn’t safe from the occasional album that took a piece of his soul along with it when he left the studio.
After all, this is the same person who literally doesn’t remember how some of his best records came to be. Station to Station is among one of the finest records he ever made, but until the day he died, ‘The Starman’ was definitely going to feel a little bit uncomfortable revisiting the era that he lost to cocaine addiction and the sinister character of ‘The Thin White Duke’ that proceeded to say any controversial thing that came into his head.
And I imagine it was going to be a bit of an existential journey for him to go through any number of songs on Blackstar. Most of us were glad that he was making any kind of music following his retirement from the road, but after his passing a few days after the record was released, it’s hard not to look at every one of the tunes on his swan song as a way of him saying goodbye to his friends, family, and fans.
But one of the greatest parts of Blackstar was how different it sounded compared to the rest of his 2000s work. He had been coming out of his electronic era in the late 1990s, but before bouncing back on albums like Reality, Heathen is one of the few albums that feels like looking at Bowie from a distance.
He had always saved his most personal emotions for his music rather than talking about them, but this is Bowie at his most world-weary at times. There was almost a feeling in the air when Bowie was writing these tunes, but in the aftermath of 9/11, Bowie remembered how hard it was trying to get back into that same headspace and singing the lyrics that he wrote before the attacks.
Although every Bowie record has a definitive jumping off point, he felt that parts of the record were bound to be a little bit tougher to manage once he started putting the finishing touches on everything, saying, “It was written as a deeply questioning album. Of course, it had one foot astride that awful event in September. So that was quite a traumatic album to finish. This one hints at that, but it’s not really trying to resolve any trauma.”
Given the fact that many of the tunes had been written before 9/11, though, Bowie seemed to already get a sense of lingering tension in the air. Listening to the opening verse of a song like ‘Sunday’, it’s hard not to hear him sing about looking for signs of life and how nothing remains and not think of what was happening in New York City at the time, even if the songs themselves were written well before.
Bowie always prided himself on being ahead of the curve a little bit, but perhaps the reason why Heathen was so painful was that it hit so close to home. 9/11 was enough to shake up any rockstar living even close to New York City at the time, and after ‘The Starman’ started calling it his home, this was the sound of a devastated man trying to process the profound sense of grief that affected the entire country.
