‘Lodger’: The album David Bowie believed wasn’t taken care of properly
It’s impossible for someone to knock it out of the park every time they walk into the studio to make a record. There are always going to be hangups or subtle things that get in the way of making a great album, and for someone that changed as much as David Bowie had, there’s no doubt that a few albums were going to come together with a pretty audible thud.
But Bowie never saw some of his lesser albums as mistakes in his musical journey. Outside of his first album that he admitted was terrible, Bowie was never shy about adopting new styles into his musical oeuvre, and if a plan didn’t manage to have the same impact as he would have hoped, he was content to have explored some new territory and move on like he did on albums like Young Americans.
When he first adopted the sound of Philly soul, though, it was almost written as a retort to his days as a glam-rock superstar. He could have kept writing characters like Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane for the rest of his career, but if ‘Fame’ kept everyone wondering where he was going to go next, Station to Station was the first sign that a dark cloud was on the horizon. Bowie had completely transformed into the ‘Thin White Duke’, and to break out of his dark persona, the best thing for him to do was to move to Berlin for inspiration.
It was already a bit of a gamble going to the place where artists like Kraftwerk were testing the limits of pop music, but records like Low and Heroes helped set the template for Bowie’s later career. He was never afraid to make songs that sounded slightly off compared to most other pop music, and when he swung for the fences, tunes like ‘Heroes’ went beyond being hits and felt like important milestones in pop history.
Despite everyone hyping up Bowie’s ‘Berlin trilogy’ as among the finest runs of albums in his career, there will always be a few asterisks next to Lodger. A lot of the tunes are as good as the previous entries and even manage to build on what both Bowie and producer Tony Visconti had been setting up, but after the mixing process, Bowie knew that there was something slightly off about the whole thing.
To his ears, ‘The Starman’ felt like the album definitely needed another mix to sound completely finished, saying, “I think Tony and I would both agree that we didn’t take enough care mixing. This had a lot to do with my being distracted by personal events in my life and I think Tony lost heart a little because it never came together as easily as both Low and Heroes had. I would still maintain though that there are a number of really important ideas on Lodger.”
And going back through his discography, Lodger does seem to have the most drawbacks of the Berlin album. The mixing was already a problem the album before, but whereas the strange sounds actually helped a lot on Heroes, this feels like Bowie trying to make the best attempt at art-pop that he can and coming up a little bit short.
But, really, any other Bowie project that falls below his standards was always going to be considered a landmark achievement by any other group. It might not have been the roaring success anyone expected, but Bowie knew it was better to take a chance and see where his material took him than to spend his time pumping the same old hits.
