The song David Bowie described as a “call for help”
There is no debating the idea that David Bowie is among the greatest songwriters of all time. Constantly adapting to new genres and styles while simultaneously reinventing his image and sound, Bowie was a true original within the world of rock. One of the main aspects of the Brixton-born artist’s songwriting that was so appealing was the intense and complex emotions he was able to express within his music and lyricism. Throughout his career, Bowie would often use music as a means of dealing with difficult times in his life, best exemplified by his final record, Blackstar, released shortly before his passing.
His 2016 album was, by no means, the only instance of Bowie creating music based around his own mortality and struggles to come to terms with his life. Almost immediately after the star first rose to prominence during the glam rock era, he began to imbue his work with some incredibly complicated and self-reflective themes. At the time, pop music was largely reserved for pithy, non-consequential, and generally upbeat tracks meant to foster widespread appeal, so Bowie completely turned that idea on its head.
As his work progressed, Bowie never lost that revolutionary spark, always operating by his own means and refusing to bend for anybody else. That is not to say, however, that Bowie had an easy ride in the music industry. As is to be expected of most people, the songwriter struggled to adapt to the colossal level of success and critical acclaim that he had suddenly found himself with. In a tale as old as rock and roll itself, Bowie soon became hopelessly addicted to drugs.
Drugs are often credited with being beacons of artistic inspiration for artists, but it seems as though you need to get the balance spot on for them not to have a detrimental effect on you as a person. This is particularly true for Bowie’s drug of choice during the 1970s: cocaine. As he came out of the Aladdin Sane era, the songwriter became heavily reliant on cocaine to carry him through on a daily basis. Understandably, this led to some incredibly dark periods in his life, which he would often transcribe into song.
The most prominent example of Bowie’s self-destructive nature during this time came on ‘Word on a Wing’ from the 1976 record Station to Station. The track itself is a fairly standard affair, awash with the kind of blue-eyed soul present throughout the album, but the deeper you listen to the lyrics, the more you get the feeling that something is wrong.
“I think it was so steeped in awfulness that recall is nigh on impossible, certainly painful,” Bowie later recalled to NME, “I was concerned with questions like: ‘Do the dead interest themselves in the affairs of the living?’ ‘Can I change the channel on my TV without using the clicker?’ Unwittingly, this next song was, therefore, our signal of distress,” adding, “I’m sure that it was a call for help.”
Expanding upon his mental state at the time, Bowie continued, “There were days of such psychological terror […]It was the first time I’d really seriously thought about Christ and God in any depth, and ‘Word on a Wing’ was a protection,” concluding, “The passion in the song was genuine.” According to the songwriter, these dark days came when filming Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, which coincided with the peak of his drug addiction.
