Up next we have what Wikipedia refer’s to as Bowie’s “Neoclassicist era”. The next album, Hours, would proudly hail having real instruments and no electronica, even though the song were initially written to be part of the soundtrack to the video game Omikron: The Nomad Soul. The computer game featured both Iman and Bowie voicing characters that also bore a striking resemblance to their actual selves. The finished album features a song co-written by the winner on an early online contest. Stylistically, Bowie was trying to recapture his old sound here, but since he had so many different sounds in his past, it ended up being something of a jumbled-up mess. There are a lot of slow and pretty ballads on here, making Hours the closest to a soft-rock, adult-contemporary album in his discography.

He tried to toughen things up a bit on the next album, Heathen, although there’s nothing in that album that is nearly as scary as the picture on the cover. It sounds good, classic Bowie, just none of the songs stick out. In some ways, this was the hardest playlist to compile since so many of the tunes just aren’t very remarkable. By the next album, Reality, the best tracks are the covers of Jonathan Richman (Pablo Picasso) and George Harrison (Try Some, But Some). In some ways Bowie had painted himself into a corner. Nothing he could do at this point would compare to his greatest hits, but it if he tried to shake things up and do something different, it would just be written off as Bowie-being-Bowie. The tour for Reality featured dates being cancelled for hurricanes and the death of a lighting technician. At one point he got hit in the eye by a lollipop thrown by a fan. In the end most of the dates were cancelled after Bowie had a heart attack. It would be his last tour.

At this point Bowie retired from music. Why tour when you’re married to Iman, he said. It was initially just going to be a year off, but that year stretched into a decade. Not that Bowie was any sort of Salinger-like recluse, but there was no more music coming. He seemed done.

But he had one trick up his sleeve…