As Bowie’s year off from music stretched into ten, it began to look as though he had retired completely. He wasn’t a hermit, per se, but he was definitely out of the limelight. It was sometimes hard to remember that he was still alive. And in some ways it didn’t matter much to the public consciousness if he was. Bowie had been seen as figure from the past rather than a current mover-and-shaker for some time before he went on sabbatical.

And then one day, without any warning or pre-publicity, Bowie dropped a new record, The Next Day, with an extremely troll-y cover. And much to everyone’s surprise, since they all stopped listening sometime around the time he was hanging with Trent Reznor, it was really good. It continued the “all-phases-of-his-career-mashed-together” sound of Hours, Heathen, and Reality, only the songwriting was much better. No one was quite sure why Bowie went away in the first place, or why he was suddenly back now, but we were all glad to see him back and in tip-top form. No one thought of it as a farewell or anything, because there was no word that anything was wrong. He had just decided to take a long time between his last record and this one.

Then, three years later, Bowie dropped another new album, Blackstar. This one was far more dense and obscure and inscrutable. Three days after the album was released, Bowie made what could be seen as the ultimate publicity stunt, and passed away from cancer. As a result it was hard to see this album as anything but a summary of one’s life work. A brilliant endcap to a wonderful career. And while there is lots to enjoy about this album, it is very dark and hard to get into. For my money, The Next Day is a much better career-capper, but that album tends to get forgotten as the shock and grief of losing Bowie so abruptly (no one seemed to even know he was sick) magnified the power and resonance of Blackstar immensely. Much like You Want It Darker by Leonard Cohen or The Wind by Warren Zevon, this was seen as a deliberate final statement.

At the time of Bowie’s passing, he was also working on a musical called Lazarus starring Michael C. Hall. So when that finally came out, a couple of the last, last Bowie recordings were included on it, as well as an EP called No Plan. And unfortunately, that’s going to be it. They may dig out old, unreleased recording in the future, but there will be no more new Bowie to look forward to. That and Prince’s death shortly thereafter initially marked 2016 as one of the worst years in memory. Little did we know what we had in store for us.

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…

So Bowie left Tin Machine and started his solo career again. His first move was to reunite with producer Nile Rodgers for an album a little less focused on commercial success than Let’s Dance. Bowie was definitely moving away from rock, experimenting with jazz and soul as well as hip-hop on this album. While it did marginally better than the Tin Machine albums, it didn’t exactly reignite his career. There are a lot of love songs on Black Tie, White Noise. That’s because David Bowie had just married supermodel Iman, with whom he would spend the rest of his life. While this may not be the most anguished or exciting album in Bowie’s career, he does sound genuinely happy.

Following this, Bowie did the soundtrack for the TV miniseries Buddha of Suburbia. This album is most instrumental, but did allow Bowie the leeway to dabble a bit more into electronica and various textures. If we was going to head-first into this new experimental medium he would need his old experimenting partner back, so he reunited with producer Brian Eno from the Berlin Trilogy for Outside. The album was supposed to be the first part in a series of records about a dystopian future where murders can be classified as art and Bowie would be playing the part of detective Nathan Adler. While it is an interesting idea, and the album sold even better than the last one, there was no follow-up and the story of “The diary of Nathan Adler or the art-ritual murder of Baby Grace Blue: A non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-cycle.”

For the Outside tour, Bowie chose Nine Inch Nails to open for him and from there he decided to use Trent Reznor to help out with his next album, Earthling. Apparently Bowie had decided to move genres from “industrial” to “jungle” or “drum-and-bass”. For someone like me, who has a hard time differentiating between various electronica subgenres, this made no difference it was important to Bowie. And the single I’m Afraid Of Americans did pretty well on MTV – undoubtedly helped by the fact that NIN frontman Trent Reznor was also featured.

The nineties were a pretty successful time for Bowie while he dabbled in these EDM textures, but they oftentimes felt pasted on top of the songs instead of intrinsically part of the songwriting process. Furthermore, it was disappointing to see Bowie, who was so often on the cutting edge, to be seen chasing trends and fads as if he were just hopping on the latest bandwagon. As the millennium began to close, Bowie had decided to revert back to what he did best… but he had done some many different things, the next few years found Bowie struggling to understand and define the entirety of his career and persona while still making new music.

Of all the things that Bowie had done, he had never really been a part of a band or a group. Since he missed the cut-off to join the Traveling Wilburys, he put together his own group, featuring two of the sons of comedian Soupy Sales as his rhythm section. He grew out a beard and dressed everyone in identical suits and tried to blend into the group. Of course, no one was really familiar with anyone else in the band, and much like Wings was just seen as an extension of McCartney’s solo career, people didn’t take Tin Machine seriously as a democratic egalitarian band of equal musicians. The fact the Bow sang and co-wrote all the songs on the first album didn’t help. (And only let one guy have one song on the second album, creatively titled II).

Still it was reinvigorating for Bowie to at play at going back to square one and starting from scratch. This was just a few years before grunge hit big and a lot of critics had a hard time categorizing this music — it often got mislabeled as Bowie’s attempt at heavy metal.

The other controversy surrounded the second album, which featured four full nude statues on the cover. This was so scandalous in 1990, that Bowie was forced to issue an alternative cover with the offending body parts broken off. For some reason that was considered better.

The other annoying thing about II is that it is the only Bowie album that is out-of-print and unavailable on Spotify or any other streaming services. Luckily, it can be found on YouTube and other less legitimate music providers, but it was especially disappointing when putting together this playlist. Tin Machine only had the two studio albums (a live album was released later) – and they music this “band” produced neither fits with the “Phil Collins years” of the previous playlist nor the electronica/jungle/house/EDM experiments of next week’s list. But only having one album to draw from wasn’t really giving me a chance to curate an appropriate mix for this week’s blog.

Oh well… If you have the files on your computer, enjoy! If not – go seek them out. Even if I like the first Tin Machine record more than the second, you really need to hear both. It is a pivotal and often overlooked period of Bowie’s career.

Here we have David Bowie in what he himself described as his “Phil Collins Years.” He was deliberately trying, not to sell out necessarily, but to sell as much as he could. He switched producers from Brian Eno to Nile Rogers. He starred in the Jim Henson-assisted kids movie Labyrinth. He would happily duet with Queen or Tina Turner or Mick Jagger. He was all over MTV – even while criticizing them for not playing enough black artists.

And it worked. David Bowie became a super-celebrity at this time. It may have become something of a “monkey’s paw” situation by the end, where he regretted going so fully commercial — but financially it worked out well.

The things is, even while he was pandering Bowie wasn’t churning out bubblegum. These were good songs. While most critics dismiss Let’s Dance, it does contain some of his best work, even with the catchy melodies and earworm hooks.

I was very tempted to add more to this list – maybe by sliding the first album, Scary Monsters, into the last playlist – but these all feel of one piece. And there are some of my favorite Bowie tracks recorded during this period.

But if your only goal is to sell records, and after Let’s Dance, each successive album sold less – so Bowie was going to make yet another drastic turn if he was going to continue.

Bowie was in trouble, but instead of going to rehab he went to West Berlin, bringing along the only guy you would want to have with you while you were detoxing… Iggy Pop. Makes perfect sense to me.

While he was in Berlin, to keep himself busy and to keep the money flowing, Bowie recorded a trio of album now colloquially as “The Berlin Trilogy” produced by Roxy Music’s Brian Eno. These three albums are now held up as a high-water mark in Bowie’s career, but to me they do just kinda sound the same as the last batch or two. The biggest difference is that on the first two album, Low and “Heroes” the second side is entirely composed of instrumentals – something that Bowie had not really dabbled with previously.

The big story behind these records was Bowie’s (and Eno’s) use of synthesizers. Synthesizers were still pretty unusual back in the mid-seventies. They were large and expensive and very few people even owned them, much less knew what to do with them. Eno and Bowie reportedly through out the instructional manual, and instead of using these primitive synths for their intended purpose (replicating known instruments and/or sounds) and started to really use the synth in pop/rock music.

But to my ears, it doesn’t sound nearly as well-integrated as the Beatles’ use of the Moog on Abbey Road or as adventurous or innovative as early synth pioneers such as Kraftwerk or Devo. That being said, these are still great albums. On the sides with the actual songs. But as much critical acclaim that Low or “Heroes” garnered, they weren’t terribly commercially successful at the time, so he completed his stay in Berlin with Lodger which is included in the trilogy mostly because it was also recorded in Germany. It is certainly more commercially minded, skipping the instrumentals and focused less on synth experimentation.

It was a step in a more popular direction for Bowie, but he was going to go full on in to trying to be a successful recording artist now that he had left the drugs and the iron curtain behind.

By Diamond Dogs Bowie was in a quandary. His Ziggy character was proving immensely successful, but having to constantly right glam-rock songs from space was getting old. This album is a bit of a pivotal point, which is why I included a few tracks on the previous playlist and few on this one. Bowie still had the spiky red mullet and the weird concept album plot going on with Diamond Dogs but it was even more half-hearted than Aladdin Sane. He was playing with the new disco rhythms that were starting to percolate across the Atlantic and wanted to really dive into the Philly-based blue-eyed “plastic” soul.

So for his next album, Young Americans he switched things up again. He cut his hair short and let it go back to blonde. He started writing songs with Luther Vandross and John Lennon, giving his songs a more polished pop sound. It was icy cold and very aloof, but it was undeniably danceable and catchy as hell.

While this ended up proving nearly as successful commercial as the Ziggy Stardust stuff, it was hard to maintain that kind of veneer and remove. The only way to keep that up at a reasonable pace was piles and piles of cocaine. So much cocaine that Bowie himself has no recollection of making the album Station To Station at all.

Clearly this was not a sustainable way to continue. But where could Bowie go to “dry out”? And who would he bring with him. Tune in next week…

While changing his name from Jones to Bowie might have been the first mask that Bowie put on, his first real transformation was into the character of Ziggy Stardust. Like most concept albums, the specifics of the plot and background of Ziggy Stardust and his backing band, The Spiders from Mars, are muddled. But David committed to this character so completely and thoroughly that when he finally did decide to kill it off (or retire it) it was big news that came as a shock even to the other musicians on-stage with him at the time.

The original gambit may have been little more than a way to get out of his own head – much as the Beatles adopted the Sgt. Pepper moniker. But this proved so successful that he continued it into the next album. At least sort of. Aladdin Sane is supposed to be it’s own story with its own character, but it really didn’t have the same impact and really just felt like an extension of the Ziggy Stardust character. The most memorable thing from Aladdin Sane is the facial make-up that Bowie wore on the cover and millions have imitated since.

However, Bowie was having a hard time coming up with new songs for his rock-star alien persona, so his next album was a covers album entitled Pin-Ups It featured many of the English bands that Bowie listened to growing up and influenced him, even if they were only a few years older than him. He was going to do a follow-up that featured American acts, but Pin-Ups ended up being such a disappointment that it never happened.

By this point Bowie was probably starting to feel as constrained by his Ziggy character as he once was by his own (fake) name. He was going to need to change things up again.

For my next series of “hour-long intros” I thought I would dive into an artist I was a lot less familiar with, but someone I was curious about and had a large enough body of work to sustain a a really deep dive; so I decided to listen to all of David Bowie’s albums in chronological order and see if I could find the dividing lines and breaking points in there. Along the way I would pick out some of my favorite songs. Most of these will be his bigger or more known hits since I haven’t really had as much time to ingest the deeper cuts, but there could be a few surprises in here.

Before Bowie became the Starman who fell to Earth, he was still the relatively normal human who got trapped in space. Here is hair is still long and blonde and flowing, showing him to be a hippy who was more quietly following trends than making them in the ’60s. His earliest recording during this decade are interesting from a historical perspective as the young David Bowie (nee Jones) was trying to figure out who he was and what he sounded like. Unfortunately nothing from this first album really fits in with the first real phase of his career (or anywhere else) so short of giving these songs their own playlist/blog I have skipped them and gone straight to David’s big break-out, Space Oddity.

While he was at this point very much still in the folky realm with lots of songs about gnomes and goblins and Bob Dylan whilst accompanied by mandolins, it wasn’t until he took off into space that David Bowie came into his own. Granted it was more the recent moon landing and the film 2001 (both directed by Stanley Kubrick) that inspired this particular flight of fancy, but the hook stuck.

From here he crafted a number of solid albums, usually featuring Bowie strumming chummily on a jumbo-sized 12-string guitar. There were a couple of big hits during this period, Space Oddity, Changes, and Life On Mars most notably. The title track from The Man Who Sold The World would become far more famous after Nirvana included it in the Unplugged set than it was at the time.

Major Tom was not a role that David Bowie embodied as much as it was just one character in one of his songs. He hadn’t quite committed himself to his persona as thoroughly as he would in the future, and at this point he still looked and dressed and acted like your typical acoustic singer-songwriter from the early seventies. While his talent had taken him far, there was a good chance he’d be taken for granted if he didn’t come up with a bigger flashier way to present himself.