David Bowie Awakens To 'The Next Day' Of His Career

Transcript

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

David Bowie has a new album - his first new studio album in a decade. It's called "The Next Day." The 66-year-old Bowie has released two videos from the album already, including one for the song "The Stars Are Out Tonight," in which Bowie and the actress Tilda Swinton portray a retirement age couple. Nevertheless, rock critic Ken Tucker says Bowie's new music displays a youthful energy and inventiveness.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE NEXT DAY")

DAVID BOWIE: (Singing) Look into my eyes, he tells her. I'm gonna say good-bye, he says, yeah. Do not cry, she begs him. Good-bye, yeah, on a day she thinks I'm in love, yeah. They whip him through the streets and alleys there. The gormless and the baying crowd right there. They can't get enough of that doomsday song. They can't get enough of it all.

KEN TUCKER, BYLINE: The cover of David Bowie's new album, "The Next Day," is actually the cover of Bowie's 1977 album, "Heroes," with a white square placed over the singer's face. It's a brilliantly simple yet shrewd piece of appropriated art, a gesture announcing that Bowie will not try to break with his past but instead will transmute it, refract it, and if he's lucky, deepen it.

Because depth is something David Bowie has usually, often wisely, resisted. In taking on, over the decades, different costumes and guises - Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke - and in gliding across the surface of genres such as glam rock, hard rock and disco, Bowie has proven a surprisingly durable artist. He's someone whose best songs allow him to make emotional, even moving music without becoming maudlin or melodramatic or, heaven forbid, sentimental.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE STARS (ARE OUT TONIGHT)")

BOWIE: (Singing) The stars are never sleeping. The dead ones and the living, we live closer to the Earth, never to the heavens. The stars are never far away. The stars are out tonight. They watch us from behind their shades, Brigitte, Jack, and Kate and Brad from behind their tinted windows stretch gleaming like blackened sunshine.

TUCKER: That's "The Stars Are Out Tonight," which proceeds from the title pun to suggest that stars - celebrities - haunt the lives of us ordinary folk, and that they're just as jealous of our lives as some of us are of theirs. The video for the song, co-starring Bowie and Tilda Swinton, finds them playing a happily aging couple who grocery shop and chuckle unironically at TV sitcoms, even as their mundane activities are observed by young, glamorous people literally dying for such contentment.

The music of "The Stars Are Out Tonight" is all guitar and drum-driven urgency, with Bowie yelling with deliberate hoarseness over the instruments, his voice a metaphor for the exhausted dread contained in the lyric. By contrast, listen to the lovely croon he uses on this song, "Where Are We Now?"

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHERE ARE WE NOW?")

BOWIE: (Singing) Had to get the train from Potzdamer Platz. You never knew that, that I could do that, just walking the dead. Sitting in the Dschungel on Nurnberge Strasse, a man lost in time near KaDeWe, just walking the dead.

TUCKER: "Where Are We Now?" evokes life in Berlin, a reminder that the album itself reunites Bowie with producer Tony Visconti, with whom Bowie made his so-called Berlin trilogy of albums: "Low," "Heroes" and "Lodger." But Bowie and Visconti don't merely reconnect with some of the sounds of that late-'70s period, extending even to the use of some familiar Bowie musicians, such as guitarist Earl Slick.

No, they also acknowledge other albums, including what I consider Bowie's finest, "Station to Station," and other producers who've helped Bowie's evolution - most notably Nile Rodgers, who guided the star through one of his best albums, "Let's Dance." You can hear this confluence of influences in a jittery, hammering song such as "Love Is Lost."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOVE IS LOST")

BOWIE: (Singing) It's the darkest hour. You're 22. The voice of youth, the hour of dread. The darkest hour and your voice is new. Love is lost, lost is love. Your country's new...

TUCKER: Wave goodbye to the life without pain, Bowie sings there, and in a song that offers a mock-hymn to that ceaseless modern quest for the new, it's also an acknowledgment of the physical pain of aging, as well as romantic agony. In general I find the structure of "The Next Day" significant, because it plays like a collection of discreet singles - songs each in a different style, genre, mood - very much in the current mode of consuming music, downloading one hit or potential hit at a time.

Yet the music also coheres as an album in the classic-rock sense: a unified statement that can be listened to at full length, to tell a story about one man's progression through innocence, experience, arrogance, cynicism, doubt, redemption and inspiration. Yes, that's overstating it a bit, but not much.

Yes, some of these steps falter in melody, or in sustaining the desired effect. But in general, "The Next Day" is a thriller, not merely a return to form - partly because David Bowie never took one form to begin with. This is his now-continuing contribution to pop music: the notion that restlessness and melancholy can yield more pleasure than anyone might reasonably expect.

GROSS: Ken Tucker reviewed David Bowie's album, "The Next Day." You can see the music video of the song "The Stars Are Out Tonight," featuring Bowie and Tilda Swinton, on our website, freshair.npr.org, where you can also download podcasts of our show.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "VALENTINE'S DAY")

BOWIE: (Singing) Valentine told me who's to go. Feelings he's treasured most of all, the teachers and the football stars. It's in his tiny face. It's in his scrawny hands. Valentine told me so. He's got something to say this Valentine's Day. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.