Wild is the Wind
I’ve fallen head over heels for Bowie’s cover of “Wild is the Wind” which closes out Station to Station (listen here).
It’s a beautiful vocal performance, but what grabs me most is the contrast between the words and the vocal tone. If you read the words, it’s a love song, but if you didn’t understand English and just listened to the vocal performance, you’d think it was a funeral elegy. It sounds desperately sad, mournful, longing–whatever love this is about is either long gone or never was.
The other reason it works is the dark undertone of the lyrics. On one level it’s just your typical hyperbolic love song — “With your kiss my life begins / You’re spring to me / All things to me / Don’t you know you’re life itself?” — but on another level it’s the dark, obsessive, all-consuming, self-destructive side of love. What does it say about your own life if it doesn’t even exist without the other person? The forlorn, yearning vocal delivery particularly enhances the underlying darkness.
The other reason it works so perfectly as the closer for Station to Station is that (as I rambled yesterday) this album is all about searching for human connection and meaning to life. The song rather perfectly embodies both.
In other “Wow, Laura, you have a disturbingly obsessive personality” news:
* I walked into a magazine store yesterday while the song “Heroes” was playing on my MP3 player and immediately saw a fashion magazine doing a tribute to Berlin with the cover model doing the exact pose Bowie does on the cover of “Heroes.” Inside was a full page featuring an extended quotation from the song. It was a bit eerie.
* I’m reading Strange Fascination by David Buckley. This dude wrote his PhD thesis on Bowie, so it’s a lot more about Bowie’s music and cultural influence than about his personal life. I am so wary of and creeped out by trashy rock star bios, but so far this is very much exceeding my expectations. I have always lamented the lack of academic rigor in my musical fandoms; between this and that Bowie encyclopedia I am in heaven.
* I got my Criterion DVD of The Man Who Fell to Earth yesterday and watched the first forty minutes of the commentary (I decided not to make it a third time of staying up until 3am watching that movie). It’s great–Bowie doesn’t talk much but everything he says is witty and charming.
* And then I dreamed that I was at Cake Shop and he was there and I struck up a conversation without revealing that I was a fan and we had this long interesting chat and I was all excited that I’d talked to him. Except for some reason I left in the middle to go shopping at the pet store next door.*
There is not actually a pet store next door. My brain conflated a bunch of LES and East Village locations so that Cake Shop and Whiskers were next to each other on the lower part of Second Avenue.
I’ve only dreamed about him a couple of times and every time it’s mid-90s Bowie, which is a bit annoying; I assume it’s because that was the first time I knew anything about him (because he toured with NIN) and so that version is the default imprinted on my brain. Attention brain: dreams about 70s Bowie, please.
Current Mood: 
weird
