Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

instrumentation.
“Then, as now, technology was on the move, so
every recording studio had something new to
explore,” Gardiner says. “Perhaps the difference
then was that things were being invented which
meant we had no reference points. Now, things are
being developed, copied and modeled and used to
re-create rather than to create.”
The psychic scars of his isolation in Los Angeles
had not yet healed, but Bowie instinctively threw
himself headlong into this recording, and like his
experience filming The Man Who Fell to Earth, the
immersion in an ambitious creative endeavor
eventually delivered him into a safer realm. “He was
pretty much living at the edge of his nervous system,
very tense,” Eno observed. “But as often happens,
that translated into a sense of complete abandon in
the work. One of the things that happens when you’re
going through traumatic life situations is your work
becomes one of the only places where you can
escape and take control.”
Once actual songs like “Sound and Vision,”
“Breaking Glass” and “Always Crashing in the Same
Car” began to take form, it became clear to all not
only that an actual album was being constructed, but
that this album would, perhaps more than any other,
reflect Bowie’s mental struggle. The songs that
ended up on the album’s first side, for example, are
uniformly short (three minutes each) and sung by an
artist not looking to mask or poeticize his mental
anguish, but rather to scream at them with what