Earthling (album) - Album Background and Development

Album Background and Development

David Bowie returned to the studio five days after finishing up his tour for his previous album, Outside. Bowie said "I really thought it would be great if we could do a photo, almost a sonic photograph of what we were like at that time. So, Reeves and I started writing immediately after we finished on the road." Despite going into the studio with no material ready to record, the album took only 2 1/2 weeks to record (typical for a Bowie album). Bowie compared this album with his 1980 album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), saying "I think there's quite a link between Scary Monsters and this album, to a certain extent. Certainly, the same intensity of aggression." Bowie described the album as an effort "to produce some really dynamic, aggressive-sounding material."

On the production of the drum 'n bass sound of the album, Bowie had this to say:

Unlike most drum and bass things, we didn't just take parts from other people's records and sample them. On the snare drum stuff, Zac went away and did his own loops and worked out all kinds of strange timings and rhythms. Then we speeded those up to your regular 160 beats per minute. That's very much how we treat the album. We kept all sampling in-house and created our own soundscape in a way.

Earthling was the first Bowie album recorded entirely digitally, "entirely on hard disk." During interviews promoting the album, Bowie stated "I did nearly everything on the guitar. A lot of screechy-scrawly stuff was done on saxophone, then transferred to sampler, and then distorted and worked on on the synthesizer."

Bowie and the band continued their experimental approach to making music, first used in the Berlin Trilogy: for the track "Looking for Satellites," Bowie told guitarist Gabrels that he "only wanted him to play on one string at a time. ... He was hemmed in by the chord until it changed, and that made his run-up most unorthodox." The guitar riff used for the track "Dead Man Walking" was based on a pattern Jimmy Page (of Led Zeppelin) had played for Bowie back in the '60's. According to Gabrels, part of the bass track on "Little Wonder" was a recording of bassist Gail Ann Dorsey as she tried to get a sound from her pedalboard while not knowing she was being recorded. For "Battle for Britain," Bowie challenged Mike Garson to play based on "the idea from a piece of Stravinsky wrote called "Ragtime for Eleven Instruments." I said 'If you could kind of get into the character of that...' and he did it immediately."

Bowie and Gabrels used a technique they'd started while working on Bowie's previous album Outside, where they'd transfer bits of guitar to a sampling keyboard and construct riffs from those pieces. "It's real guitar," said Bowie, "but constructed in a synthetic way. But Brian Eno got in the way - in the nicest possible way - so we didn't get to that until this album. We want to go further with that, because it's a very exciting idea." Bowie considered this album, along with its predecessor, to be a "textural diary" of what the last few years of the millennium felt like.

Bowie's and Gabrel's musical influences at the time had a big impact on the sound of the album: Bowie was influenced by a "euro" sound and bands like Prodigy, while Gabrels was still into the American industrial sound and bands like Underworld.

Bowie said that he approached the production of this album similarly to how he approached Young Americans:

I wanted to work within the Philadelphia soul experience, and the only way that I knew was to bring what's thoroughly European about me to this intrinsically black American format. And this not a dissimilar situation. It was the hybridizing of the European and the American sensibilities, and for me, that's exciting. That's what I do best. I'm a synthesist.

"Little Wonder" was one of the first tracks Bowie & Gabrels wrote for the album, and Bowie called writing the track a "ridiculous" exercise in pure stream of consciousness. "I just picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and made a line for each of the dwarves' names. And that's the song . And then I ran out of dwarves' names, so there's new dwarves in it like 'Stinky'."

"I'm Afraid of Americans" was an unused leftover from the Outside sessions: Bowie said "That was something that Eno and I put together, and I just didn't feel it fit Outside, so it didn't go on it. It just got left behind. So then we took just the embryo of it, and restructured it with this band."

Bowie summed up the meaning of the songs on the album by saying:

I guess the common ground with all the songs is this abiding need in me to vacillate between atheism or a kind of gnosticism. I keep going backwards and forwards between the two things, because they mean a lot in my life. I mean, the church doesn't enter into my writing, or my thought; I have no empathy with any organised religions. What I need is to find a balance, spiritually, with the way I live and my demise. And that period of time - from today until my demise - is the only thing that fascinates me.