Recording and Production
Heathen marked the return of record producer Tony Visconti, who co-produced (with Bowie himself) several of Bowie's classic albums. The last album Visconti had co-produced was Scary Monsters in 1980.
Originally, Bowie had recorded the album Toy for release in 2000 or 2001. This album was meant to feature some new songs and remakes of some his lesser-known songs from the 1960s. Although Toy remains officially unreleased, a few of its tracks—including "Afraid" and "Slip Away" (then titled "Uncle Floyd")—appear on Heathen. Some other re-recorded songs were included as B-sides to the singles from Heathen.
The album features guest appearances from The Who guitarist Pete Townshend (who had played guitar on an earlier Bowie track, "Because You're Young" from Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)), Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, Dream Theater keyboardist Jordan Rudess, pianist Kristeen Young, and prolific bassist Tony Levin of King Crimson.
Read more about this topic: 5:15 The Angels Have Gone
Famous quotes containing the words recording and/or production:
“Write while the heat is in you.... The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)