in the end it all circles back to David Bowie
seen from Indonesia
seen from Indonesia
seen from Israel
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from Israel
seen from China
seen from China
seen from China
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Norway
seen from United States
seen from India
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
in the end it all circles back to David Bowie
i'm sure it's been said before but david bowie had quite literally one of the most exquisite side profiles of any human being in history
David Bowie // Station To Station
Spotify - Apple - Tidal
There are albums that belong to a particular moment in an artist’s career, and then there are albums that seem to exist outside time. Station to Station, released by David Bowie in 1976, is one of those records. It sounds like a journey, but not necessarily one with a destination. It feels like movement through darkness: trains, stations, cities passing outside a window, identities being abandoned and reinvented somewhere between one place and the next.
Bowie was already famous, but Station to Station arrived at a strange and almost frightening point in his life. The record sits between the soul and funk of Young Americans and the electronic, experimental world he would explore in Berlin. It is therefore a kind of bridge, but an unstable one. You can hear Bowie leaving one musical universe while already stepping into another.
The opening title track is extraordinary. It begins with the sound of a train approaching, as if the album itself is arriving from somewhere distant. Then comes one of Bowie’s most enigmatic characters: the Thin White Duke. Elegant, detached, almost aristocratic, he sings about magic, cocaine, religion, love and transformation as if they were fragments of the same dream. The song gradually builds into something hypnotic and enormous. It is not simply a song about travelling; it feels like travelling through Bowie’s own fractured identity.
What makes Station to Station so fascinating is the contradiction at its centre. The music is incredibly controlled, sophisticated and precise, while the person creating it was going through an extremely chaotic period. Bowie was living in Los Angeles, surrounded by drugs, exhaustion and paranoia. He was reportedly sleeping very little and existing on a diet that was almost absurdly restrictive. Yet from that chaos came music of remarkable clarity.
There is something almost unsettling about listening to the album with that knowledge. The record does not sound like a cry for help. It sounds confident. Sometimes even cold. Bowie transforms instability into style, confusion into character, and personal disintegration into art.
The second side is equally remarkable. Golden Years brings funk and soul into Bowie’s world, while Word on a Wingsuddenly becomes intimate and vulnerable. Then comes TVC15, one of the strangest and most infectious songs on the album, before Stay and finally Wild Is the Wind, a devastating interpretation that closes the record with a completely different emotional temperature.
And perhaps that is what makes Station to Station so enduring. It refuses to settle into one identity. It is rock, funk, soul, electronic music and something else that is difficult to name. It is Bowie looking backwards and forwards at the same time.
The title itself feels like a perfect description of his career. Bowie was never particularly interested in arriving. He was interested in the next station.
The Thin White Duke would eventually disappear. Berlin would come. Low, "Heroes" and Lodger would follow. Bowie would continue changing, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes disastrously, but almost always refusing to remain where people expected him to remain.
That is perhaps the real meaning of Station to Station. It is not an album about knowing who you are. It is an album about moving while you are still trying to find out.
And sometimes the most interesting journeys are the ones in which the person on the train has no idea where the next station is.
i cant listen to fame by david bowie the same ever again
08.09.2026
Sweet Pickle Books, East Village Bookstore, Spoonbill & Sugartown Books
I got Peter Hujar's Day by Linda Rosenkrantz, Whoring Art: A Red Light Anthology, Modern Love by Constance De Jong, Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black by Cookie Mueller, Females by Andrea Long Chu, This is Not My Cat by Takashi Homma, and Pic by Jack Kerouac
In the end, I told Sue to get Sula by Toni Morrison, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and Nausea by Sartre
