Heathen (stylised uǝɥʇɐǝɥ) is the twenty-third studio album by the English musician David Bowie, originally released in Europe on 10 June 2002, and the following day in America. It was his first release through his own ISO label. It reunited Bowie with the producer Tony Visconti for the two's first full-album collaboration since 1980. Recording took place at New York studios from August 2001 to January 2002 and featured guest musicians including Dave Grohl and Pete Townshend. Two tracks, "Afraid" and "Slip Away", evolved from Bowie's shelved Toy project, while three were covers of songs by Pixies, Neil Young and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy.
Musically, Heathen displays an art rock and art pop sound reminiscent of Bowie's 1970s works. The spiritual lyrics, reflected in the artwork and packaging, were based on his accumulated feelings of dread, thoughts on ageing and hopes for a better future for his newborn daughter. Commentators interpreted some tracks, particularly "Sunday" and "Slow Burn", as partial responses to the September 11 attacks, although Bowie denied any influence.
Boosted by a vast marketing campaign and promotional appearances, Heathen reached number five in the United Kingdom and became his highest-charting album in the United States since 1984, reaching number 14. The single "Everyone Says 'Hi" reached number 20 in the UK. Bowie supported the album on the Heathen Tour throughout mid-2002, performing Heathen in its entirety at several shows.
Heathen represented a creative and commercial resurgence for Bowie following a period of experimentation in the 1990s. It was his most well-received album in years, being praised as a return to form and his best since Scary Monsters (1980). His biographers have commended Bowie's ability to update his older sound for a modern setting and recognise it as one of the finest of his later career.
Background and writing
In 2000, David Bowie recorded Toy, a collection of remade songs he wrote in the 1960s with a couple of new tracks. Originally slated for release in March 2001, the project was shelved due to financial troubles encumbering EMI/Virgin. In the meantime, Bowie began work on a new album with his former producer Tony Visconti, the duo's first full-length collaboration since Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980). After not speaking to each other for almost 20 years, the two reconciled in 1998 and recorded various one-off projects before reuniting for a full album. Both men were eager to work with each other again, with Visconti stating: "It was only in very recent years, around the time he made contact again, that I realised how much I missed him. We both had grown and changed, so the time was right to open the channels again."
Bowie spent the spring of 2001 writing compositions alone at New York City's Looking Glass Studios. Wanting to utilise songwriting techniques he had used across his entire career, he aimed to create a collection of "serious songs to be sung" and "a personal, cultural restoration". Visconti was impressed with Bowie's expanded knowledge of melodic and harmonic structures. The writing stint resulted in his first solely-written album since 1993's The Buddha of Suburbia. Bowie contributed the track "Nature Boy" to the soundtrack to the movie Moulin Rouge! (2001), in which some of his own songs also appeared. Personal events in Bowie's life, including the birth of his daughter, Alexandria, in August 2000, and the deaths of his mother Margaret and friend Freddie Buretti in April and May 2001, respectively, deeply affected him and influenced some of the new material. In June, Bowie moved into Visconti's home in West Nyack, New York, where the two spent time working on songs using Pro Tools.
Recording and production Initial sessions
At the suggestion of the guitarist David Torn, Bowie and Visconti chose Allaire Studios in Shokan, New York to record the album. Located on the estate of Glen Tonche on top of Mount Tonche in the Catskill Mountains, the studio had 40-foot tall ceilings and a view of the Ashokan Reservoir. Although Bowie had preferred more urban areas, such as New York City or Berlin, the location's isolationism influenced the tracks "Sunday" and "Heathen (The Rays)". He told Interview magazine:
Recording commenced in August 2001 and continued into September. The lineup consisted of Bowie, Visconti and the drummer Matt Chamberlain, whom the two had met while scouting at the studio; Torn contributed guitar parts in September. The trio finished 19 pieces in about two weeks, one of which was a remake of the Toy track "Uncle Floyd", now titled "Slip Away". Bowie explained to Time Out magazine that he was adamant about working with musicians neither he nor Visconti had worked with before. Bowie himself contributed more instrumentation on Heathen than any studio album "since Diamond Dogs or maybe Low "; he played guitar, saxophone, stylophone, keyboards, drums and the same EMS AKS synthesiser he used on Low. Visconti also brought back the vocal effect previously utilised on "Heroes" (1977) for "Sunday" and "I Would Be Your Slave", wherein three microphones were set up at different distances from the singer, each opening up when Bowie sang at the appropriate volume.
Overdubs and mixing
Bowie invited several musicians to Allaire to contribute overdubs. They included the Toy guitarist Gerry Leonard, Visconti's associate singer Kristeen Young and the keyboardist Jordan Rudess, who had worked with Bowie and Visconti during their pre-Toy sessions. Rudess revealed at the time: "Bowie doesn't like a lot of options. He has a good idea of how he wants the end result to sound, so practically what's on his demo is close to what he wants." Bowie's former guitarist Carlos Alomar, last seen on the 1995 Outside Tour, contributed overdubs in mid-October. Additionally, Foo Fighters' frontman Dave Grohl guested on a cover of Neil Young's "I've Been Waiting for You", having performed with Bowie at his 50th birthday concert in January 1997, while the Who's Pete Townshend played parts for "Slow Burn". Townshend, who guested on "Because You're Young" from Scary Monsters, later told fans that Heathen was "surprising, moving, poetic, in a musical and visionary sense."
Mixing for Heathen began at Looking Glass in October 2001. Here, Visconti reworked the Mark Plati-produced Toy track "Afraid" to have it match the new material. He, Bowie and Alomar also recorded vocals and guitars for "Everyone Says 'Hi", which was completed at Sub Urban Studios in London with production by Brian Rawling and Gary Miller. Miller said that he primarily worked off the vocals: "It started off like a remix, but ended up as a fully-fledged production." Overdubbing continued on and off until January 2002. Visconti added contributions from the Scorchio Quartet (Greg Kitzis, Meg Okura, Martha Mooke, Mary Wooten), who previously played with Bowie at the Tibet House Benefit Concert in February 2000, and the Borneo Horns (Lenny Pickett, Stan Harrison, Steve Elson), last seen on Never Let Me Down (1987). Other credited players on Heathen include the drummer Sterling Campbell and the bassist Tony Levin of King Crimson.
Outtakes from the sessions included "Wood Jackson", "When the Boys Came Marching Home", "Fly" and a new version of "Safe", a track Bowie and Visconti recorded for The Rugrats Movie in 1998, but ultimately cut from the film. Bowie later remarked that "the hard part was knowing which songs not to include [on the final album]".
Music and lyrics The standard edition of Heathen contains 12 songs: nine originals and three covers. Two of the covers were originally slated for an abandoned sequel to Bowie's 1973 covers album Pin Ups: Young's "I've Been Waiting for You", taken from his 1969 eponymous debut album, and "I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship" by Norman Odam, or the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, from whom Bowie lifted part of his Ziggy Stardust moniker in 1972. The final cover is "Cactus" by the Pixies, taken from their debut album Surfer Rosa (1988). In his book Strange Fascination, David Buckley discusses the album's musically diversity, from the "edgy rock" of Scary Monsters ("Cactus"), techno ("I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship"), American punk ("I've Been Waiting For You"), drum and bass ballad ("I Would Be Your Slave"), riff rock ("Afraid"), quasi-reggae ("5.15 The Angels Have Gone") and 1971-era pop ("Everyone Says 'Hi). Other reviewers have classified Heathen as art rock and art pop. Compared to previous albums, the songs feature ties between the melodies, harmonies and arrangements, predominantly on "Sunday", "Slip Away" and "Afraid". Bowie said he wanted to capture the mood of Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind (1997), and based "Sunday", "Heathen (The Rays)", "I Would Be Your Slave" and "5.15 The Angels Have Gone" off of Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs.
Thematically, Heathen continues the spirituality of Outside (1995), Earthling (1997) and Hours (1999). Depicting a godless world, the record also presents Bowie's reflections on ageing. He told Interview that once you reach a certain age, you realise "you're not growing anymore", "your body's strength is diminishing" and once aware, "you've got to let it go". Comparing Heathen and Hours, author Dave Thompson says that both share similar moods, reflections and "deep, personal beauty". However, compared to the melancholic nostalgia that pervaded Hours, biographer Nicholas Pegg says that Heathen focuses on feelings of existential dread, particularly on "Sunday", "Afraid" and "Heathen (The Rays)". Pegg also analyses the feeling of anxiety, stating that unlike Diamond Dogs and Station to Station (1976), throughout Heathen the anxiety is of "a happy, fulfilled mind struggling to come to terms with intimations of mortality". Bowie elaborated in Interview: "It's a head-spinning dichotomy of the lust for life against the finality of everything." He also defined the album's protagonist as a lost 21st-century man.
Connections with 9/11
Due to its subject matter, recording location and timing of its release, commentators at the time suggested that Heathen was partly a response to the September 11 attacks. The author James E. Perone even stated in his book The Words and Music of David Bowie that the album "chronicles New York City at the time of the...attacks", identifying "Slip Away", "Slow Burn" and "A Better Future" as reflecting a post-9/11 atmosphere. Bowie denied any connections to the attacks, stating that all the songs were written beforehand and reflected a general feeling of anxiety that he had accumulated living in America, particularly "Slow Burn". Nevertheless, he admitted that "Sunday" "was quite spine-tingling to realise how close those lyrics came. There are some key words in there that really just freak me out." Visconti later explained that the recording sessions were still underway at the time of the attacks, but suggested that "only a few lines were amended after September 11". Plati also commented that "I think in Heathen you can feel the overall mood of where we all were during those times."
Songs The album opener, "Sunday", displays pervading electronic textures and synthesiser-based loops, musically descending from the atmospherics of Low and tracks such as "Word on a Wing" (1976), "The Motel" (1995) and "The Dreamers" (1999). Establishing the album's core themes of spiritual doubt and existential dread, the dreary lyrics were inspired by the surrounding region around Allaire. Pegg argues the title "neatly encapsulates the album's sense of an uneasy balance between the spiritual and the secular". "Cactus" discusses a distaste and lack of sexual engagement that represents a departure from the album's main themes. Featuring Visconti on bass and Bowie on all other instruments, including his only recorded drum performance, Pegg considers the rendition a raw, tightly produced piece of garage rock that pays homage to T. Rex's "The Groover" (1973).