Recall that Bowie was only 54-an age when things start to get creaky and the weight of memory is more of a burden, but generally an age still fat in the middle of life. Of course, the grand old man persona of Heathen was as much a fictive personality as Ziggy Stardust had been. You’ve got to let it go.” In another interview he said mid-life was a time of no longer becoming, but simply being.įor a man who’d staked his life on continually becoming, wasn’t this state essentially death? Bowie’s Four Last Songs are barren landscapes, a set of departure lounges, wings of abandoned houses, empty train stations, beaches without footprints. “ Especially in one’s mid-fifties, you’re very aware that that’s the moment you have to leave off the idea of being young. His own Four Last Songs were the album’s bookends, “Sunday” and “Heathen (The Rays),” and two mid-sequenced songs, “5:15 The Angels Have Gone” and “I Would Be Your Slave.” These were end-of-life musings, thoughts on death, parceled regrets, “hard questions.” He’d reached the point, he told Interview‘s Ingrid Sischy, where he felt was no longer growing. “ I kind of used them as a template.” (His preferred recording was Gundula Janowitz‘s performance (with Herbert von Karajan, 1973), which he described as “ach with love for a life that is quietly fading.”) “ There’s a certain sense of universality in those songs that Strauss wrote at the end of his life when he was 84…they’re the most terribly romantic, sad, poignant pieces that I think have ever been written,” he told Interview in 2002. Some of Heathen was his version of Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs, or so he claimed. So in 2002, a year after having composed the songs on Heathen, Bowie began giving them a narrative structure. The Ziggy Stardust “storyline” wasn’t cooked up until 1973, when Bowie described it to William S. It’s long been Bowie’s habit to rewrite his albums in the press once he’s made them.
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