David Bowie
Station to Station

THE REVIEW

It's very cold here at the station, I'm waiting for a train on this gray and wintry day, I don't know where I'm going, I just feel like taking a ride: here it comes, steaming and noisy. I get in the carriage, put on the walkman, and listen once again to "Station to Station". Inevitably, I think of the Thin White Duke who was born with that album, who in 1976 was unwell, very unwell, and probably he too boarded a train one day to take a break, to stop thinking about anything or anyone, ending up writing these six pearls full of nostalgia and solitude.

Those were heavy years for David, filled with anguish and cocaine, with delusions as you make us understand right from the title track, a monumental and stylistically perfect song with a slow and rising intro, up to the more lively finale, placed immediately at the beginning of the album: I find in this piece all the repertoire proposed up to that point, an excellent transition between the past and the imminent European future. The calmer "Golden Years" takes us to soul territories already addressed in the previous "Young Americans", a soft and light song, the only beam of light in the total darkness of the album that returns to despair in "Word on a Wing", a true prayer for help to God, a final appeal to religion to help him from cocaine, a chilling yet majestic image. "Stay" addresses the theme of casual encounters between people, a snapshot of human relationships; musically, it is the "strongest piece" of the album, a track still performed live today due to its very engaging funk-rock but, for those who write, remembered for Bowie's great vocal performance, here more the Thin White Duke than ever. Special mention for the experimental "TVC 15", a track that seems to anticipate the sounds that will come with "Low" and the following Berlin trilogy. This chapter closes with "Wild is the Wind", a ballad by Tiomkin impeccably covered by Bowie, who gives the song an unplugged aura and romanticizes it with his capital voice.

The journey ends, one can get off the train and reflect. You reflect on what you've just experienced: there's a lot of meat to put on the fire, there's the personal pain of an inner distress that is an obsession, a person living the lowest existential point, but not artistically given the great result, a bridge that connects what was and what will come, indeed in my opinion with "Station to Station" begins the Duc's best moment that will span five albums until "Scary Monsters".

You pack your bags, now you jump on the plane headed for Berlin, a new era begins.