"Space Oddity" and "Starman" by David Bowie

A phaser is an effect that moves an audio signal in and out of phase so that it sounds like it's canceling itself out, adding a sense of motion to an otherwise static tone. It can really liven up a mix, however it has no starfleet applications no matter what you may have heard to the contrary. Welcome to Strong Songs, a podcast about music. I'm your host, Kirk Hamilton, and as always, I'm so glad that you join me to talk about music that's in phase, music that's out of phase, and sometimes music that's a little bit above. It's a new year. Strong Songs Year 3 is underway. We've got new theme music which you're hearing right now and I'm very excited for the year to come. The episode that you're about to listen to is entirely listener-supported and if you'd like to know more about how to help me make strong songs go to patreon.com/strongsongs. This year I wanted to get into the meat of the episode a little bit faster so as soon as the syndrome music ends we're going to get right to it. Of course before we make a change like that I feel like there is one opinion that we should probably get. So let's ask the horns what they think. Music is magic and it is all around us. However, for just one moment I want you to stop listening to the music around you and turn your eyes and ears to the sky. There's not enough magic or mystery in our day-to-day lives and one could be forgiven for sitting and staring at the sky wishing for something magical to happen. Like what if a mystical being from another world brought us a collection of songs that changed everything. Songs that saved humanity and made us remember the unifying joy of being human. It's a romantic notion isn't it? A being from another world with art or music so beautiful that it changes our world for the better shows us things we never could have imagined. It's that promise that music makes sometimes you hear music that's so good it doesn't seem like it could have possibly originated on this world or even in this solar system. It came from somewhere else brought to us by a visitor from afar and as fanciful as it may sound just such a visitor did grace our planet with his music and for more than 50 years he showed us what rock and roll could be. In the summer of 1969 he looked down on earth from low orbit and he sent us this dispatch about what he saw. Yes the time has finally come for strong songs to talk about the music of David Bowie, an inarruable legend of music, a personal hero of mine and someone that I have been excited to talk about on this show since before strong songs existed. Bowie's music was extra terrestrial in its excellence and I figured what better song to talk about than his iconic 1969 single Space Audity. But you know what I mean that's a great song but if I'm gonna talk about David Bowie, David Bowie, the great David Bowie on strong songs is it really gonna be enough to just talk about a single song. The thing is if we're gonna talk about one David Bowie song about a man in outer space looking down on the world we should probably talk about the other David Bowie song about a man in outer space looking down on the world. So let the children lose it, let the children use it and let's talk about star man too yeah. Space Audity and star man are in many ways sister songs to one another. I think before I knew David Bowie music sort of better than I do now as an adult when I was a kid I kind of got these songs mixed up even and I'm guessing I'm not the only one who felt that way. Obviously their subject matter is very similar they're both songs about men in outer space looking down on the earth. They also have a lot of musical similarities that I'm really interested in teasing out on this episode because when you've got two very similar songs by the same artist a lot of times the similarities between the two songs actually tell you a lot more broadly about how that artist wrote music and also the differences can be instructive too. So first we're gonna talk about space Audity which came out in 1969 then we're gonna talk about star man which came out three years later in 1972. It was a big three years though not just for Bowie but also for recorded music in general. So space Audity was on a self titled album in 1969 that I think is now retitled space Audity and it wasn't actually a huge hit when it came out it became a hit later and is now like one of Bowie's most famous songs when it came out didn't actually make a huge impression. In the years in between these two songs Bowie did release some music but in 1972 he released the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars. His band The Spiders from Mars his persona which he adopted was Ziggy Stardust and this was the moment that David Bowie exploded into the public consciousness. That was partly due to the strength of star man which was a huge hit and you can almost see the song as the second draft of space Audity like written to be a little bit more of a hit and even though both songs are great star man just totally hit to the point that when space Audity was re-released it also became a hit and now both songs are held up as emblematic of Bowie's sound and style. We're going to be going in chronological order which means we're going to start with 1969 space Audity. 1969 is a noteworthy year for a couple of reasons pertaining to this song first of all that was the same year the same summer in fact as the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. Space flight was on everybody's mind and that of course is reflected in the subject matter of the song. Also 1969 is two years after the Beatles released Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band which ended with the epic song A Day in the Life that was actually the final song of Strong Songs Year 2 if you're new to the show and you haven't listened to that episode you should go listen to it because with a day in the life the Beatles introduced or popularized a musical technique that is definitely very present in space Audity as well. So let's start at the very beginning we've just got a nice strumming guitar slowly fading up let's get into it. Now even before Bowie sings that iconic opening lyric ground control to major Tom I really like how this intro works. We're in the key of C space Audity is in the key of C and here in the intro we're going between two different chords it's an F major seven chord and an E minor chord. Now I like seventh chords because they're just nice and rich a basic chord is a one three and a five a seventh chord is one three five and seventh just a little bit of extra musical information it richens up the sound of the chord but we was a fan of seventh chords in particular major seventh chords and this song starts on an F major seven to give you a sense of the difference this is just a regular F major chord which is a one three five chord and this is an F major seventh chord. Just a little bit fuller a little bit more musical information and that F major seventh chord does some major work on space Audity a little bit later in the song in addition to during the intro. So it's two nice chords they sound nice going back and forth from one to the other but I also just like how faint this is it's very very quiet at the beginning of this track and it fades up oh so slowly and that's really beautiful to me because it evokes the sense of someone floating in space and I can really picture it you know it's it's totally silent in space no one can hear you play guitar and you can picture a space capsule kind of over across the horizon totally darkened and slowly coming into light and it's so so far away and then you begin to make out the figure inside right as billy begins to sing it's evocative and beautiful. So there are some cool individual elements contributing to this opening verse. As was common in the 1960s the rhythm section was panned rather than being in the center in the 1970s it started being more of a standard thing that the bass and the drums would be We pan center at the very end. released the kick drum and the bass drum would be right there in the middle of the mix, and everything else would be panned to the left and the right. In this case, the drums in the bass are over on the left, the guitar is over on the right, and the vocals start in the middle, but then they kind of go right and left as well. Space out of the featured a number of UK studio musicians, including Yessis Rick Wakeman on Melatron, Mick Wayne on the guitar, Herbie Flowers on bass and Terry Cox on drums, incidentally Wakeman, Cox and Flowers all played on Elton John's Mad Man Across the Water, which I talked about a song from that album Tiny Dancer in year one of strong songs, though none of those musicians actually played on Tiny Dancer. Kind of a small world, the English studio music scene in the late 60s and early 70s. So over on the left we've got Flowers and Cox on bass and drums. Cox is really just playing the snare drum here, this kind of a martial march beat, which gives a slightly military vibe to things and fits, given that it's got this official ground control, major Tom kind of energy, and Flowers is just playing steady whole notes on the bass. As for the right channel, the acoustic guitar is of course the dominant sound that's bowing himself playing the acoustic guitar just strumming between a C major chord and an E minor chord we've moved into the key of C, which this song is in. The verse starts on a C major chord and Bowie is just strumming along. The chords for this verse just go back and forth between C major and E minor like that, and then Bowie does something that he really likes to do that is actually going to turn up in Starman as well. He goes to A minor, then he walks down to an A minor over G, and in this song he then goes to a D over F sharp, which is a really common chord progression and nice little walk down works very well on the guitar, one of the reasons that I think that it's common, and it sounds like this in the song. The most present other sound in addition to Bowie's vocals of course, is a small synthesizer known as a stylophone that Bowie is playing and that I always kind of thought of as sounding like a speaking spell before I knew what it was. The speaking spell was that little learn how to spell tool that a lot of people grew up with. I don't think they make them anymore, but if you were a kid when I was a kid, the speaking spell had a voice that had this same kind of robot cow mooing sound that the stylophone has. They actually make a modern one of these, a modern stylophone. I don't have one, so I'm not going to recreate it here, but I kind of want one. They look really fun. It's kind of a mix between a toy and a synth. I'm sure you could get some use out of it, but we obviously did. But it's just kind of a neat little thing, and it's called a stylophone because you play it with a stylus, with a sort of a pin that you slide up and down the control surface, and that lets you make all kinds of weird sounds. It actually reminds me of some of the synthesizers people would release for the Nintendo DS and 3DS where you could control the pitch of the synthesizer and some of the parameters using the stylus on that device, which is actually a really cool input device. It's very different than most musical input devices, but that gives the stylophone a distinct sound. And that's definitely a part of what makes this opening verse to space out of these sound so distinct. The last thing that you might notice is just a little bit of electric guitar. I believe this is McWayne on the electric guitar just playing just nice ringing kind of chiming notes or harmonics on the electric guitar, just a couple of times, which adds to the sort of ethereal atmosphere of this intro without being intrusive and letting the acoustic guitar do most of the real harmonic guitar work. So let's listen to that whole first verse and just take in the mix, pay attention to how the drums in the bass are over on the left, the acoustic guitar is over on the right. Bowie's voice is in the middle, but then splits to the left and the right, the stylophone and the electric guitar just a little bit are there in the middle of the stylophone doing nice held notes while the electric guitar just adds little chimes for texture. All right, here we go. And in the second verse, they begin to count down. And we all know what count down is a lead too. So I really love this and listeners of the show will know why this huge glissando, the liftoff as the rocket launches into outer space is extremely reminiscent of the Beatles a day in the life, which of course was recorded only a couple years before this. And while I don't know for sure that it was an influence on this part of space out of the, I have to imagine that it kind of was because what musician wouldn't hear a massive glissando like the one in a day in the life and think, well, okay, we'll have to do something like that on my next record. That horn flare, oh my god. Okay, we're not talking about a day in the life. There's already a whole strong song's episode about that. We're talking about space out of the, where they also do a very similar glissando into the first chorus. You know, the only real glissando that's happening there is in the guitar. McWayne is kind of sliding up the low E string on his guitar in a sort of a funny way that does add a glissando energy to the arrangement. So really the rest of what's going on is just a steady build. The notes are kind of climbing. And the main thing that is causing that climb is actually the melaton. An actual melaton is a very sought after and rare instrument. It's a tape-based instrument that uses different tape sounds to make string and flute and other sounds that are, we're very common in the 1960s and 1970s. There's a lot of classic recordings that use the melaton. I actually talked about it on a previous episode of Strong Songs. I believe on a Q&A episode in year one. I don't have a melaton, but logic actually comes with a melaton sampler built in. So I'm using that and it sounds pretty good. So like I mentioned, playing the melaton was Rick Wakeman, who would go on to be a member of the very well-known prog band Yes. And he was apparently the guy who could get the melaton to play in tune. He gave a cool interview about this song not that long ago and said that that was the thing that he could do was he knew how to get the melaton to play in tune and sound good. So they've kind of overdubbed melaton parts here. They've got the flute melaton sound and the string melaton sound. And they're using it to build a kind of an orchestra for a long time actually thought there were just strings playing on space out of you. But no, that is the melaton and that's kind of the power of the melaton as it has these very warm flute and string and choral sounds. So that's what's providing the orchestral sounds along with the guitar. Let's give that glissando or really that crescendo without a company in glissando and other listen. [Music] So one of the things that I like during this lift-off section is Herbie Flowers moving in the opposite direction he does this sort of really fast bass guitar dive bomb into what I guess I think of as the chorus of this song into the next section which runs in counter. It's sort of a contrary motion sort of a thing. After this long build up he then plays this really cool dive bomb into the chorus. I love a good bass dive bomb and that is definitely a good bass dive bomb. All right, let's get into this chorus. [Music] Now space-outed he may be a deceptively melancholy song but this is a triumphant moment this first chorus in the chorus in general. Very triumphant and uses a couple of harmonic tricks that I really like that we've talked about on previous episodes but I'm going to highlight again here. So this song is in C and the chorus is in C and we start on a big fat C major chord. Let's go through the rest of the chords of this chorus. So the second chord after that C major chord is an E dominant seventh chord that's an E seventh chord. This is an iconic sound. It turns up in a whole ton of songs. I love this chord progression. And when you go from one to three seven you're always, I'm pretty much always going to go either to the sixth minor which the E seventh leads to an A minor. So you could go through this chord progression C to E seventh to A minor. Ton of songs do that or what a lot of pop songs do is they like to go one to three seven to four. And that's what Bowie does here in space out of D he goes from C major to E seventh up to F. Then right after that F chord he does another chord progression that is pretty iconic that I really like. He goes to F minor which is four major to four minor. then to C, then back to F, then they repeat that F minor to C, then back to F, and then they go all the way back to C to do the second half of the chorus, which is the same chord progression again. So there's some nice musical storytelling going on here. There's kind of a lift up to a floating plateau, which fits with the sort of lift off space flight theme of this song. The first three chords that C to E to F definitely feels like there's this lift, the G to the G sharp to the A, that fifth to the third on the E7 up to the A, which is the third on the F major. There's definitely a feeling of lifting that chord progression, but then it stays kind of in the same place. The F goes to the F minor, to the C, back to F, to F minor to C, it kind of floats around that F. So there's a lift off up to F, and then this nice hovering zero gravity float around F before returning back to C to do it again. As far as the rhythm section goes, the drums have opened up somewhat. It's a very restrained beat, but it's just kind of a kick drum, and then a snare and a crash cymbal just sort of going in steady time over on the left, over on the right. But he's a Couset guitarist just steadily strumming through that chord progression, the C, the E, the F to the F minor, covering all the harmony though the real instrument that's taking care of the harmony here is Wakeman's melatron playing. He's using the string sound to just play really lushly through that chord progression right there in the middle. He really fills out the mix and he's just playing a nice melatron pattern, sort of a string arrangement through those same chords that Bowie is strumming on the acoustic guitar. The gruviest rhythm section instrument is Herbie Flowers' bass. He's playing a nice bass line over there on the left, and he's getting a little bit funkier than anybody else. He's feeling a little bit more, and I think improvising a little bit more, and he's playing some nice arpeggiated bass lines moving through the chord progression. So here's my little reenactment of just the rhythm section with no melody on the chorus of space oddity. [music] All right now let's listen back to the original, and I want you to try to hear all of that. Listen to the chord progression and the way that the chords lift up through those first three chords, then reach that F major chord and sort of stay put for a while. Listen to how the band is arranged and how the instruments are arrayed in the mix, how that melatron is playing those steady chords while the acoustic guitar strum over on the right, how the drums are playing a very simple part over on the left, while the bass gets actually a little bit funkier and offers some more creative subdivision. Pay attention for all of that. Ears on, here we go. [music] Now onto the melody, there's some cool stuff going on here both melodically with the way that the melody is written and also in terms of the arrangement, the vocal arrangement is doing something cool here that happens throughout this recording and I think it's actually a pretty neat effect especially if you take the lyrics and the narrative of the song into account. So the contour of the melody follows the same basic shape of that chord progression, it climbs up and then it goes down and then it goes back up. That's a nice kind of rolling melody and at points boy has overdubbed himself singing a higher harmony part as well. So I would say the main melody is over on the right and the higher harmony melody is over on the left. What I like about this is that lyrically this is actually ground control to major Tom. So this song is actually tossing perspectives back and forth, it's already done that and it definitely does it during this chorus where major Tom is at times on the radio speaking back to ground control, he's up in space or reading the earth while ground control is reaching out to him and at various points in this story we cut from the perspective of ground control up to major Tom, back to ground control and back to major Tom. It's not always so neat as the fact that whenever ground control is speaking there are multiple voices so that kind of makes sense since it would be a group of people in a control room and that whenever major Tom speaks it's just bowie singing by himself but in this chorus that is what happens and it's kind of neat once you realize that's what's going on. Here at the beginning ground control is speaking and so there are two voices speaking. Then in the second half of the chorus major Tom radio is back to ground control to tell them that he's leaving the capsule and it goes back to bowie centerpan by himself. The harmony is come back right after that, it's kind of just for that line, this is major Tom, we cut to that centerpan solo bowie vocal which is cool, it really helps that line stand out and when the harmony does come back in right after that line we get this extremely great example of vocal diction. I've always loved how he says, "moksta paku liya wae hey" but we almost always find some way of pronouncing something that's just a little bit weird and a little bit specific, it's a total bowie thing and this is definitely an example of that. So that vocal arrangement is very purposeful and it's very dramatic and it unerlines the narrative of the song and it also makes that second half of the chorus much more dramatic because we cut to major Tom by himself as he's stepping through the door and out into outer space which sets up the second half of the song. This is major Tom's and crown control I'm stepping through the door and I'm floating in the most of the song. From this blue and there's nothing I can do. Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do. After all the pump and circumstance of launch and crown control congratulating major Tom on this great accomplishment he's kind of left alone up in space looking down on the earth and it's a very melancholy thing. It would be a very sobering and lonely experience I would think to be up there alone and bowie certainly imagines it that way and it's what makes this song more of a melancholy thing especially once you really look at the lyrics and the story that it's telling then it seems well with you know the exciting launch and all of the cool guitar riffs and stuff like it's actually a song about a guy who is launched into space and then kind of left there and just floats away and that's the story of the song. So this is kind of happening we're in the midst of it and this beautiful post chorus section really embodies that feeling of floating. Over on drums Terry Cox has gone up onto the ride symbol and he's doing some nice symbol work there to kind of open things up a little bit. Flowers' space is still pretty active but he's playing some more whole notes to give more of a sense of space. Make me his melanchron, wake me his doing some really cool stuff on melanchron here. This is overdubbed so he's doing a few different parts but he really sounds like an orchestra. Some of the flute parts that he's playing are really lovely and they move just sort of up and down the keyboard in a really nice way and the acoustic guitar is just strumming through the chords. Now remember that F major seventh chord from the beginning? Well that is back as is the E minor chord that comes right after it we're basically back to the intro or a hybrid of the verse in the intro and it's just moving back and forth between those two chords. The second part of this post chorus goes to a B flat, to an A minor, to a G, down to an F which is another walk down kind of similar to the one that happened during the opening verse. Notably though it is different it's sort of the same shape as the opening verse but it's different it's almost like a B verse or something which gives this song an unusual form and space out of D does have an unusual form. It's almost through composed despite having an identifiable chorus but in a subtle way it has actually a very unusual song for it. Some lovely vocal harmonies happening here and I really like how the main melody really emphasizes the major seventh. That first chord is an F major seventh and we start up on the E which is the major seventh of that chord so the melody really emphasizes the major seventh which is the thing that makes the chord sound like what it is it's the defining chord tone. So with all of that in mind let's listen through that post chorus just listen for the lushness how kind of rich the arrangement becomes the ride symbol over there on the left, those nice major sevenths in the melody as we move toward the acoustic guitar breakdown. Alright here we go. ♪ Far above the world ♪ ♪ One is her, this blue ♪ ♪ And there's nothing ♪ And then it's time for the acoustic guitar to set up the electric guitar solo. (upbeat music) That acoustic guitar breakdown introduces another little harmonic wrinkle. It's a kind of a cool little pattern. It goes from C down to F up to G up to A major. And A major actually kind of factors during this guitar solo as well. The other two elements during this guitar breakdown are the handclaps which start on the left and then pan over to the right. And then the stylofoam actually makes a triumphant return. It was playing a little bit during the chorus too, but it makes a big noticeable return as it sets up the guitar solo. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) So that A major chord turns up again during McWayne's guitar solo, which is an oddball guitar solo. This whole section is kind of weird and it's its own section of the song. There's also just some clipping on the guitar in places. (upbeat music) The melatron is holding everything together. The drums are kind of soloing and the guitar is just playing these little ideas that fit in and out of the overall kind of cacophony that's going on. (upbeat music) And then with this wonderfully weird final guitar dive bomb, we go back into the chorus. (upbeat music) So as Tom floats above the earth, he reflects on his loneliness. (upbeat music) And I think my spaceship knows which and then we cut back to solo vocals as he relays a personal message. And then we get, yet another new section of the song. Major Tom has left his capsule and is floating out in space and his ground control tries fruitlessly to get in touch with him. The chords change again and it does this really cool walk up and walk back down from G up to E, which goes up to that G sharp in the bass, up to A minor, back down to G, to D over F sharp, to C, to G. As ground control says, can you hear me, can you hear me, and then finally, can you hear, and it transitions to a different kind of here. Here am I floating around my tin can as we go to Major Tom, who is floating alone in space, drifting off across the horizon. There's some very subtle flicking going on here, which calls to mind Morris code. And as Tom drifts away, the acoustic guitar sets up another guitar solo. This second guitar solo follows the same form as the first one with some tasty licks from McWing on the guitar, but then at the end when they set up that final E chord. The E, the final chord of the guitar solo, just kind of never resolves. Instead the band just deteriorates. Conjuring Tom, freed from his capsule, drifting off across the horizon, and out of sight. It's a chilling downer ending that doesn't really line up with how I think of this song or the associations that I think of for this song. Like I usually see it associated with the glories of space travel, not with the melancholy loneliness of space and maybe even a death in space. Taking as a whole, it's a more experimental and strange song than I gave it credit for before I learned it for this episode. It has the sections that are kind of iconic ground control to Major Tom, that first chorus, the conversation between ground control and Major Tom, but the particulars are actually more unusual than your average rock and roll song. It tells such a clear story, it kind of has a script with different characters, it feels a little bit more like theatrical production, than a rock song, especially once you get into the nitty gritty and start looking at those particulars. What I think is so interesting is if you take all those particulars that we just studied, these tales of outer space, the chill intro building up into a triumphant chorus, the guitar solo, the sound, and the vibe of the song, and you refine them and flip them around in some ways, you get 1972 Starman. He likes to come and meet us, but he thinks he blow our mind. With Starman, everything is just a little bit more where you might expect it to be. The drums and bass are pan to the center that drums are playing a much more straightforward rock beat. The tempo is consistent throughout and never goes into strange glissandos or avant-garde disintegrations. The vocals also pan dead center and never split left and right. The strings are a regular string section and not a melaton. There is no style of tone to be heard, the guitars are cleanly recorded and right up in your face, and when they rock, the whole band rocks with them. And yet there are so many similarities, in particular thematic similarities. If in 1969 Space Audity told the story of a man launching up from the earth into space and then getting lost and drifting away, 1972 Starman tells the story of an extra-terrestrial being, the great Ziggy Stardust, arriving in orbit above the earth and waiting to come down to earth to greet us all. It's a theatrical and even cinematic song in much the same way as Space Audity, even if the story is telling us exciting and hopeful rather than Melancholy and Sam. It's a straightforwardly great song on its own and even more interesting if you view it in the context of Space Audity coming three years earlier. It was the featured single off of 1972's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars. It featured the Spiders from Mars band which was Mick Ronson on guitar, who also provided the string arrangements for this recording. Trevor Boulder was playing bass and another Mick Woodman C was playing drums. And if you remember, Mick Wayne played electric guitar on Space Audity. So if you were a UK musician in the 1960s or 70s and you wanted to play with David Bowie, you probably had a better chance if your name was Mick. Starman is a pretty straightforward song harmonically though it actually starts in a very weird place that isn't indicative of where the rest of the song is going. It starts on this extremely strange chord. Check this out. Like, "Oh, what? What is that chord? Here they're going to do it again." It's very cool. So they're going back and forth between two chords, a lot like the beating of Space Audity and as it happens, one of those chords is an F major 7 chord but it just happens to be the second chord. The first chord as best as I can hear it is like a Bb major 7, possibly the sharp 11 over A, which is a major 7 chord over the major 7th, which gives you the pretty nasty rub between the root, which is a Bb and the A down in the bass. It gives it kind of a flat 9 sound, which is an extremely distant interval that's best avoided honestly. As much as distance can sound good, a flat 9 almost never sounds good. Outside of, of course, a dominant 7 flat 9 chord somewhere where you're going for the distance or a kind of low Korean sound, which is a kind of modal sound that I guess you could say they're going for here. And I mean, it is on purpose. They're just trying to get this weird ugly sound, which does set a kind of an otherworldly tone for a song that's otherwise pretty straightforward. From here they jump straight into a very groovy first verse. As the narrator's radio transforms into a conduit for a signal from another world. Very groovy verse. So first of all, I love Woodman's Fill right there into the beginning of the verse, Super Tight Drum Fill. The 70s were definitely when Studio Engineers got really good at recording drums and just I love that really tight 70s drum sound. So in terms of the chords that are happening this verse is another good example of how Boe's chord progressions are just a little bit more theatrical, sound a little bit more like classic standards and tin panelley songs, then a lot of other rock songs. He's not just a one four five guy, those three chords, the one four and the five, the root of the blues, and where a lot of rock and roll music goes to, those are the three most common chords in rock. And Boe certainly knows his way around a one four five chord progression, as we'll see a little bit later in this song, but he also likes to use chords that are just a little bit more jazz and fluenced a little bit more tin panelley, and that's on display here. He begins on the two chord, on a G minor chord, which they sit on for a minute, and then they resolve to an F major. That's a really nice way to start a verse. I love verses that start on two. It's not that common, especially in pop and rock music, it was starting on that two chord. Then they go to the one to the F major, then they go to a C to a five, and then they do something cool with the phrasing. They just tag on an extra bar and do this little walk up from A flat to B flat. It's right here. The bass and drums are keeping the groove steady, but the guitar is actually really driving this in terms of the thump and the pop and the sizzle. In this case, the way that the acoustic guitar is recorded, and I'm not totally sure if this is Boe or Ronson playing a acoustic guitar here, but it's really nice acoustic guitar playing, and it's Mike really close to the strings. You can hear that attack. And the guitar strumming pattern really provides this nice groovy subdivision that gives a lot of a sizzle to this groove. You have the acoustic guitar is really driving the groove. Like the typical sizzle provider, the hi-hat is way down in the mix, and the acoustic guitar is providing that function and then some. And as they set up the chorus, it's time to finally bust out the phaser. I love the way they set up that chorus. It really does sound like Morse code from Outer Space. It's some sort of piano, electric piano, maybe, and they put a phaser on it, which as I discussed in the intro to this episode, it's an effect that we've talked about before on this show. It basically takes an audio signal and puts it out of phase with itself, which means that the peaks and valleys of the audio signal are placed so that they're canceling one another out, and it gives this sense of sort of hollowness and motion to an otherwise static tone. Without the phaser, an electric piano on octave A's would just sound like this. With the phaser, it sounds like this. And with that otherworldly effect, Bowie sets up this absolutely killer chorus. There's so much good stuff in this chorus, the way that acoustic guitar is still really driving the bus. Ronson's string arrangement is just beautiful. I love this chord progression, especially the turnaround, which we'll talk about in the turnaround, just totally rules. But first, let's just talk about the melody, because what a melody. In terms of melodies that begin with a huge octave leap, of course the most famous is Harold Arland somewhere over the rainbow, famously performed by Judy Arland in the Wizard of Oz, but we consciously based this melody on that melody, and it has that same feeling of soaring majesty. I mean, if you begin your song with a huge octave leap like that, it's probably gonna draw people in. The chords are similar to over the rainbow, but a little bit different. It starts on an F major and then it goes down to the 6 minor, to a D minor, which again, a very 10-pan alley move to go to the 6 minor from 1. Under the rainbow, just for the record goes from a 1 chord to a 3 minor chord, so it goes to kind of the other common minor chord, rather than going to the relative minor, it goes up to the 3 minor, pretty similar, but it does change the feeling of that melody and of that octave. But anyways, Starman goes from F major to D minor, then it does a walk down that's very similar to the one in space out of the, it goes to A minor, then A minor over G, which is also kind of a C major in second inversion, and then it goes down to a C chord. And since through that phrase, two times, the second time, a second higher vocal harmony comes in, so there's an overdubbed vocal harmony going on top, but they're both pan right to the middle, so it's nowhere near as dramatic or easily differentiated as on space oddity. Starman, waiting in the sky, these doors are not to know it, 'cause you know it's in the hall with quality. Meanwhile, Mick Ronson's string arrangement is just soaring. I mean, it's this totally beautiful thing tying this whole chorus together. He's got the cellos to the center left doing some nice long tones, while the violins do some faster runs over on the right toward the end of the second phrase. It's really tasty stuff. Like I love this run that sets up the turnaround. This turnaround, the final three chords of this chorus are so cool. They combine so many different bowie ideas into something that just works perfectly and also acts as a perfect setup to the next section. So the first thing that happens is something that also happened in space oddity and a chord progression that you all know that I love. He goes to the four chord, a Bb, then Bb minor, then he resolves to F major. So it resolves to one, but the turnaround keeps going in a way that is very common in jazz and American songbooks standards, but not that common in pop music. He extends the turnaround by going from one down to six dominant seventh, which is a D7 chord, to a two minor, G minor, to a five chord, which is C. And the five chord is where he ends setting up the next phrase. It's a killer turnaround. So let's go through it more or less in time. It goes four, four minor, one, six, seven, two minor, five. Now listen to the actual recording as they go through that same chord progression. Here we go. Fantastic chord progression. The kind of thing you would just see in a jazz standard or a Jerome Curntune or a Harold Arlington, it's got a kind of show tune quality to it. It's the kind of chord progression that, while very common in that kind of music, I just wish that we heard more chord progressions like that in modern pop music instead of just the one, the four, the five, maybe the six minor, if you're lucky. There's so much more harmony out there that can sound really great. And what's so cool about this turnaround is that right here when Bowie is at his most theatrical, his most songbooky, he's setting up a transition to the exact opposite. This soaring chord progression is he calls out to the children and tells them to boogey. This section driven by that boogey, boogey electric guitar with Ronson's guitar playing the lead on top. This section rules and it's the most iconic part of this song, but I think it's the transition from the end of the chorus with that grand old chord progression into this section which is just four, one, five, with the most straightforward rock guitar part going in the electric guitar and the acoustic guitar in the left and right channels. We go from this soaring longing melody as the starman looks down on earth to the children boogey down on earth with this just straightforward glam strut. That transition is this song's secret weapon, the way they grandly set it up and then instead of resolving to one, they land right on the four chord and get down. It exemplifies that mix of theatricality and rock and roll that makes David Bowie's music so great. There's actually not much more to this song after this, they just do the whole thing again. This is one of those examples of a song where they do something really great and then they say you know what would be good, I think we should just do the whole thing all over again. So that's what they do. They go through another verse, the verse still has that same groove, still sounds nice, the starman still getting in touch with the kids, then they transition into another lovely chorus. Bowie's vocals soar alongside the strings through that lush songbook turn around yet again, though this time it's actually setting up a reprise of the chorus so they just do the whole chorus again. And then with one final grand turn around, it's time to let the children boogie all the way home. The Starman's message of peace and rock and roll has been delivered, so it's time for him to sing along. There are a lot of theories about what Starman is about, but here's one for you. In 1969, Major Tom launched into space and he became lost. He stepped out of his capsule and he floated away. But here's the thing, Major Tom didn't die. He hitched a ride on a starship and sailed the galaxy. After three years of interstellar adventure and a few guitar lessons, he returned to us as Z starred us with a message of love and rock and roll. And thus the rise and fall of Ziggy starred us. Like Space Audity, Starman ends with a fade to nothingness, but it's a very different kind of fade. Instead of a lone man floating off to oblivion, a group of dancing young people led by a benevolence starman joyously bogees into infinity. And that'll do it for my analysis of David Bowie's Space Audity and Starman. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope you're as excited as I am for your three of strong songs. If you did enjoy this episode, I hope you'll consider going over to patreon.com/strongsongs and becoming a patron of this show. I make strong songs entirely by myself. I put a ton of work into every episode and it means a lot to me to be entirely listener supported so thanks so much to all of my patrons. Of course you can also support strong songs by buying some merch from the new Strongsongs store. There's a link for that down in the show notes and you can also just spread the words. If you know anybody who you think might like this show, please tell them about it. You can find links for all my social stuff, Twitter, Instagram, as well as my newsletter, which I'm about to send a new newsletter for 2021, all down in the show notes as well. The new Strongsongs year three theme music featured a killer horn section with BJ Cord on trumpet, Kyle Molotor on trombone, and Carlos Eene, known online as Insane in the Rain, on Barry Sax. You've heard outro solos from BJ and Kyle in previous years, but Carlos had never recorded one so while he was recording his Barry part I asked if he would want to record a outro solo as well. He was up for it and he totally killed it. So stick around for a Barry Sax solo from Carlos Insane in the Rain, Eene, and I'll see all of you in two weeks with yet another Strongsongs. [Music] [Music]