The man has done it again! On his 66th birthday and after a decade of silence the reclusive David Bowie, supposedly long since retired after a health scare (and creative burn out?), suddenly and unexpectedly launches a new single, Where Are We Now?, with an album, The Next Day, to follow in March. How Bowie managed to write and record an album over two years without any rumours leaking to his ever-nostalgic fan base is told in this article. The silence and the surprise are classic Bowie showmanship and enjoyable in their own right but, even better, the single is very good and, according to the producer, Tony Visconti, is the most low-key song on the album. The good news doesn’t stop there. This is no last hurrah. Bowie has reportedly recorded 29 songs and even on the De Luxe edition of the new album there will only be 17 tracks, so at least one more album will follow. As Visconti puts it; “You know, he’s an artist, he can’t sit on his creativity forever. You could tell from the beginning that the songs were stunning even in primitive form. They were obviously things that had built up over the past 10 years, sketches he had all along.”
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