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Travis: David Bowie’s 26th and final studio album was released on January 8, 2016, two days before the singer/songwriter/polymath icon’s death following an 18-month battle with liver cancer. The album’s producer and one of Bowie’s closest collaborators, Tony Visconti, told The Verge after Bowie’s death, “He made Blackstar for us, his parting gift. I knew for a year this was the way it would be. I wasn’t, however, prepared for it.”

The album was conceived and completed in periods of remission over the final year of Bowie’s life with a group of musicians he’d never recorded with, the Donny McCaslin band, a jazz quartet from New York’s downtown scene. 

In an interview with The Guardian, Visconti added, “There were days he couldn’t come in. But when he got in front of the microphone, he sang his balls off. I’ve never seen him happier.”

Obviously Bowie’s death casts a long shadow over this album, a definitive final statement from one of the most important artists—not musicians, ARTISTS—of the past century. The music, a sort of post-punk jazz with hints of many of the different sounds Bowie played with throughout his career from European cabaret music to 90s electronica, is often dark, sometimes impenetrable. The lyrics make reference to his illness, his pain, his past, resurrection, and the supernatural. But, listening to it again obsessively over the past couple of months in preparation for this discussion after a few years without hearing it all the way through—I was obsessed when it came out—yes, it makes me sad, but it’s also powerfully life-affirming. He may have gone out earlier than expected, but he went out on his own terms, making the art he wanted to make. And, like Visconti said, he sang his balls off.

I was familiar with Blackstar; it was one of my favorite albums of 2016. So for me, delving into it again was an easy pleasure. I can remember those initial listens though finding the music and the mood intimidating. As a newcomer to the album, what were your first impressions, Tyler?

Tyler: Bowie’s haunting, wordless “Ahh-ahh-ahh” in the title track, that struck me.  It took some time before I felt ready to engage with the album beyond that song—the eerie warmth of that vocal bridge playing some role in my worry—given its association with the artist’s death.  I made it through a couple of times but then set it aside for a spell.

When I returned to it?  Now, then I became enthralled.  The second track, “’Tis A Pity She Was A Whore,” started revealing itself as darkly hilarious—I hope I’m getting that right, anyway.  Then, the hookier songs—“Girl Loves Me” especially, that immortal universal “Where the fuck did Monday go?” line and delivery striking me as brilliant—paired with the more amorphous work, like, say, “Lazarus.”  I like bizarre and unpredictable music as much as I ever have, and the lithe experimentation throughout Blackstar caught my fancy hard.

Travis: That opener, the title track, with its length and its cycling through different movements and its lyrical complexity and obtuseness, going from occult themes to tossed off jokes playing on the names of iconic rap groups (Mos Def and Talib Kweli’s Black Star, Guru and Premier’s Gang Starr), would be the epic closer on a lot of albums, I think. It’s ballsy of Bowie to put it first. A listener’s first impression of the album is this strange piece with those haunting vocals you mention, the skittering drums, the sax going wild all over the place, and it goes for ten minutes. 

It also opens up some of the themes the lyrics tend to repeat. That mix between high and low culture, referencing a solitary candle in a Scandinavian village as a symbol of knowledge among ignorance right beside the aforementioned pop culture ephemera. People could (and some probably have) written theses on the folding and looping lyrical references not even on the whole album but just this song. 

I don’t know if you watched the music video, but it has a lot of gnostic imagery and references to his own impending doom, as well as the deaths of his most famous past personae (Major Tom, Ziggy, the Thin White Duke). There was always another persona, another mask to take its place, but now its just him, and he’s dying, and ready to make room for others to create. I fucking love this shit.

The title track and “Lazarus” are my favorites from the album and I kind of assumed they would be the standouts for anyone who listened. I’m excited that “‘Tis a Pity She Was a Whore” and “Girl Loves Me” stuck out to you instead. This album has a lot of riches that reveal themselves to different listeners in different ways, it seems.

Tyler: I dig the twofer of “Dollar Days” and closer “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” as well, not least because the latter track somehow leaves us with that sense of affirmation that you mention.  It’s a gentle song about facing the end.

Travis: Yeah, those ending songs are probably the prettiest on the album and the lyrics match the poignance of the music. The harmonica bit in “I Can’t Give Everything Away” is the same melody as “A New Career in a New Town,” one of the instrumentals on Low (which, incidentally, was also produced by Visconti, along with the other Berlin albums, Scary Monsters, Young Americans, and The Man Who Sold the World among others). I read the phrase “I can’t give everything away” as that he’s found closure in his death and he wishes he could give that feeling to his fans and loved ones as well. I don’t know if that’s the intent or not but the sentiment feels real.

You’re right, too, about the dark humor of “‘Tis a Pity She Was a Whore.” Bowie wouldn’t make an album without humor. Juxtaposing the lofty composition of the phrase “Tis a pity she was a whore” with lines like “man, she punched me like a dude.” Actual LOL.

Tyler: Love it. 

Travis: And the delivery of the line you mentioned earlier, “Where the fuck did Monday go?” Also hilarious. People have accused me in the past of only liking humorless music. But I think there’s a difference between music being funny and music being a joke, and I love the first and hate the latter.

None of this album would play alongside Wheatus’s “Teenage Dirtbag.”

Tyler: David Bowie was, indeed, pretty fly for a white guy.

Travis: Oh man. The Offspring is a band that exist(ed?).

Tyler: Kind of grotesque that I folded in a reference to them in an article about David Bowie.

Travis: I think he’d approve.

Mix of high and low and all that.

I mean, in “Lazarus” he talks about already being dead, his scars that can’t be seen, and then he drops his cell phone from heaven and says to someone “I was looking for your ass.”

Speaking of, I imagine “Lazarus,” as it was the album’s single, will probably represent Blackstar on future greatest hits compilations. I think it’s a worthy inclusion among the Bowie greats. It’s got a Joy Division-meets-free-jazz feel to it, and Bowie’s vocal is great.

I think at this point the only song we haven’t mentioned, since the album only has seven (it’s a tidy 41 minutes even with the lengthy opener), is “Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime).” The highlight of that one for me is when everything drops out but the fuzzy bass and the drums and we get that distorted walking bassline.

Tyler: You read my mind.  Am I mistaken or is “Sue” a murder ballad?

I’m a big fan of “I kissed your face…I touched your faaace,” another vocal riff that’s compelling and spooky.

Travis: “Sue” does have murder ballad vibes. It and “‘Tis a Pity” feel of a piece in that they are the songs that don’t feel directly self-referential or about Bowie’s own mortality. I wonder if he had them lying around as lyrics before he got sick.

Or maybe even full songs.

Anything you want to point out that we’ve missed thus far?

Tyler: It just astonishes me, the perfect grace of his goodbye.  Two days before he died!

Travis: Yeah, it’s crazy. He was always one of the most media-literate rock stars, with a very carefully curated public persona (or many very carefully curated public personae). It’s almost like he managed to orchestrate his exit from the world just as elegantly as he did his stylistic shifts from glam rock to plastic soul to the entirely alien stuff he was doing with the Berlin albums and Station to Station and Scary Monsters to making a straight-up glossy pop album with Let’s Dance. He went out on one of the weirdest (and one of the best, in my opinion) albums in his discography after like ten albums ranging from “eh, a few decent songs for completists” to “never play this for me again.”

You know how when a classic rock artist releases a new album that’s slightly better than expected, it’s always “this is the best BLANK album since BLANK”? Like I’m sure someone said about Hackney Diamonds that it’s the best Stones album since Some Girls, even though it’s just kinda there? The album before Blackstar, 2013’s The Next Day, was one of those. We were getting a lot of “the best Bowie album since Let’s Dance” or, for people who like it, Earthling (his 90s alt-rocktronica album, which is okay for what it is). 

That doesn’t work for Blackstar. It’s too damn good.

Tyler: Yeah, there isn’t an excessive or misplaced note, from the elusive opening track to the soothing closing one.  It immensely rewards repeat listening, too.

Travis: I feel like I should try to rank it in the Bowie canon, but I don’t think I can. It’s not as obviously classic as Hunky Dory or Ziggy Stardust or as easy of a listen as something like Young Americans or Let’s Dance. You’ll never hear any of it alongside “Jean Genie” or “Suffragette City” on a classic rock station. It’s a final artistic peak from a genuine visionary, though, and we rarely get those. 

I kind of wonder if, somewhere in those Paisley Park vaults, lies the Prince equivalent. Probably not, since Prince’s death was accidental and unexpected. But I’ve always sort of seen Prince and Bowie as similar artists, makers of truly weird music who nonetheless achieved massive fame and critical and commercial success without compromising themselves. 

I’m trying to think of an artist who went out on such a strong late-career note. Though I’m not nearly as much of a fan, I feel like Dylan might have it in him. Or maybe I’m thinking too much, and Bowie’s truly one of a kind.