‘hours…’: A Track-By-Track Guide To Every Song On David Bowie’s Time-Bending Album

Something In The Air

Although the brooding Something In The Air was, according to ‘hours…’ guitarist, co-producer and co-writer Reeves Gabrels, a take on “a lost relationship viewed in the rear-view mirror”, there’s plenty more to draw from the song, which introduces something of a spot-the-reference parlour-game aspect to the album. Despite maudlin lyrics (“There’s something in the air/Something in my eye/I’ve danced with you too long”), the song’s chorus includes traces of All The Young Dudes’ rousing chord progression, while its outro lifts directly from I’m The One, a song by Annette Peacock, the avant-jazz singer who, back in 1972, had introduced Bowie to his longtime pianist Mike Garson. Few songs capture so tragically a heartrending breakdown in communication between two people. “Don’t look me in the eye,” a bruised Bowie sings. “We lay in each other’s arms/But the room is an empty space/I guess we lived it out.”

Survive

Having sung, in Something In The Air, of being unable to avoid “the clash, the big mistake” in a relationship, Bowie shifts perspective in Survive, addressing a lost love as “the great mistake I never made”. He would later allow that the song was informed by “a time in my life when I was desperately in love with a girl”, but, during an intimate performance for the BBC, in June 2000, he averred: “It’s not really a girl, it’s a state of mind.” Taken either way, the song is a paean to resilience from an elder statesman still committed to his own unique quest: “Where’s the morning in my life?/Where’s the sense in staying right?/Who said time is on my side?” he sings. Bowie’s 12-string guitar recalls the folk-rock leanings of his self-titled second album; listen close and you’ll also hear Bowie’s characteristically rasping saxophone, plus nods to the Morse code guitar motif that signalled Starman’s arrival.

If I’m Dreaming My Life

Lurching back and forth between somnambulant meander and urgent pacing, If I’m Dreaming My Life was a last-minute addition to ‘hours…’, worked up during overdubbing sessions, after Bowie and his band had decamped to Philip Glass’ Looking Glass Studios, in New York City. As if surveying the three-plus decades that lay between his younger self, who’d recorded a song called When I Live My Dream for his 1967 debut album, and the globe-straddling artist whose career had led to places that would have been mere fantasy for most, Bowie seems to wonder how much of it has been real, his lyrics slipping between worlds as the song’s shifting time signatures undulate beneath him.

Seven

In discussion with Uncut magazine, Bowie described Seven as a “real hippy-dippy” number “right out of the 60s”. Yet though the song initially seems to suggest as much, it builds gradually from Bowie’s 12-string strumming to incorporate layered vocals, delicately placed synths and weeping slide guitar, becoming a poignant meditation on living in the moment, free from naïve idealism. “The gods forgot they made me/So I forgot them, too” Bowie sings, as if refuting fate, destiny or any other notions of pre-ordained paths. “I listen to the shadows/I play among their graves.” Mortality courses through much of ‘hours…’, yet Bowie was in no mood to worry over ticking clocks. “I’m very happy to deal and only deal with the existing 24 hours I’m going through,” he told Q magazine in late 1999. “The present is really the place to be.”

What’s Really Happening?

An enthusiastic collaborator throughout his career – his long list of musical co-conspirators includes guitarist Mick Ronson, sonic innovator Brian Eno and Chic architect Nile Rodgers – Bowie invited, via a competition on his BowieNet website, songwriters of any experience to submit lyrics for the final version of What’s Really Happening? Twenty-year-old Ohio native Alex Grant emerged victorious, and he and his friend Larry Tressler even joined Bowie in the recording studio, laying down backing vocals during a session filmed on a 360-degree camera for a groundbreaking experiment in livestreaming. The result was a churning alt-rock number described in an ‘hours…’ press release as “the first true cyber-song”

The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell

Having eulogised the “pretty things” on the Hunky Dory song Oh! You Pretty Things, Bowie thrashes out some end-of-millennium angst on the most muscular ‘hours…’ cut, The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell. Where his young charges were once harbingers of youthful promise, time, in keeping with the generational outlook maintained throughout the album, appears to have caught up with them: “You’re still breathing but you don’t know why,” he sings. “Life’s a bit and sometimes you die.”

“That was really dangling a carrot, wasn’t it?” Bowie told Q magazine, knowing that the song’s title would have fans riffling through his past to make further connections, not least between his psych-rock favourites The Pretty Things and proto-punk pioneers The Stooges, whose song Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell appeared on the Bowie-produced Raw Power album. Add a glammy stomp and lyrics such as “I found the secrets, I found gold/I find you out before you grow old”, and Bowie all but insists that listeners hear in The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell a firm goodbye to his early-70s personae.

New Angels Of Promise

If the pretty things are doomed, what can the “new angels of promise” bring? Where Bowie was, on that previous track, “reaching the very edge”, here he implores the celestial beings to “take us to the edge of time” on an album whose title alone acknowledges that there is a finite amount of it left. Across a doomy landscape – and with vocal inflections – that evoke the “Heroes”-era classic Sons Of The Silent Age, the man who shared a birthday with Elvis Presley also sings of “suspicious minds” gathered in a “lonely crowd” through which these angels move, their intent unclear beyond an inscrutable declaration: “It’s always time.”

Brilliant Adventure

A clear cousin to the “Heroes” instrumentals Sense Of Doubt and – with Bowie reprising the sound of the Japanese koto on synth – Moss Garden, Brilliant Adventure clocks in at just under two minutes, but its effect is lasting. Later lending its name to the Brilliant Adventures (1992-2001) box set, the tune acknowledges the inspired creative run that Bowie embarked on during his “Berlin period”, while also sounding a note of optimism for further excursions to come.

The Dreamers

Named after the fictional band that Bowie, Gabrels and bassist Gail Ann Dorsey played in the Omikron video game, from which eight if the ‘hours…’ songs were developed, The Dreamers brings the album to an ambiguous close: is it despair or hope that Bowie channels while singing of his “searcher/A lonely soul/The last of the dreamers”? Could that searcher even be Bowie himself, the avowed outsider, devoting what time he has left to unravelling life’s mysteries? Singing in one of his richest vocal registers, Bowie reaches for grandeur on a track whose electronic soundbed paves the way for a soaring guitar solo from Gabrels, while Bowie’s repeated backing vocals – “So it goes” – suggest that searching for absolutes is a fool’s errand. Eventually, all that’s left is the sound of windchimes tinkling in the breeze, as if all answers are floating, tantalisingly, out of reach.

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