David Bowie was an observer of human beings with the specific, alert attention of someone who understands that the people around them are the raw material of art. This is not predatory exactly — it is the occupational reality of a certain kind of artist. The world they inhabit is simultaneously lived and witnessed. They are inside the experience and outside it at the same time, noting and cataloging and filing away the thing that is happening to them for later use. Bowie did this with unusual thoroughness and unusual precision. The people who moved through his life — briefly, significantly, peripherally, centrally — had a way of ending up inside his music.
The difference between Bowie and other artists who drew from life was the transformation. He was not a confessional songwriter in the way that the term is usually understood. He did not take a person’s story and present it straightforwardly. He refracted it. He changed the surface while preserving the essential truth. He made portraits that the subject would eventually recognize while the general audience received something else entirely.
1. “Andy Warhol” (1971). The portrait was delivered, famously, to the subject in person. Bowie played the song for Warhol at a meeting at the Factory and Warhol’s response was silence — not appreciative silence, not approving silence. The uncomfortable silence of someone who has received a representation of themselves that is too accurate to be comfortable and too musical to dismiss. Warhol eventually left the room without commenting on the song. Bowie performed it on Hunky Dory and it became one of the album’s most discussed tracks. The two men had a complicated relationship afterward that neither fully explained.
2. “John, I’m Only Dancing” (1972). The people inside this song have been identified by Bowie biographers with confidence. A relationship from his early London years — a person he had known in the specific close way of people who are young and poor and making art together and have not yet learned to protect themselves from each other. The song arrived on the radio and the person it was written about heard it in a context where identifying themselves publicly would have been complicated. They did not identify themselves. The song became a classic. They lived inside it invisibly.
3. “Golden Years” (1975). Written during a period in Bowie’s Los Angeles years when his personal life was as chaotic as his professional life was productive. The song has a specific tenderness in it that his work from this period — dominated by the cocaine paranoia and excess of the Thin White Duke era — does not often contain. The person it was written for has been described by people who were close to Bowie at the time as someone who brought a moment of genuine human warmth into a period of considerable self-destruction. They received the song privately before it was released. Their response has not been reported.
4. “Heroes” (1977). The most celebrated song of his career was sparked by a specific real image — two people kissing at the foot of the Berlin Wall, observed by Bowie from a studio window. The two people were his producer Tony Visconti and a woman who was not his wife. Bowie saw it and the image became the emotional center of a song about love persisting against impossible circumstances. Visconti did not know the song’s specific origin until years later. His response when he finally understood what Bowie had been looking at through the window was, by his own account, complex.
5. “Ashes to Ashes” (1980). The return of Major Tom — the character from “Space Oddity” revisited ten years later — was also a more personal document than it appeared. Bowie has said that the song was partly about addiction, about his own relationship with the specific substances that had defined the 1970s and that he was beginning to move away from. But the people who knew him most closely have described the song as also being about a specific person — someone from the early part of his career who had been a significant presence and who had ended up in a place that mirrored the song’s portrait of isolation and self-destruction. Whether that person recognized themselves is not known. The song is too large now to be anyone’s private property. It belongs to everyone who has ever felt like Major Tom.
Bowie put people in his songs the way certain writers put people in their novels. The people inside the songs lived with it. Some of them are still living with it. Others have gone the way that people go while the songs keep playing.
The songs outlast everyone they came from. That was always the point.