Outside Industrial Period

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Lore & Background

Recording for Earthling began in August 1996 shortly after the conclusion of festival dates. Bowie chose the composer Philip Glass's Looking Glass Studios in New York City. Bowie himself mostly self-produced, making it his first self-produced record since Diamond Dogs (1974). He explained: 'I knew exactly what I wanted. We didn't have any time to pull in a co-producer ... so I just sort of went for it.' The album was recorded entirely on hard disk, allowing instruments and vocals to be cut and pasted at random. While Bowie focused on crafting the lyrics, using an improved version of the cut-up computer program used for Outside, Gabrels and Plati focused on the music. Plati recalled: 'We were cranking [songs] out one per day. Reeves would be coming up with guitar parts and sounds, I'd be at the computer recording him or working on the arrangement, and David would be on the couch, writing the lyric. At day's end, he'd do a vocal.'

In Their Own Story

The latter half of the sessions focused on overdubs by Garson, Dorsey and Alford. Their contributions were manipulated through various studio effects, such as sampling, looping and distorting; according to the biographer Chris O'Leary, Alford is heard more through sped-up loops rather than live tracks. Gabrels also utilised a Roland processor on his guitar which allowed for digital manipulation and alteration. He and Bowie used a technique they previously utilised for Outside: transferring bits of guitar to a sampling keyboard and constructing riffs from those pieces. Bowie stated: 'It's real guitar, but constructed in a synthetic way. But Brian Eno got in the way – in the nicest possible way – so we didn't get to that until this album.' Bowie's primary goal during the sessions was to combine elements of the 'technological' and 'organic': 'That's very much how we treat the album. We kept all sampling in-house and created our own soundscape in a way.'

Reader's Guide

Musically, the album showcases an electronica-influenced sound partly inspired by the industrial and drum and bass culture of the 1990s. Bowie had previously explored these styles on Outside, but fully embraced them for Earthling. In a contemporary interview, Bowie said that 'I thought that what we should do was develop our vocabulary of dance forms, but incorporate rock.' He compared the process to his Young Americans album (1975), which combined his European musical background with black soul styles. Characterised by 'rapid-fire bass, hailstorm percussion, flashes of distorted guitar, sampling [and] sudden dramatic pauses', drum and bass rhythms dominate 'Little Wonder', 'Battle for Britain (The Letter)', 'Telling Lies' and 'Dead Man Walking'. Lyrically, Perone describes the album's overall theme as alienation, while Nicholas Pegg says that the lyrics revisit the spiritual themes previously found on Station to Station (1976), a claim supported by Bowie himself.

Did You Know?

• Earthling was recorded in about two and a half weeks; Bowie at one point stated it was recorded in eight days.
• The album was Bowie's first self-produced record since Diamond Dogs (1974).
• Bowie used an improved version of the cut-up computer program used for Outside to craft the lyrics.
• The artwork depicts Bowie wearing a Union Jack coat co-designed by Alexander McQueen.
• One track, 'I'm Afraid of Americans', was remixed for release as a single by Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor, who appeared in its music video.