David Bowie Cover of the Week: Johnny Amish covers “Looking for Water”
There were many strong contenders for “cover of the week” that were posted over the past seven days, but the thing that pushed this one over the top for me was the song selection: Have you ever heard a cover of “Looking for Water” before? Me, neither. Johnny Amish’s simple acoustic version reminds us how good a song it is.
Bowie’s original version of the song, off Reality (2003), was faster-paced, with the music itself, rather than the lyrics, driving the song’s intensity and urgency. Amish’s cover is much less urgent, but in that it’s slowed down, I feel the lyrics sink in: “I lost God in a New York minute; Don’t know about you but my heart’s not in it.” Bowie came up with some depressing, all-hope-is-lost lyrics from the very early days of his career (he wrote, “I’m Tired of My Life” as a teenager), but these words are particularly bleak.
Bowie wrote the song in the post-9/11 context of New York City (where he lived), during the early days of America’s military response. Then, as now, things looked bleak for a reason. As is often the case with Bowie, he identifies the problem without offering a solution. The final line of the song is, “dumb is forever” (which, for years I heard as “Diamonds are forever,” even though there isn’t even a space for the “are”).
Not to go on too much of a tangent, but Bowie responds—if not directly to this song, then to its sentiment—in the final track of his last studio album, “I Can’t Give Everything Away” (2016). One of the lines of hopelessness in “Looking for Water” is, “That look in your eyes that never means never.” It’s answered in the later song with, “saying no but meaning yes, this is all I ever meant.” So, in the end, Bowie relates his negative observations with a positive meaning.
Bowie uses water as a stand-in for both life and death at different times. It’s not his most-used analogy, but both uses come into play (perhaps unexpectedly) in the 1987 song, “Glass Spider,” in which the aforementioned spider’s children cry for their mother because the life-giving “water’s all gone.” But water is also death in the same song, as expressed in the seldom-noticed line, “If your mother don’t love you then the riverbed might.” In the dystopian “Candidate,” futureless lovers buy some drugs, watch a band and jump in the river holding hands. So water can be, not simply death but a mechanism for suicide. It’s all very dim.
Reality was released at a time that it seemed Bowie was pumping out an album every year or two. To my ears, it sounded like a sequel to Heathen, and while I liked it (and still do), I didn’t really experience it either as “the next thing” or the last thing. The A Reality Tour and corresponding live album was kind of a greatest hits retrospective. And then Bowie disappeared and wouldn’t release another studio album for about a decade. So, the album kinda got lost, and “Looking for Water” got lost on the album. At least that’s how I experienced it. So I am grateful to Johnny Amish for breathing some life back into a song that, for me, wasn’t quite forgotten, but maybe hasn’t gotten its due.
As I mentioned, there were some really solid covers that posted this week of “Heroes,” “Starman” and others that I frequently hear. But part of the point of my “cover of the week” is to draw attention to performances that keep Bowie’s music alive and vibrant. This one does that best this week.