Leah Kardos covers “Sunday” and Bowie and 9/11

Bowie’s album, “Heathen,” widely considered one of his best later works, was released in June, 2002. In part due to the timing, and in larger part due to the mood and even lyrics of some of the album’s songs, many thought of the album as an artistic response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It was not— the seeming relevance was coincidental. That said, Bowie managed to capture the sense of the time that the world had begun a transformation for the worse. We couldn’t yet tell how the world was changing, but we had a sense of dread about it.

As is often the case with Bowie’s lyrics, the words to many of the songs off “Heathen” didn’t make literal sense but seemed to apply to the time. This is the case for, “Sunday” — “Nothing remains, we could run when the rain slows, look for the cars or signs of life, where the heat goes…” Yeh, its easy to see these words as Bowie describing the immediate circumstances on the ground after the attacks in Manhattan, where, after all, he lived at the time. What else could he have been thinking about? But Bowie insisted her wrote the song prior to 9/11.

Other lyrics from the song had a long tail— he named what I believe to be the last compilation album released during his lifetime as, “Nothing has Changed,” from the lines in this song, “Nothing has changed, and everything has changed.” The implication Bowie was implying toward himself is that the span of his career had both consistency and constant rebirth, as if the cycle of birth, death and rebirth itself was what not changing even if each moment along the cycle is different than what came before and after. If he could apply the sentiment to his own career retrospective, an even more overt application is to the ways of the world.

Beyond the lyrics, the mood of “Sunday’s” music is somber and ominous. Surely the music met the moment.

I’ll mention here that Bowie’s next album, “Reality,” or at least one of its songs, “New Killer Star” was more overtly (and actually) influenced by the post-9/11 world. The opening lines, “See the great white scar over Battery Park” are fairly obvious, though the larger meaning of the complete song are characteristically opaque. Bowie also participated in the “Concert for New York,” during which he performed excellent renditions of both, “Heroes,” and Simon and Garfunkel’s, “America.”

Finally, I should acknowledge that this video is not of Bowie singing, “Sunday,” but an excellent cover by Leah Kardos, whose past appearances in this blog have been in the form of her own analyses of some of Bowie’s later songs. She appears to be a woman of many talents.