I’m not exactly sure when and how it is supposed to have been used, but there’s an official playlist celebrating the coronation of King Charles, and “Let’s Dance” is on the list. This is a pretty vivid video of Bowie performing the song at the 2002 Glastonbury festival, which I thought was fitting because it is in England. I watched…

Linda Lewis made a significant contribution to one of my very favorite songs, but before I saw that she passed away on May 3rd at the age of 72, I didn’t know her name. Lewis was one of the backing vocalists on Aladdin Sane, and her five-octave voice was especially distinctive on “Panic in Detroit.” As I write this, I’m…

Someone with more time (and more musical talent) than me came up with this combination of “Space Oddity” and a Billie Eilish song called, “I Love You.” The Eilish song is probably famous, but I’m not familiar with her works beyond the theme song to No Time to Die. That said, she has a beautiful, haunting voice and this mash-up…

OK, here’s the Bowie connection: “Star Wars actor Mark Hamill revealed a connection between the original 1977 movie and David Bowie. Hamill related a ‘fun fact’ tweet, noting that he'd gone inside a papier-mache creature on the set in 1976, and discovered that one of the newspapers from which the prop had been built carried a review of a Bowie…

I’m not a huge Def Leppard fan, but neither do I find the band to be offensive. The one of their songs I think of is “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” This song, “Rocket,” sounds a lot like that one, at least to my ears. BUT, the song is all about the band’s influences from the early 70s and late…

Ted: Wait, let me guess, Piggy Stardust. Coach Beard: Rashers to rashers, oink to oinky. Ted: I love it. I of course got it immediately and said, “Piggy Stardust” along with Ted in real time. More evidence that Bowie has become a cultural phenomena. Quote from Season 3, Episode 6 - “Sunflowers”

I heard several intriguing Bowie covers this week including “Space Oddity” by Don’t You Overthink?, “Absolute Beginners” by Steve Harley and “Fame” by Infectious Groove, but my selection for cover of the week is one of my favorite songs, “Hallo Spaceboy,” by Dennis Graumann. Like most of the artists who end up with a “cover of the week,” I was…

In a strange way it was fortuitous that the original link I used for this song during my 2016 song-a-day tribute stopped working because Picasso died 50 years ago this month. That coincidence is just about the only thing this song actually has to do with the actual Picasso. Well, that’s not true— the song touches on some of his…

Moonage Daydream, the acclaimed documentary by filmmaker Brett Morgan is in the news because it is becoming available by streaming on HBO Max. It was snubbed at the Academy Awards but it received plenty of other awards and near-universal praise from critics. I watched it when it first became available on DVD, a few months ago and thought this was…

Rolling Stone has become as much an online publication as a physical magazine, if not more, and like many such publications, it likes its lists. A recent one listed the 50 worst decisions in rock history. Most lists that have anything to do with rock music includes something about David Bowie, and this was no exception. Coming it at #…

This video is very similar to yesterday’s with a few exceptions. I might have skipped it except I was actually at this concert, which turned out to be the final Bowie concert I would ever attend. The video itself and Bowie’s performance are both a little smoother than yesterday’s. The song selection is very similar to yesterday’s but there are…

Singer and civil rights leader Harry Belafonte has died at the age of 96. There’s not much of a Bowie connection, but I was able to find this picture of them both attending an event honoring Susan Sarandon at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Tim Robbins stands between Bowie and Sarandon. Belafonte and Sarandon did some work together on…

This is another concert video that popped up in my YouTube feed. An obvious bootleg, the sound quality is pretty good though there a few interruptions in the recording. There’s an argument that this phase of Bowie’s touring career— his last— was his best, because he performed songs from throughout his career to that point. Though at this stage he…

I am not especially drawn to reggae music. Bowie’s main experiment with the genre was with Tonight, the album that is probably least popular among fans (which, in fairness, is not a reggae album, thought some of the songs are influenced by reggae). I also was not familiar with the East Star All-Stars before this album, though I have learned…

I usually like to select a new video by a lesser known performer for the cover of the week, but this appears to be an older cover by an established band. Nonetheless, it was recently posted to YouTube, so that gives me an excuse. Several of the other recently posted covers this week are faithful renditions of songs such as…

This should be funnier than it actually is. I never saw the show, Flight of the Conchords, but apparently an episode in 2007 had something to do with David Bowie. Part of the episode was the eponymous band performing this song, which parodies Bowie’s voice, some of his lyrics as well as some of his looks. Specifically, most of this…

I was so delighted to have finally found Bowie’s version of this song in a form I could post, which I did yesterday, that I thought I’d post the original today. It’s pretty similar. Has there ever been a band that looked as ridiculous as Sigue Sigue Sputnik? They make Ziggy Stardust look like a back-suited Beatle. I have to…

This song is something of a phantom, at least for me. I am telling you, I purchased a download of this song many years ago…yet it vanished. And then I couldn’t find it anywhere. In 2016, when I was doing my song a day tribute, I couldn’t find this song on YouTube. I didn’t even know where it came from—…

I haven’t previously heard this mix of “Fame,” but I’m really posting to to give me an excuse to write about a weird obsession of my local newspaper, Albany’s Times Union. A terrible accident happened back in 2018 in which a poorly maintained limousine crashed, killing 20 people. The incident occurred in Schoharie County, which is a rural county outside…

Bowie albums tend to get a flurry of retrospective media coverage when they reach an anniversary that ends in “0.” This year, I’ve seen such retrospectives for the 50th anniversary of Pin Ups and Aladdin Sane, the 40th for Let’s Dance, the 30th for Black Tie White Noise and the 10th for The Next Day. I expect to see something…

This has all the makings of the type of Bowie cover I really like— a real but unknown (to me) band putting its own take on a relatively obscure Bowie song. This cover is off Leger’s presumably new album, Latent Uncovers. I’ve always liked, “Janine,” which is off of Space Oddity. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it outside the…

From time to time older video links stop working in some of my blog posts, so I use the occasion to update my comments, which is the case here. The sad thing is that the official video is pretty creative and is still very much alive on YouTube, but I can’t get the link to work. If you haven’t seen…

The Music Masters Collective in the Catskills is doing a “Camp Stardust”— immersive Bowie experience in a camp-like setting this summer for four days in July. The David Bowie World Fan Convention will take place in New York City in June. The Southbank Center in England is currently running an exhibit celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Aladdin Sane and its…

Oddly enough, the first thing I feel compelled to clarify is that this double live album is not a recording of a Bowie concert in Buffalo. The reason I’m starting with that is that the album cover explains that it is a recording of “The 96.9 Buffalo, NY Sound and Vision Broadcast, 1990.” And so it is. It’s a recording…

This is another clip of Bowie performing on a talk show. Yesterday I had him on Dinah Shore in 1976. This one is from fur years later when he was promoting Scary Monsters on The Tonight Show. He delivers two strong performances, of “Life on Mars” and “Ashes to Ashes.” Johnny Carson characterizes both of the songs as being about…

Bowie’s Christmas duet with Bing Crosby has become famous, in part because it became one of the Christmas songs that gets played every year, but also because it’s such an odd pairing. In one sense, it must have seemed stranger back in 1979 when it happened— Crosby was not just at the very end of his long career and life…

This is a link to a documentary of sorts about what Bowie was doing in 1980. It focuses on his stint on Broadway in The Elephant Man, but it also covers Scary Monsters, which Bowie released that same year. It’s a pretty interesting moment in time. Bowie would go on to act in several movies but never again on Broadway,…

This is a special one. What you have here is the daughter of David Bowie and Iman singing “Starman” and “Life on Mars.” She’s singing along to recorded music, karaoke style. She’s apparently reading the words (though she’s obviously familiar with them) and she screws up a few times, but she can sing for sure. She has a nice voice.…

OK, so I wanted to post something related to Easter. So, “Lazarus…” also came back from the dead…even though the song doesn’t really seem to be about the Biblical Lazarus…and Easter isn’t about Lazarus…OK, ok. Do you have a better idea??? In looking for a version of “Lazarus” that I haven’t previously posted, I cam across this one by Puddles…

I don’t know anything about DoM, but what he (he?) did was take Bowie’s vocals from “Suffragette City” and placed them over the music from “Psycho Killer.” He had to have made other adjustments because the marriage between words and music is perfect to the point that it’s slightly disturbing. So, whoever DoM is, he is the third artist here.…

I went to my first Bowie concert in 1987– when the Glass Spider tour came to Toronto. It was from that’s point on that I became a fan. Around that time, the way we listened to music was changing from records and tapes to CDs. By the late 80s, RCA had attempted to release Bowie’s back catalogue on CD, but…

What possible connection could David Bowie have with Donald Trump? Why would Newsweek superimpose Bowie’s face into a picture of the former president as part of its coverage of Trump’s arraignment in New York? The reason, it turns out, is that Trump appears to be a Bowie fan. Or at least his event organizers are. And Bowie’s son, filmmaker Duncan…