David Bowie: My Favourite Bowie Love Song (That You've Probably Never Heard Of)

Bowie as John Blaylock in the 1983 erotic horror film The Hunger

Playing on my previous theme, I thought I'd share my favourite Bowie love song - one that you've probably never heard of: "So She".

""Heroes"", "Modern Love", and "Miracle Goodnight" are all more famous, or at least more publicised, Bowie love songs.  ""Heroes"" was about the bravery of choosing to love despite the frailty of the human condition.  "Modern Love" was about the new type of love found in a world devoid of spirituality.  "Miracle Goodnight" was written in celebration of his new marriage to Iman earlier that year.  This is just a sampling of a few of Bowie's superb love songs.  So why pick this obscure little diddy that Bowie himself thought was a throwaway track?

"So She" was included on The Next Day Extra material during its release in late 2013.  As Pegg writes, "Tracked on 12 May 2011, with Bowie's lead vocal not recorded until 23 October 2012, the slight but pretty "So She" was relegated to the status of a bonus track."  And O'Leary confirms this in his post, embellishing that, "the core group here was David Torn and Gerry Leonard on guitars, Tony Visconti on bass and Zachary Alford on drums".

Musically, producer Tony Visconti highlighted the song as, "Harmonically it is quite sophisticated for such a short piece." (Pegg, 2016)  Indeed, as Pegg describes:

Opening with a rockabilly guitar which is soon swept away on a sea of drums, keyboards and strings, the song feels more like a hotchpotch of familiar ingredients from the Bowie store cupboard: the lolloping beat takes us back to "Days", while the ambient guitars and layered vocal harmonics are reminiscent of 'hours...', particularly when a hint of the Hawaiian-inflected slide guitar from "Seven" pops its head around the door.  When Bowie sings 'Further out to sea', there's a melodic echo of the opening line of "Space Oddity", a recurring figure in Bowie's work which had earlier resurfaced in "The Motel", "Battle For Britain", and "Something In The Air" among others. (Pegg, 2016)

This is elaborated on by O'Leary, who writes:

...["So She"'s] odd structure is a whirl of feints and altered and swapped roles. A stark rockabilly guitar turns out to be some harsh prep for the song’s main hook, a dancing six-note melody (with leaps of sixth and seventh intervals) carried on keyboard and guitar. The chord progression of the first verse gets reused for the outro, while the second verse nicks the intro’s A major progression. And what seems like a refrain, a bittersweet eight-bar shift to C# minor and F# (“further out to sea…”), turns out to be a bridge: it appears only once, with Bowie singing the title line over the return of the intro hook. 

Paced by acoustic guitar (Bowie, showing yet again he’s an underrated acoustic player) and Visconti’s restless bass, colored by Leonard and Torn’s atmospheres (and the occasional piano dub, like the raindrops of notes starting at 1:57) and a Visconti/Bowie string arrangement that builds from ruminative long-held notes in the bridge to fluttering figures for the title line, “So She” shines for what seems like a moment, then winds down into silence.

And this musical oddity is complemented beautifully with lyrics just as intricate.  As Pegg highlights:

"I am far from the best interpreter of Bowie lyrics," Tony Visconti told the NME in 2013, "but I'll stick my neck out ... 'So She' is a wistfully sung love song.  It kind of makes me feel romantically sad...." Indeed it is.

And it is this wistful quality of "So She" which reminds me of another favourite love song - The Beatles' "For No One" from Revolver.  One one of the finest Beatles tracks, it's also deceptively simplistic in its lyrics.  However, upon a closer examination, both songs are more intricately complex.  Both songs feature a singer whose voice holds a hint of wistful longing - a sense of loneliness interwoven with nostalgia subtly placed between pretty lyrics about the love he experience(d).

In "For No One", McCartney creates an effective framing device where the speaker is the third party in the song about lost love (reminiscent of a previous hit "She Loves You").  He is able to offer an objective perspective on the situation, but even so, the song still feels tender and emotive.  By being the outsider looking in, McCartney is able to contain a sense of longing in the speaker - perhaps relating to a desire to have someone to love himself, despite the tragedy of the failed relationship he sings about.

However, unlike McCartney, the speaker in Bowie's love song is involved in the relationship.  Yet he still imbues the lyrics with the same sense of loneliness and longing.  This is because, as O'Leary wrote regarding a different Bowie love song, "Of course, this being Bowie, the center of the love song winds up being its singer..." Indeed, most of Bowie's love songs seem to offer this twist, where the object of his affections plays second fiddle to how the love and relationship affect the main speaker.  Whether he's confused, besotted, hurt, or any number of emotions one experiences in a relationship, Bowie ultimately conveys in all of his love songs the same theme: how difficult it is to truly communicate with and be understood by another.

This is evidenced in "So She" by the last lyrics, which emphasise the Speaker's feeling of being, "The only one and all alone" rather than the fact that the girl took away this sense of loneliness in the previous line ("Feeling like I'd never been").  Although the elusive "She" offered him a respite from such loneliness, the song ultimately conveys that it's a comfort for a deeper wound rather than a permanent healing.

Bowie also obscures his lyrical context more than McCartney.  In "For No One", the characters described are clearly, but somberly, defined.  The girl wakes up and leaves the abandoned lover at home.  While she's out with others, she describes her relationship as one where "long ago she knew someone but now he's gone/She doesn't need him".  Meanwhile, the abandoned lover stays at home.  While the day continues to pass, his, "mind aches/There will be times when all the things she said will fill [his] head/[He] won't forget her".  While the third party somberly looks on, characterising the state of their crumbling relationship as one wh e, "...in her eyes [he] see[s] nothing/No sign of love behind her tears/Cried for no one/[It's] A love that should have lasted years".

This is in comparison to "So She", in which the relationship between the characters is vague.  Who is the "priceless man" introduced at the beginning who "suffers gloom/so slow"? Why is he characterised by something he is not ("priceless"), rather than something he is? Or is "priceless" here referring to invaluable worth? And why is he suffering gloom? Is this a reference to depression?

And was this priceless man the one who had his "eyes stolen/for her"? If so, why were they stolen in the first place? Did they need to be instead of given to "her"? Or perhaps the lyric is supposed to relate to the cliches of how "someone can steal your heart" combined with "only having eyes for one person"?

If so, who is in love with "She"? The Speaker? The clues to his identity are even fewer.  The song describes the fact that, "[he] would slide away/Further out to sea", and that the inscrutable"She", "saw [him] smile".  However, there is no other concrete grounding for a narrative framework.  And all of this doesn't even mention the even more enigmatic, eponymous "She" character.  Of her characterisation, all we know is that "She saw [the Speaker] smile".

O'Leary offers this interpretation of the song, stating:

There’s a trace of “Slip Away” (“slide away”) and “The Motel” (“the priceless man,” meet “the odorless man”), and echoes of other The Next Day pieces—purloined eyes; lunar eclipses. Mainly it’s the return of “The Loneliest Guy“: the broken lonelyheart figure that Bowie’s played since “Letter to Hermione.” The second verse’s brief lyric—“she saw me smile….feeling like…I’d never been”—offers a happy ending at last: he’s found a love that makes him feel as if he hasn’t been born. Yet the reveal is that she makes him forget, for a moment, what he really is: “the only one and all alone.” And there it ends. Even the title’s a fragment: so she what? We’ll never know, nor will he, apparently.

However, this interpretation seems too straightforward for the loose, fragmented lyrics provided (a la Low album style - "Breaking Glass", or fellow EP "Some Are", anyone?).  For a start, the way Bowie breaks up the lyrics as he sings could indicate what O'Leary interpretation suggests.  He croons "In love" as a separate line from "Feeling like I'd never been".  Therefore, the Speaker has found love with "She".  However, if the lyrics are taken as a whole in the stanza, they contradictorily seem to suggest the reverse.

Instead, it reads as "She saw me smile/Feeling like I'd never been/In love/Feeling like I'd never been/The only one and all alone".  Here, the "She" is looking at the Speaker smiling.  As she does so, the Speaker says he feels like he's never been"the only one and all alone" as well as like he's never been "in love".  Therefore, it doesn't seem like a happy ending is offered.  The Speaker asserts that he feels neither alone nor in love when she looks at him, but he has previously felt lonely and in love.  And in fact, by the hypnotising way the song spirals to a calming fade out combined with the Speaker's lilting words, it's suggested that this senseless state is preferred.

Moreover, the lines, "A sleeping sky/Takes the moon/So slow" give the song a haunting, romantic feeling.  The song takes place during the night, where a lethargic sky slowly overtakes the moon (whether by cloud coverage or by break of day, it's unclear).  It sets the serious moonlit (although not for long) atmosphere for when the Speaker says he's "sliding further out to sea".

Which, speaking of, the line "further out to sea" could be a play on words.  The usual interpretation is that the Speaker is going, or sliding, further out into a body of water.  Perhaps adrift on a boat out at sea.  All of these elements - the sea, sailing, and ships - would be a fair guess, since all of them are included in standard Bowie imagery (see: "Shake It" lyrics, "I feel like a sail boat/Adrift on the sea/It's a brand new day").

As Pegg writes, "The lyric, too, seems like a lucky dip of Bowie tropes: the sky, the moon, the sea, loneliness, isolation, a female figure who arrives like an angel of comfort." (Pegg, 2016)  Thus, this reading further cements that "So She" is a perfect compliment to the main album The Next Day, which uses Bowie's own persona and body of work to create a heavily self-referential mythos in which he, as David Jones, writes and performs his final character: Bowie.

However, this line could also relate to vision instead of a body of water as in "further out to see".  This is supported by the next line, "So she".  Thus, the entirety of the thought would be read as, "I would slide away/Further out to see/Further out to see/So she/She saw me smile".  This would also work in reference to the previous line about eyes being stolen for "She" - vision is wholly consumed by her.

Within the context of referring to standard Bowie tropes, eyes, sight, and vision are all prolifically used.  In Low, (amongst other albums), he uses imagery related to sight to expand upon the relationship between multiple definitions of the word vision.  It can be seen as a sense, as the ability to think about/imagine the future with imagination and wisdom, and/or as an experience of seeing someone/thing in a dream or trance (see: "waiting for the gift of sound and vision").  However, I prefer to take both this interpretation of "see" with the version of "sea" to incorporate both images and layer Bowie's excellent narrative conceits.

This is because it is clear that Bowie's work fares better under a free associative interpretation of his lyrics.  By this, I refer to the act in which one takes all the associated thoughts of the term (as related to its connotative and denotative meanings as well as any imagery, emotions, and other artistic/experiential references that come about) and considers all of these definitions/thoughts equally valid as relating to the true meaning of the word(s).  In this way, the piece is embellished and enriched by the loosely composed lyrics instead of being impoverished.

This method is also a more helpful guideline for interpretation, considering that Bowie used the "cut-up method" when writing his song lyrics for decades.  As he described in a 1982 interview:

[The method] was introduced to me by Burroughs, William Burroughs the American writer, in 1972 when I met him in London. I’d been very interested in his style of writing, which didn’t work on a linear fashion. And it seemed to present the reader with a series of images, although ostensibly unconnected made great sense in the subconscious, and I asked him how he did it. [laughs and impersonates] Well, it’s very simple [aside] looks like a banker, Mr. Burroughs. 

And he just took three statements dealing with the same subject, cut them up, mixed up the words and took out bits and pieces, put them together, and using that strictly as a tool for writing you can take imagery from those lines, and the accidents that are produced, and create some devastating psychological effects that really create an atmospheric condition without actually talking literally about the subject you want to talk about. 

It has, again, that night-time quality where the real meets the unreal, and that’s an aspect of writing I’ve always admired in a lot of authors and pop writers is the ability to keep things on a surreal and real level so they have feet on earth and heads in heaven sort of thing. It’s a twilight state, I think, that one goes for.

Thus, Bowie confirms that most of his writing is meant to force the listener into a "twilight state" where free association reigns supreme just like that in the "dream state".  And "So She" certainly has a dream-like quality to it.

At once wistfully nostalgic and beautifully lonesome, this is why "So She" is my favourite love song.   In a mere 2 minutes and 30 seconds, Bowie establishes not only sophisticated musical harmonies, but he also incorporates his entire backlog of imagery into a terribly romantic piece that, as Pegg writes, "...many an artist would give their right arm to create..."