Earthling (stylised as EART HL I NG) is the twenty-first studio album by the English musician David Bowie, released on 3 February 1997 through RCA Records in the United Kingdom, Virgin Records in the United States, and Arista Records/BMG in other territories. Mostly self-produced by Bowie, it was primarily recorded from August to October 1996 at New York City's Looking Glass Studios. Bowie composed the tracks with Reeves Gabrels and Mark Plati, who are credited as co-producers, with Mike Garson, Gail Ann Dorsey and Zack Alford providing overdubs later.
Developing musical styles previously explored on Outside (1995), Earthling showcases an electronica-influenced sound partly inspired by the industrial and drum and bass culture of the 1990s, further exhibiting jungle and techno styles. Lyrically, the tracks express themes of alienation and spirituality. One of them, "I'm Afraid of Americans", was remixed for release as a single by Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor, who appeared in its music video. The artwork depicts Bowie wearing a Union Jack coat co-designed by Alexander McQueen.
Earthling charted better than its predecessor and reached the top ten in several countries. Its accompanying singles featured numerous remixes and were supported with music videos. Bowie promoted the album through television appearances and on the Earthling Tour in 1997. Although the album was mostly received positively on release, later reviews find Earthling lacked innovation in a time when the drum and bass craze was well-established; others consider it a worthwhile addition to an underrated decade for Bowie. It was reissued with bonus tracks in 2004 and remastered in 2021 for inclusion on the box set Brilliant Adventure (1992–2001).
Background and recording
David Bowie supported his 20th studio album Outside on the Outside Tour, which ran from September 1995 to February 1996. The lineup for the tour included Reeves Gabrels (guitars), Mike Garson (piano), Zack Alford (drums), Gail Ann Dorsey (bass), Carlos Alomar (rhythm guitar), George Simms (vocals) and Pete Schwartz (keyboards). A few months after the tour's conclusion, Bowie and the band—minus Simms, Schwartz and Alomar—played a series of festivals during the summer from June to July 1996.
Bowie's positive relationship with the stripped-down lineup was the springboard for his next studio record. He told Alan Yentob in 1996: "They're probably the most enjoyable set of musicians I've worked with. It's the greatest fun and satisfaction I've had with a band since the Spiders." Gabrels later told the biographer Paul Trynka:
In April 1996, Bowie began recording a new track, "Telling Lies", alone at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland; it was the last time he worked at Mountain. The song, which expanded on the jungle and drum and bass rhythms found on the Outside tracks "I'm Deranged" and "We Prick You", made its debut at the summer shows. Speaking with Mojo magazine in March 1997, Bowie stated: "[I] used it as a blueprint of where I wanted the Earthling album to go... We just kept re-moulding it throughout the tour." Also recorded around May was an untitled piece containing the lyric "dead men don't talk" that, like "Telling Lies", pre-dated the Earthling material.
Initial sessions
Recording for Earthling began in August 1996 shortly after the conclusion of the festival dates. For the location, Bowie chose the composer Philip Glass's Looking Glass Studios in New York City. Joining the lineup was the engineer Mark Plati, a New York native who had extensive experience at Looking Glass. 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." Plati and Gabrels were both credited as co-producers, while the former co-wrote several tracks.
Bowie and Gabrels commenced work on Earthling with Plati using demos the two had made on the road. 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." According to Bowie, the trio did not focus on crafting melodies, instead tinkering with the recordings to see which combinations worked and which did not: "Once we developed a kind of mattress, then I would go into the studio and just free-associate against that." Plati was impressed with Bowie's work ethic and recalled that most of his vocal tracks were done in one take. While the sessions were still underway, the band performed four shows on the US East Coast in September 1996, where they premiered "Little Wonder" and "Seven Years in Tibet".
Overdubs 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." Garson was not a fan of the material initially, as he was forced to work with set structures compared to his mostly improvisational role on Outside. For the drum tracks, Alford began by working on his own snare patterns at 120 beats per minute (bpm) which were then sped up to 160 bpm, and afterwards improvised on a real kit against the sampled patterns. 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."
Unlike Outside, the majority of the tracks were written and recorded quickly, with the entire album recorded in about two and a half weeks; Bowie at one point stated it was recorded in eight days. In addition to revamped versions of "Telling Lies" and the Outside outtake "I'm Afraid of Americans", seven new tracks appeared on the final album. Outtakes from the sessions included remakes of the Tin Machine tracks "Baby Universal", which was played on stage earlier in the year, and "I Can't Read", which was replaced by "The Last Thing You Should Do". According to O'Leary, Earthling was initially envisioned as an EP of new tracks sequenced with the remakes and covers, but by the end of the sessions, there was enough material for a full-length album of new content.
Music and lyrics
Compared to the nineteen pieces found on Outside, Earthling contains only nine tracks. Additionally, Bowie stated that he found Earthling "primitive" in contrast to the complexity of its predecessor. 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. While reviewers generally consider Earthling Bowie's "drum and bass album", the biographer Marc Spitz argues that "it's simply [a] case of a veteran artist pursuing a sound with which he or she has fallen in love." Buckley agrees, further noting that only three or four tracks contain a drum and bass element. Plati later contested:
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". Other reviewers have noted the presence of industrial rock, electronica, hard rock and alternative dance. The author James E. Perone found an emphasis on techno and jungle and deems Earthling more musically accessible than its predecessor, partially aided by "strong melodic hooks" throughout. Bowie initially compared the album's aggressive sound to 1980's Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). 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.
Songs "Little Wonder" was one of the first tracks Bowie and Gabrels wrote for the album. Bowie called writing the track a "ridiculous" exercise in pure stream of consciousness: "I just picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and made a line for each of the dwarves' names. And that's the song [laughs]. And then I ran out of dwarves' names, so there's new dwarves in it like 'Stinky'." Originally set to be a "nine-minute jungle electronic epic", the song was trimmed to six minutes for the album. Described by O'Leary as a combination of arena rock and electronica, it utilises percussion and power chords from the Prodigy's "Firestarter", a 1996 UK number one that assisted in bringing drum and bass rhythms to the mainstream.
"Looking for Satellites" was the second track recorded for the album. In an interview with Mojo, Bowie described the track as "A straight, rational piece about where we find ourselves at this particular point in this era: somewhere between religion and technology, and not quite sure where to go next. It's kind of a poignant feeling, standing alone on a beach at night looking for a satellite... but what you're really looking for is an answer." It features various cut-up lyrics that were influenced by the then-recent discovery of the possibility of life on Mars. Bowie considered the lyrics "measuring the distance between the crucifixion and flying saucers". The atmosphere is said by Pegg to contain "wistful uncertainty". Gabrels' guitar solo, pieced together from multiple takes, was added in the last minute at Bowie's insistence.
According to Plati, "Battle for Britain (The Letter)" was an "attempt to do a jazz-tinged jungle track". He believed the song brought focus to the album, wherein the structures would resemble "actual songs [instead of] intense atmospheres". Characterised by various loops and distortion, the lyrics discuss Bowie's uncertainty about his own British identity, as he had not lived in the UK for two decades. The music combines techno and the alternative rock of Tin Machine, with vocal melodies and harmonies reminiscent of, in Perone's words, "a 1966 or 1967 British rock band". For the piano solo, Bowie challenged Garson to play a part based on an Igor Stravinsky piece, which he interpreted after hearing it played on a CD.
Inspired by Heinrich Harrer's autobiography of the same name, the lyrics of "Seven Years in Tibet" reflect the Chinese takeover of Tibet. It began as a Gabrels' composition titled "Brussels" and was almost scrapped by Bowie before Gabrels intervened; Bowie later described it as his favourite track on the album. Musically, the song presents a mix of genres such as new wave, grunge and R&B. According to Pegg, it is characterised by saxophone riffs, shrieking guitars, various loops and treated vocals and synthesisers.