Station To Station - David Bowie (1976)

I’m probably as obsessed with Bowie as I am with Dylan and Miles. But I got into David Bowie as an adult, so I don’t have the same background that leads to long-winded infodumps.

Bowie moved to LA in 1975 to shoot a movie and got stuck in the celebrity drug culture that was rampant there at the time (and maybe all the time).

Despite his personal life deteriorating into shambles, he still managed to get a band together and make new material while living in LA.

This record saw a number of new creative strategies. The process of molding and creating things on the fly in the studio, as well as a lot of the musicians he was working with, would form the backbone of the “Berlin Trilogy” that was coming next. Those records were recorded in Europe specifically to get away from the life he’d been leading in LA.

Golden Years was a big hit, but a lot of this record is only really notable for being a stepping stone between Young Americans from shortly before and a string of great records that would follow.