PRESS RELEASE: New York, NY–January 8, 2013–In the early morning hours of Tuesday the 8th January, Iso/Columbia Records released a new single by David Bowie titled ‘Where Are We Now?’ exclusively launching in the iTunes Store in 119 countries. David Bowie’s first new album in ten years and his 30th studio recording, THE NEXT DAY is also available as a pre-order on iTunes with a wide release scheduled for March. January the 8th is of course David Bowie’s birthday, a timely moment for such a treasure to appear as if out of nowhere.
Throwing shadows and avoiding the industry treadmill is very David Bowie despite his extraordinary track record that includes album sales in excess of 130 million not to mention his massive contributions in the area of art, fashion, style, sexual exploration and social commentary. It goes without saying that he has sold out stadiums and broken ticket records throughout the world during this most influential of careers.
In recent years radio silence has been broken only by endless speculation, rumor and wishful thinking ….a new record…who would have ever thought it, who’d have ever dreamed it! After all David is the kind of artist who writes and performs what he wants when he wants…when he has something to say as opposed to something to sell. Today he definitely has something to say.
Produced by long term collaborator Tony Visconti, ‘Where Are We Now?’ was written by Bowie, and was recorded in New York. The single is accompanied by a haunting video directed by Tony Oursler which harks back to David’s time in Berlin. He is seen looking in on footage of the auto repair shop beneath the apartment he lived in along with stark images of the city at the time and a lyric constantly raising the question Where Are We Now?
PREVIOUSLY: When Bowie Met Kraftwerk And Blew Madonna’s Mind
PREVIOUSLY: Dan Buskirk’s Review Of THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH Re-Release
PREVIOUSLY: Will Farrell & John C. Reilly ARE Bowie & Bing
Watch the HD version HERE.
RELATED: Yesterday, on his 66th birthday, David Bowie gave us a revelation, as he has so often done. The news that there is a new album – The Next Day – out in March came as a surprise (tinted with delight, bewilderment and relief) to almost everybody. Even unsung-hero collaborator Tony Visconti hadn’t said a word. This has been announced and presented and choreographed with matchless elegance, cool and subtlety. Here is a single. Here is a (so wrong, yet so right) video. They exist. Do what you will with them. Both are understated, both offer new depths with each perusal. The delicately-sung single, ‘Where Are We Now?’, is not “instant”, or flash. It is not a sad by-numbers attempt to recapture old glories. It is very much Bowie, but it is a quivering ghost of a Bowie song, the imprint of his fabulous past gently laid over a forlorn, elegiac yet life-affirming drape of meditations and reveries about missing the old Europe and, possibly, youth. It is becoming of the man, and of the star. And it is becoming obvious that, after all this time, he wouldn’t have let it 
out of the house if he didn’t believe it would add to his body of work and polish his mythology. It is spectral, frail, yearning without chest-beating, candid in its few, clipped phrases and sighs concerning the heart’s filthy lessons. The crooning peacock is now a whispering sage.
It’s been ten years. Seven since a concert. Nobody knew back then that 2003’s pretty-good-if-not-great Reality, which closely followed the underrated Heathen, by turns playful and justly pompous, was going to be the last recorded music contact for a decade. An artless decade, as it turned out. David Bowie was unwell. Heart surgery. A lollipop hitting him in the eye on stage in Oslo, for freak’s sake. Last year on his 65th birthday I wrote that he was by all accounts enjoying relaxing, in New York, with his wife and daughter. He’d said that he missed his son (film director Duncan Jones) growing up, and didn’t want to make the same mistake with his daughter. There was the odd cameo on other people’s albums, but mostly there was an atypical restraint and reclusive hush from the personification of charm. And so rumour upon rumour rushed in to fill the vacuum. Had he (finally) run out of ideas? Was he so vain that he didn’t want the world commenting on his ageing? (The new video is vanity-free: if anything it wilfully amplifies his age). A couple of months ago he was photographed stepping out for a sandwich in Manhattan, resembling Tom Courtenay more than ever, and everybody had an opinion on What This Meant. MORE