David Bowie: rock's major chameleon sheds his skin like never before

INGRID SISCHY: What struck me immediately about your new album, Heathen [ISO/ Columbia], is that, unlike so many of your records, it doesn't seem to be pointing either forwards to the future, or backwards to the past.

DAVID BOWIE: That's true. I went in with the idea of creating a personal, cultural restoration. I wanted to capture everything--all the ideas, all the techniques that I've used over the years--while working within this prism called the zeitgeist. In the process, I wanted to create a timeless piece that didn't owe to the past, present or future, but just floated in its own autonomous kind of place.

IS: That's a strategy that contrasts sharply with a lot of what's going on in music right now, which is formula, formula, formula. It's a really anti-experimental period--a lot of records are coming out by people who sound as if they're running scared.

DB: I was particularly conscious of not being controlled by what's happening in the music industry. How music can be downloaded, and how that will affect the future of everything, was starting to take precedence over the music itself. I really needed to remove myself from all of that if I was going to write clearly and cleanly. I didn't want to know about new techniques or old techniques or anything; I just wanted to reestablish myself as a writer and a putter-together of sounds. The breakthrough came for me in the spring of last year. I'd assembled a lot of music that I really liked, almost 40 pieces, maybe even more. They were just sort of motifs; they weren't finished, established pieces of work. But I get to a point often, when I'm writing like that, that I know where it should go, so I can stop work on it. I think, Ah, I've cracked this; I know what this should do. And I don't have to finish it off right then. And so I move on to another sketch. So I was sent up to Shokan, which is just outside of Woodst ock [New York], up a mountain to a house called Glen Tonche that'd recently been converted to a recording studio. It was almost an epiphany that I had. Walking through the door, everything that my album should be about was galvanized for me into one focal point. Even though I couldn't express it in words right that second, I knew what the lyrics were already. They were all suddenly accumulated in my mind. It was an on-the-road-to-Damascus type of experience, you know? It was almost like my feet were lifted off the ground.

IS: Wow. I have two questions. You said you were sent up. Who sent you?

DB: A musician who actually worked on this album. His name is David Torn, and he's a very skilled and wonderful guitar player who also lives very near Woodstock. He'd been working in that studio only a few weeks before, and he said, "David, you must go and see this new place." He said the atmosphere is unlike any other studio that he'd ever been to.

IS: Can you capture what it is that makes it so evocative?

DB: Well, firstly I think a mountain retreat immediately creates a certain kind of atmosphere. It was an estate originally built by an industrialist in the '20s as a summer home for his family, and he'd obviously knocked around a lot with nautical types, because the whole place has a kind of yacht feel that you get from Eisenhower-era yachts--those very American but aristocratic pieces of work. The whole thing is wood, with great, vast main rooms, and the grounds are full of deer, pigs and bears. The dining room that we ended up using as our studio has 40-foot tall ceilings, with 25-foot windows that look out over a reservoir and the mountains.

IS: When you told me you were recording in the Woodstock area, I was surprised. I've never thought of you as an arcadian type.

DB: Well, you're right, I've never been a fan of the whole Woodstock thing. I'm not a nostalgic person at all, and I'm not very good at being laid-back--it kind of scares me, so I usually record in cities with lots of clash like Berlin, New York or Tokyo.

IS: Are you normally so atmospherically influenced?

DB: Oh, tremendously. I mean, I went into Woodstock once, and I hated it; it was just too cute for words. This is not cute, on top of this mountain: It's stark, and it has a spartan quality about it. In this instance, the retreat atmosphere honed my thoughts.

IS: How?

DB: It enabled me to realize that probably my greatest strength as a writer is an ability to capture transitory, nagging fear. I don't do political worldview very well, but I'm good at capturing ephemeral pockets of doubt and underlying anxiety. I know how good this album is--it's an incredibly successful album for me, creatively. I wouldn't change a note of it. I really adore it. And it's given me an unbelievably buoyant kind of confidence about what I am as a writer. And I almost feel that I will be writing some of my very best work over the next few years. I don't know what happened up there, but something clicked for me as a writer.

IS: Let's go back to the mountains and what they might represent for you.