Word on a wing meaning

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«Word on a Wing» is a song written and recorded by English singer-songwriter David Bowie in 1975 for the Station to Station album, where it appears as the closing track of the LP’s first side.

Bowie admits that the song was written out of a coke-addled spiritual despair that he experienced while filming The Man Who Fell to Earth. In 1980 Bowie spoke of the song to NME, claiming «There were days of such psychological terror when making the Roeg film that I nearly started to approach my reborn, born again thing. It was the first time I’d really seriously thought about Christ and God in any depth, and ‘Word on a Wing’ was a protection. It did come as a complete revolt against elements that I found in the film. The passion in the song was genuine… something I needed to produce from within myself to safeguard myself against some of the situations I felt were happening on the film set.»^[1]

During the time of recording this song Bowie began to wear a silver crucifix given to him by his father, stating in NME in 1980 «I wear it, I’m not sure why I wear it now even. But at the time I really needed this».^[1] A Kirlian photograph of this crucifix featured on tour material around the Station to Station album, in art for his 1997 album Earthling, and cover art for «Little Wonder».^[2]

Live versions[edit]

• A live version recorded at Nassau Coliseum, Long Island on 23 March 1976 was first released as a bonus track on the 1991 Rykodisc CD release of Station to Station. The same performance was included on the album Live Nassau Coliseum ’76, which was released as part of the 2010 reissues of the Station to Station album, in the 2016 collection Who Can I Be Now? (1974–1976), and as a stand–alone album in 2017.
• After regular appearances on the Isolar – 1976 Tour, «Word on a Wing» remained under wraps for over twenty years. Bowie revived the song in 1999, initially during his episode of the VH1 Storytellers television music series, when Bowie reaffirmed that the song was a product of «the darkest days of my life… I’m sure it was a call for help,» noting that he spent much of 1975-76 pondering such questions as «Do the dead interest themselves in the affairs of the living?» and «Can I change the channel on my T.V. without using the clicker?»^[3]

Other releases[edit]

• An edit of the song was released as the B-side of the single «Stay» in July 1976. The single version is included on Re:Call 2, part of the Who Can I Be Now? (1974–1976) compilation released in 2016.

Personnel[edit]

• David Bowie – lead vocals, chamberlin
• Warren Peace – percussion, backing vocals
• Roy Bittan – piano, organ
• Earl Slick – lead guitar
• George Murray – bass guitar
• Carlos Alomar – rhythm guitar
• Dennis Davis – drums
• Harry Maslin – synthesizers, vibraphone

References[edit]

Word on a wing

» Word on a Wing » — это песня, написанная и записанная английским певцом и автором песен Дэвидом Боуи в 1975 году для альбома Station to Station , где она появляется как заключительный трек первой стороны пластинки.

Bowie признает , что песня была написана из коксового -addled духовного отчаяния , что он испытал во время съемок фильма Человек , который упал на Землю . В 1980 году Боуи рассказал о песне NME, заявив: «Были дни такого психологического террора, когда я снимал фильм Роуга, что я почти начал приближаться к своему возрожденному, рожденному свыше. Это был первый раз, когда я действительно серьезно подумал о Христе. и Бог в любой глубине, и «Слово на крыле» было защитой. Это действительно явилось полным бунтом против элементов, которые я нашел в фильме. Страсть в песне была подлинной … то, что мне нужно было произвести изнутри себя, чтобы обезопасить себя от некоторых ситуаций, которые, как я чувствовал, происходили на съемочной площадке «.

Во время записи этой песни Боуи начал носить серебряное распятие, которое он продолжал носить. Несмотря на то, что в лирике утверждается, что он «изо всех сил старается вписаться в вашу схему вещей», Боуи, похоже, с подозрением относится к слепой вере в отношении религии, восклицая: «Просто потому, что я верю, это не значит, что я тоже не думаю», не нужно подвергать сомнению все в раю или в аду ». Это подозрение, кажется, противоречит настроениям Боуи во время записи Golden Years, где сказано: «Я полностью верю». Позже Боуи признался, что «был момент, когда я чуть не был втянут в этот узкий взгляд… нахождение креста как спасения человечества в период Роуг».

Живые версии

• Концертная версия, записанная 23 марта 1976 года в Nassau Coliseum, Лонг-Айленд, впервые была выпущена в качестве бонус-трека на компакт-диске » Station to Station» 1991 года, выпущенном Rykodisc . Такое же исполнение было включено в альбом Live Nassau Coliseum ’76 , который был выпущен в рамках переиздания альбома Station to Station 2010 года в сборнике 2016 года Who Can I Be Now? (1974–1976) и как отдельный альбом в 2017 году.
• После регулярных выступлений в туре Isolar — 1976 «Word on a Wing» оставался в секрете более двадцати лет. Боуи возродил песню в 1999 году, первоначально во время своего эпизода музыкального сериала VH1 Storytellers , когда Боуи подтвердил, что песня была продуктом «самых мрачных дней в моей жизни … Я уверен, что это был призыв о помощи, «отмечая, что он провел большую часть 1975-76 гг., размышляя над такими вопросами, как» Интересуют ли мертвые себя делами живых? » и «Могу ли я переключить канал на моем телевизоре без использования кликера?»

Другие релизы

• Редакция песни была выпущена как сторона B сингла » Stay » в июле 1976 года. Версия сингла включена в Re: Call 2 , часть альбома Who Can I Be Now? (1974–1976) сборник выпущен в 2016 году.

Персонал

• Дэвид Боуи — вокал, камердинер
• Уоррен Пис — ударные, бэк-вокал
• Рой Биттан — фортепиано, орган
• Эрл Слик — соло-гитара
• Джордж Мюррей — бас-гитара
• Карлос Аломар — ритм-гитара
• Деннис Дэвис — ударные
• Гарри Маслин — синтезаторы, вибрафон

Рекомендации

Word On a Wing.
Word On a Wing (rehearsal, 1976).
Word On a Wing (live, 1976).
Word On a Wing (live, 1999).
Word On a Wing (VH1 Storytellers, 1999).

With God he has very suspicious relations; they sometimes remind me of the relations of two bears in one den.

Maxim Gorky, on Tolstoy.

The heart and hymn of Station to Station, “Word On a Wing” is a petition to God, though as prayers go it’s rather opaque and quietly defiant, more of an opening negotiation tactic than a submission to a higher power. As much as he’s considering giving himself up to God, Bowie also seems as though he’s attempting to use God as leverage in some larger scheme.

Hence the warring moods of “Word On a Wing,” which is in turns suppliant (“I’m trying hard to fit among your scheme of things,” “‘just as long as I can walk, I’ll walk beside you, I’m alive in you”) and audacious (Bowie offering his own “word” against the received Word of Christ, or the argumentative tone of lines like “just because I believe don’t mean I don’t think as well“). Like the other love songs on Station to Station, the icy “Wild Is the Wind” and the love-as-confusion “Stay,” the singer seems to deny himself achieving any connection, no matter how desperately he wants it. Here, though, Bowie’s playing for far greater stakes.

Bowie, like many of his era, class and country, was only nominally Christian*; when John Lennon said that the Beatles meant more to British kids than Christ did, it was the likes of Bowie he was talking about. Bowie’s only spiritual efforts had been his brief dedication to Buddhism in the mid-’60s. So “Word On a Wing,” closing the first side of Station to Station, seemed a mild shock at the time. It’s the fruit of a period when, for the first time in his life, Bowie seriously thought about God. He told the NME that he wrote “Word On a Wing” while filming The Man Who Fell to Earth, so there’s a parallel to Lennon’s “Help!”—both songs are pleas for deliverance, written while their composers were stuck on a movie set, paranoid and depressed, wondering what they had become.

And like Bowie’s use of the Stations of the Cross in “Station to Station,” there’s even a blasphemous tone to “Word On a Wing,” with the imagery and musical trappings of Christian culture being used for occult ends. “Word” is white magic set against the necromancy of “Station to Station,” with the two tracks circling around each other on a single LP side, like yin and yang (“Golden Years,” an ambiguous utopia, separates them).

Bowie once called “Word On a Wing” a “protection…something I needed to produce from within myself to safeguard myself against some of the situations that I felt were happening on the film set.” Bowie thought he needed protection. Around this time he allegedly hired a white witch in New York to help him combat what he described, in a paranoiac moment, as a coven of Satanic witches trying to steal his semen in order to breed a devil child (the perils of doing cocaine and watching Rosemary’s Baby once too often). The witch, one Walli Elmlark, came to Los Angeles and performed an exorcism on Bowie’s house (including the pool, a natural repository for demons) and gave him a list of counter-spells and protective incantations. “Word On a Wing,” a talisman encased in a song, was another buttress.**

In 1975, at the depths of his isolation and despair, Bowie had considered converting to some form of evangelical Christianity, as Bob Dylan would do a few years later, but at some point Bowie pulled back. Recalling the period in the NME interview five years later, Bowie seemed to regard this temptation as one would a failed, if nearly-consummated, romance. “There was a point when I very nearly got suckered into that narrow sort of looking…finding the cross as the salvation of mankind.”

Still, Bowie would wear a crucifix around his neck for decades to come, and he left as his solitary witness “Word On a Wing,” a song whose ironies and compromised origins don’t detract from its beauty (along with “Life on Mars?” it’s one of the most melodically gorgeous pieces Bowie ever wrote) and the sustained commitment of Bowie’s performance. The song moves from the somber, weary acceptance of the early verses, which Bowie sings in his low register, to move to lovely assurance, the way Bowie cradles the words “sweet name, you’re born once again,” to the ornate, rising and falling phrase in the final chorus (“my prayer flies like a word on a wing”), with Bowie and his fellow singer Geoff MacCormack sounding like woodwinds. The track ends with a celestial soprano bearing the song away from its fallen creator (it’s actually a Chamberlin, the precursor to the Mellotron).

Bowie’s brand of fascism, while it embraced irony, was basically serious; or was taken seriously by a certain hermetic compartment of his mind, wherein it dwelt. The rest of him…was deeply uneasy about it; so uneasy that he included on Station to Station a song, “Word On a Wing,” which semi-seriously kept a line open to God in case the demons evoked elsewhere in the album should get out of hand.

Ian MacDonald, “White Lines, Black Magic.”

“Word On a Wing” offers ascension via key changes: the song starts in B major, an unusual and remote key, for two verses (perhaps to counter the odd choice of key, the chord progression is straight I-IV-V), with Bowie initially singing the root note, B, and so paralleling the bass. With the chorus, there’s a move to D-flat (on “Lord, I kneel and offer you…”), then a shift to D major for the second part of the chorus (on “Lord, Lord, my prayer flies…“), then a slip back to B major at the start of the final verse, whose lyric is a medley of the previous verses. (There’s far more to come, with a move back to D for a bridge, then another spell of D-flat, with the song finally ending in D, concluding on the tonic.)

As lovely as the accompaniment on “Word On a Wing” is, the song is essentially a work for solo voice and piano. Whatever random elements had led to Roy Bittan playing on Station to Station (no one remembers how it happened—Earl Slick, who had played with Bittan, once said he had suggested him, while other reports have it that Bittan happened to be staying in the same LA hotel as Bowie), Bittan’s presence on “Word On a Wing” seems destined. From the child’s steps of a melody in the intro to the steady chording in the verses, from the cascading notes flowing under Bowie singing the “sweet name” section to the sprightly two-note interjection that caps the “word on a wing” prayer, Bittan’s piano is Bowie’s guide, confidant and fellow pilgrim; it’s granted a divinity that the singer craves as much as he spurns. A beautiful struggle, a wondrous song.

Recorded October-November 1975. Performed on the 1976 “Isolar” tour, and revived in 1999.

Top: Close-up of Elizabeth Frink’s Shepherd and Sheep, 1975 (Photo: Steve Rutherford.)

* The decline in British churchgoers, notable even in the war years, was a cause of national concern and as such the subject of several books, the wittiest of which was R.C. Churchill’s The English Sunday (1954): “The Bible itself, however, has ceased in general to be read in England. What, then, do we read instead? Apart from Sunday newspapers a good many people, of course, read nothing at all on Sundays.”

** While many of Bowie’s reported adventures in Los Angeles at this time seem, in retrospect, to have been only tall tales or bad dreams, Marc Spitz confirmed a great part of this bizarre story via interviews with Angie Bowie, Cherry Vanilla and Timothy Green Beckley.

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