Thirty-seven years on this record has lost none of its bleak power, a truly adult record in a sea of rock banality:
As a recovering cocaine addict, Bowie’s songwriting on Low tended to deal with difficult issues: “There’s oodles of pain in the Low album. That was my first attempt to kick cocaine, so that was an awful lot of pain. And I moved to Berlin to do it. I moved out of the coke center of the world [i.e., Los Angeles, where Station to Station was recorded] into the smack center of the world. Thankfully, I didn’t have a feeling for smack, so it wasn’t a threat.” Visconti contended that the title was partly a reference to Bowie’s “low” moods during the album’s writing and recording.
See Philip Glass and Bowie discuss their collaboration:
manwithoutqualities 