Howdy Star Gazers and welcome to this special
episode of Star Trails. My name is Drew and I'm
going to do something a little different today.
I'm going to discuss a song that's been stuck
in my head for weeks now. If you recall a few
episodes back, I mentioned the first production
car in space was a Tesla Roadster that SpaceX
launched into a giant heliocentric orbit. In
the seat was Starman, a mannequin wearing a space
suit, and the song Space Oddity by David Bowie
was playing on a loop. And, since that episode,
that song has been playing on a loop in my head.
I've played along with it on my guitar. I've
listened to alternate versions of it. I've studied
covers of it by well -known artists. I've been
absorbed in its history and disturbed by the
story it tells. I've tried to learn how it was
made and, last night, I even played it on a ukulele
at a weekly jam session I attend. I've always
admired this song, along with many others in
Bowie's catalog, but it wasn't until recently
that I really listened to it from both a narrative
and harmonic perspective. And the more I learned
about this song, its history and usage through
the years, and its connection to space exploration,
which existed from the moment it was released,
I just seemed to enjoy it even more. So in this
episode, I'm going to break down 1969's Space
Oddity, David Bowie's very first hit song. This
isn't just a story about an astronaut. It's about
drifting, physically, musically, and emotionally.
To properly investigate it, we need to set the
scene. Space Oddity was released in 1969, right
in the hottest stretch of the space race. In
1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the
first man in space, famously musing about Earth's
blue color from orbit. Not long after, Alan Shepard
became the first American in space, and the race
was on. Just eight years later, the United States
was preparing for something that seemed impossible,
landing a man on the moon. The previous year,
Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey was released.
A slow -burn science fiction epic about a rogue
AI and mankind's evolution from club -wielding
early primates, to a spacefaring civilization.
And even the title Space Oddity feels like a
response to Kubrick's film. It's not an odyssey,
as in a grand heroic journey, but it is something
strange. These world events, and especially the
movie, were factors that inspired Bowie to write
Space Oddity, a sparse psychedelic folk song
about an astronaut, Major Tom, who achieves orbit
and the fame that goes with it. Yet something
on his mission goes awry. and he helplessly watches
Earth as he drifts away in space, presumably
lost forever. Like a stage play or film, the
song follows a three -act structure. We start
from an orderly place, the control room of a
launch facility. Major Tom is established as
the hero. A countdown to lift -off quietly begins.
If you're listening to the stereo version of
the song, the countdown happens in your left
channel, while Bowie's vocals occupy the right
channel. In fact, in the stereo version, all
the elements of this song are hard -panned left
and right, which was a common technique of the
era. I'm going to go over this more in a bit.
In Act 2, Major Tom has achieved orbit, and the
papers want to know whose shirts you wear, which
I interpret as Tom achieving fame for his accomplishment.
People are obsessed with him. much in the way
celebrity reporters ask film stars who they are
wearing at red carpet events. And now it's time
for Major Tom to take his space walk to leave
the capsule if he dares. However, something is
wrong. Tom says he's floating in a most peculiar
way and the stars look very different. There's
a shift in the song's tone here. A guitar solo
seems to send us farther into space, and when
we return to the story, Major Tom is a hundred
thousand miles away, virtually halfway to the
moon. He makes one final plea. Meanwhile, ground
control is panicking. In the final act, Major
Tom seems strangely at ease with his predicament.
Now he's floating far above the moon, watching
Earth from afar. A cacophony of instruments and
noise rises and eventually fades out as the song
ends. And I'm immediately reminded of the ending
of 2001, A Space Odyssey, when Dr. Dave Bowman
takes a trippy journey through space and time
before his transformation into the Star Child.
The story of Major Tom is eerie and melancholy,
but what makes it really unsettling is everything
happening underneath it. Space Oddity mostly
orbits around the musical key of C major, but
Bowie tosses in some gimmicks that make the song
feel quite unstable. Without getting too far
down into a music theory rabbit hole, let me
explain what I mean by the song's key. Songs
generally revolve around a tonal center, especially
pop songs which often cycle through the same
three or four chords. Chords are derived from
the musical key the song is written in. So imagine
sitting at a piano and pressing only the white
keys. Congratulations, you're playing in the
key of C. which has no sharp or flat notes. To
form chords, we look at the major scale of C,
which is only seven notes, starting with C, D,
E, and so on, until we circle back around to
C again, now an octave higher. C, being the first
note in the scale, means we can use it as the
root note of the one chord, which is C major.
Let's go a few notes up to E. This is the third
note in the C major scale, which means it's a
minor chord. Here's the melancholy E minor. In
the opening verse, Bowie alternates between the
C and E minor chords, which from the outset produces
a feeling of drift or oscillation. As we move
deeper into the verse, Bowie moves to A minor,
but steps slightly outside the key and plays
a D7 with F sharp as the bass note. That 7 chord
imparts a certain bluesy or twangy sound here.
The real outlier is the F sharp for the bass
note. Remember, C has no sharps or flats. Here's
what it sounds like. Bowie includes additional
chords that aren't strictly diatonic, meaning
they aren't part of the key of C. These are called
borrowed chords, since we're taking them from
adjacent keys, and some examples of this include
moves from F major to the borrowed F minor during
the verses. And then there's Bb, just a step
lower than C, that introduces the Planet Earth
is Blue line. And then there's this great transitional
chord progression. That ends in two strums of
A major, also a borrowed chord. The reason I'm
harping on these borrowed chords is because they
make the song feel emotionally unsettled. When
you hear one, it feels familiar, but just slightly
off. These borrowed chords aren't mistakes, they're
used intentionally, like the music itself is
stepping outside its comfort zone. And that mirrors
what's happening in the story. Major Tom leaves
the safety of Earth, and the unstable harmony
follows him. There's another huge musical decision
here. Major Tom doesn't go home in the end, and
neither does the music. And what I mean by that
is the song doesn't neatly resolve back to its
tonal center of C major. Pop songs generally
wrap up by returning to their one chord. For
example, here's a simple progression that goes
home to C major in the end. Space Oddity doesn't
do that. In the ending freak -out section, it
seems to leave the key of C altogether, drifting
to D major and finally to E major. That leaves
us feeling stranded as the music fades out, and
that is a very intentional songwriting decision.
I'd also like to take a moment to discuss instrumentation
and production. Listen closely to these opening
moments and see if you can hear a buzzing, organ
-like drone under the guitar chords. That weird
sound is Bowie playing a stylophone, a handheld
synthesizer that was marketed to children. It
came out just a year before this song, so it
was a new futuristic instrument. It kind of sounds
like a buzzing radio here. By sliding the instrument's
stylus over the metal keyboard on top, you can
produce eerie wah -wahs and squeals. Interestingly,
Bowie was a big fan of the stylophone, and you
can even buy a new iteration of it with a Bowie
theme, including instructions for how to play
several songs. Space Oddity is one of them, of
course. As the song builds, another high -tech
instrument of the time can be heard. Listen to
the wall of symphonic strings here. That's not
a string quartet. That's a Mellotron. An early
keyboard instrument that doesn't generate sound
like a synthesizer, but plays back actual recordings
on strips of magnetic tape. Each key triggers
a real violin or choir, but it sounds frozen
in time and mechanical. And because it's tape
-based, it's never perfectly stable. The pitch
wobbles slightly, the timing isn't exact, and
if you hold a note long enough, it just runs
out. You've probably heard songs featuring the
Melotron. It was famously used for the flute
sounds at the beginning of Strawberry Fields
Forever by The Beatles. A real example of a Melotron
is expensive, but I have a couple excellent simulations
of it here on my production machine. There's
just something about these sounds recorded long
ago that's so haunting. This particular emulation
I'm playing is made by Arturia and features actual
sounds recorded from a vintage Mellotron. In
Space Oddity, this sound fits perfectly. It doesn't
feel grounded or alive. It feels distant. fragile,
like a signal drifting through space, slowly
fading as it goes. The recording process also
contributes to the song's ethereal quality. There's
a generous use of reverb and echo, which pushes
sound away, making them feel distant, like they're
floating in a vast space. There's also subtle
tremolo on the electric guitars. A gentle pulsing
in the volume that keeps sustained sounds from
ever feeling completely stable. And then there's
the stereo mix. I already mentioned how the instruments
are panned hard to the left or right, but here
it creates something more psychological. Instead
of a cohesive band, you hear elements separated,
almost isolated from each other. Together, all
these subtle choices are doing some real world
building. So what actually happens to Major Tom?
Well, no one really knows because Bowie keeps
things deliberately ambiguous. This isn't a song
so much about an astronaut as it is about isolation
and emotional disconnect. Tom no longer feels
connected to our world. Maybe it's a meditation
on the price of fame itself, being adored by
the planet, but feeling withdrawn and alone.
The question that comes to mind is, did Major
Tom willingly send himself adrift into the void?
Because he seems at peace with the consequences.
Another idea is that maybe he experienced some
version of the overview effect. that feeling
astronauts report after seeing the Earth from
afar. It's the realization that Earth is a fragile
place, that humanity's problems are small and
insignificant, and the sobering realization that
our world is a very, very small place in an expanding
universe. We can find more clues to the song's
meaning scattered throughout Bowie's five -decade
-long career. The song Ashes to Ashes is considered
something of a sequel to Space Oddity, largely
owing to a line in its chorus which asserts,
Major Tom is a junkie. Now, I personally don't
like the idea of Major Tom as an addict, but
this is what Bowie has given us. I prefer the
song Star Man, which in my opinion sounds like
the true sequel. Consider this interpretation.
Major Tom disappears, and like Bowman in 2001,
he returns in an evolved form, the Starman. However,
Bowie never canonized that. Starman is on the
Ziggy Stardust album, so it's related to the
narrative arc of Ziggy Stardust, the rock musician
from Mars. But again, there's the idea of isolation.
The Starman would like to meet us, but he's afraid
humanity isn't ready for him. Bowie loves to
create these characters in his songs. Ziggy,
Major Tom, Aladdin Sane, The Thin White Duke,
and so on. Major Tom could be Bowie himself.
Maybe Major Tom becoming a junkie is Bowie being
self -referential about his own drug problems.
However you want to frame it, it's interesting
to see how many space references Bowie peppers
throughout his work. Aliens are messengers, space
is otherness, and contact is dangerous. And right
up to the end, Bowie was singing about space.
His final album, Black Star, was released in
2016, just before his death. It's abstract, symbolic,
almost ritualistic, but filled with cosmic imagery,
stars, voids, death, transformation. It feels
like crossing into something unknowable, and
Bowie, near death, literally was. Space Oddity
has been covered by a variety of artists through
the years, including a note for note rendition
by Def Leppard that even places the sound in
the stereo field exactly like the original. However,
one of my favorite renditions is by the flaming
lips, who lean hard into the psychedelic aspect.
But Space Oddity has achieved a cultural status
that goes beyond rock music. It began life that
way. In 1969, the BBC used it as the background
music for its coverage of the Apollo 11 moon
landing. It seems they didn't pay much attention
to the lyrics. It was selected simply because
it sounded spacey. Even Bowie was nervous about
its use, fearing that if something went wrong
on the mission, his song would be forever linked
to a tragedy. Decades later, the song found its
way into orbit. Astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded
the first music video in space aboard the International
Space Station. playing Space Oddity on a guitar
and singing a modified version of Bowie's lyrics.
This time, the astronaut makes it home. And now,
more than 50 years after the last crewed missions
to the moon, a new chapter has begun. As I'm
recording this episode, four astronauts are on
a journey deeper into space than any human has
traveled before. The Artemis II mission will
loop around the moon and return to Earth, splashing
down in the Pacific Ocean. It's our first manned
moonshot since 1972. I don't know if they're
listening to Space Oddity, but they're following
a path first taken by Apollo 11 in 1969, the
same year the song was released. I suspect we'll
still be listening to this song even 50 years
from now. There's a certain irony in it, a song
about drifting into the void of space. somehow
reminds us what's at stake here on Earth. Well
folks, I think I've finally purged this tune
out of my own head, but I apologize if it's stuck
in yours now. Thanks for taking this journey
with me, and if you have any thoughts on this
song or the episode, be sure to leave me some
feedback over at the show website, StarTrails
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the stars, clear skies everyone.