Deep Cut Friday: ‘Word on a Wing’ by David Bowie

Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.

Few artists veered as wildly from one style to another as David Bowie. In between recording the Philly soul experiment Young Americans and the icy Berlin art rock opus Low, he made 1976’s Station to Station, a unique album that contains musical elements of both of those divergent eras. Released 50 years ago this week, Station to Station was an artistic high watermark for Bowie, but it came out of a troubled period that he’d later say he has little memory of. He was addicted to cocaine, paranoid, and dangerously underweight, and courting controversy with the fascist signifiers of his new persona, the Thin White Duke. 

“Word on a Wing” is the dark horse of Station to Station, the least frequently performed of the album’s five original songs in Bowie’s lifetime, and the least streamed of its six tracks today. It’s a striking song, though, a desperate prayer from one of the few times the singer gave serious thought to God and organized religion, and began wearing a silver crucifix around his neck that he’d been given by his father. Bowie was an early fan of Bruce Springsteen, and “Word on a Wing” may be his loveliest and most straightforward piano-and-voice collaboration with the E Street Band’s Roy Bittan, who played on Station to Station and 1980’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). 

Chris O’Leary’s blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame has detailed, insightful entries about every song Bowie ever made. In 2010, O’Leary analyzed the Station to Station song’s religious themes while deconstructing its rich melodic structure: “‘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…’).”

After performing “Word on a Wing” regularly in the year of its release, Bowie only resurrected the song for a handful of shows in 1999. One of those performances was a taping for VH1 Storytellers, a relatively obscure song to close the program after hits like “Life on Mars?” and “Rebel Rebel.” “1975 and 1976 and a bit of 1974 and the first few weeks of 1977 were singularly the darkest days of my life,” Bowie said in his introduction. “Unwittingly, this next song was therefore a signal of distress, I’m sure that it was a call for help.” 

Three more essential David Bowie deep cuts:

“Queen Bitch”

Bowie wrote Hunky Dory’s “Queen Bitch” under the influence of the Velvet Underground after his first trip to America. These days, it might feel more familiar for heavily influencing the Killers hit “Mr. Brightside.” 

“Fascination”

Years before becoming an R&B superstar in his own right, Luther Vandross provided backing harmonies and vocal arrangements for countless artists. Bowie was so impressed with Vandross’s song “Funky Music (Is a Part of Me)” that they rewrote it with new lyrics for the Young Americans track “Fascination.” 

“Blackout”

“Blackout,” which closes the first side of “Heroes,” is a perfect distillation of the futuristic sound he was developing with Brian Eno and King Crimson’s Robert Fripp in the late ’70s.