“Sound And Vision” by David Bowie

"Sound and Vision" sits on side one of Low, the album David Bowie put out in January 1977, and RCA picked it as the record's first single. It started as nothing more than a G major chord progression Bowie handed to his band at the Château d'Hérouville in France in September 1976; he wrote and sang his part afterward, and the track was finished at Hansa in West Berlin that autumn.

The build is sly. It runs as an instrumental for over a minute and a half, stacking Carlos Alomar and Ricky Gardiner's guitars, Bowie's baritone sax and the backing voices of Brian Eno and Mary Hopkin before the man himself finally shows, while Dennis Davis's drums come out huge and warped through Tony Visconti's Harmonizer. The tune bounces; the words are dark and inward-looking, the sound of a man still reeling from years of drug addiction.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.