David Bowie Deep Cut Friday: Word on a Wing

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 wiht 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 it’s 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.