Earthling

David Bowie was coming from a very good epoch. In some interviews, he stated that we was finding his “true essence”. He started to experiment with sound and lyrics. He started to get involved with drum n'bass atmosphere. In an interview with The Seattle Times, Bowie said:

Unlike most drum and bass things, we didn’t just take parts from other people’s records and sample them. On the snare drum stuff, Zac [Alford] went away and did his own loops and worked out all kinds of strange timings and rhythms. Then we speeded those up to your regular 160 beats per minute. That’s very much how we treat the album. We kept all sampling in-house and created our own soundscape in a way.

About the meaning of the songs, David Bowie stated that all of them keep some similarities between them. Bowie has always been a very spiritual person that has always fought to see if he find his own spiritual balance. He said in an interview to QMagazine:

I guess the common ground with all the songs is this abiding need in me to vacillate between atheism or a kind of gnosticism. I keep going backwards and forwards between the two things, because they mean a lot in my life. I mean, the church doesn’t enter into my writing, or my thought; I have no empathy with any organised religions. What I need is to find a balance, spiritually, with the way I live and my demise. And that period of time – from today until my demise – is the only thing that fascinates me.