If you're a consistent follower of County Grind, you're familiar with our birthday blogs. These pieces are usually a nice way to say "thanks" to artists we appreciate, and a great way for us to exercise of our trivia muscles and give muso-nerds everywhere a thread to troll.
However, today we have a truly special one: David Bowie (for the hearing impaired: DAVID FUCKING BOWIE) has announced with the first sunrise of his 66th year, that he will be releasing his first album of fresh material in over 10 years this coming March.
And, if an album announcement wasn't enough to get you digging through the stacks of the Thin White Duke's 29 other classic albums in anticipation, the man has been kind enough to grant us a track and video from the future release, which will be titled The Next Day!
We are honestly way too excited by the news to follow suit with our normal birthday blog format, so here is the new video and a few of our favorite live Bowie moments as an offering to the tour deities in the hopes that the new record finds Mr. Bowie stateside and road-bound sooner than never. If you need us, we'll be scouting for sealed copies of Low on Ebay and working on the Ziggy shrine we keep in the laundry room.
5. "Where Are We Now"
Above is the fresh track, "Where Are We Now?" The track is said to be a reminiscence of Bowie's time spent in Berlin. (Side note: If you dig this track as much as we do, you might be into Nick Cave and the Bad Seed's kinda-sorta similar sounding and also new contribution, "We No Who UR.")
4. "Moonage Daydream"
This live gem features Ziggy and his Spiders From Mars at their absolute peak doing an extended version of "Moonage Daydream." The interplay between Bowie and (our personal favorite of Bowie's many foils) Mick Ronson in this clip is sublime, to say the least. FREAKOUT-Out-out-out!!
3. "Jean Genie" featuring Stevie Ray Vaughan
Another Ziggy-era favorite, this rare rehearsal clip from 1983 features Stevie Ray Vaughan on lead guitar. For the uninitiated, Bowie's somewhat credited with breaking the pride of Texes, who's burning blues stringin' is one of the highlight's of Let's Dance.
2. "Heroes"
Here we find the ever-dapper Bowie performing everyone's favorite Eno collaboration with turnpike toll-booth fashion icon and odd-ball guitarist extraordinaire, Adrien Belew. The new Bowie release was produced by the same Tony Visconti that was behind this and a myriad of other notable Bowie releases.
1. "Heathen (The Rays)"
From Bowie's 2002 electronically tweaked and lush sounding Heathen, the man is obviously digging deep in this clip. Entrenched in both emotion and blue-silk, this is a really prime example of what we'd like to get from the live Bowie performances we just know we're going to be granted in 2013. And, since we've done nothing to suppress our guitar-dork tendencies, that's long-time collaborator, Earl Slick, hiding behind the dark specs.
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