Remixing David Bowie’s “Starman”

In Electronic Music School: a Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity, we include a series of project plans that are designed to scaffold student creativity. If you sit someone down in front of an empty DAW session and tell them to be creative, they are likely to be paralyzed by uncertainty or anxiety. It works better to give them a starting point, some constraints, some raw material. In the Simple Remix project, you give students an acapella track (an unaccompanied vocal) and have them create new instrumental backings for it. One of my favorite songs for this purpose is David Bowie’s 1972 classic “Starman.”

This is one of many Bowie acapellas in wide circulation.

The song is nominally in F major, but the melody is ambiguous enough that you can effortlessly reharmonize it in all kinds of strange and interesting ways. Bowie’s vocal timbre also meshes very well with electronic production, and it sounds especially cool through effects like vocoder and Auto-Tune.

I have remixed the “Starman” acapella many times. Here are a few standouts:

Here’s a guide to prepping the vocal stem for making these tracks in Ableton:

This week, I made a guest appearance in Megan Foley’s music tech class at The Polytechnic School in Pasadena, CA. I had sent them a specially prepped version of the “Starman” vocal that I put at a steady tempo so it would easily fit onto the DAW grid. The students set Bowie to everything from funk to EDM to Hans Zimmer style orchestration. One of them recreated the acapella using Vocaloid and ended up with something that sounded like the Katamari Damacy soundtrack. There were some creative vocal chops that resulted in intriguing alternative lyrics. The aforementioned vocaloid version repeated the phrase “There’s a star” over different chords, which made a delightful hook unto itself.

Here is the beautiful thing about the Simple Remix project. One of Megan’s students asked me, “Where do I go from here?” The answer is, just remove David Bowie’s vocal out of your track, and voila, you have a banging original instrumental. Then find yourself a singer-songwriter and work together to come up with a new melody and lyrics. This is much easier than writing a song from scratch!

Let’s dig into the specific qualities of “Starman” that make it such a reliable source of inspiration. It is quite a weird song, even by David Bowie standards. Here’s an analysis of the form and harmony.

Here’s my transcription.

The intro is mysterious: Bb and F chords with the open E string ringing. In jazz, this wouldn’t sound so unusual, but it’s an exotic sound in rock, especially with that open string timbre.

The key of the verse is ambiguous. I hear Gm as the tonic because of its metrical placement. The F would then be the bVII chord. Then C could be the IV chord, but the C7 resolves to F. So retroactively, we were really in F the entire time, and Gm was really the ii chord. In the moment, though, it certainly does feel like Gm is the tonic. After the F, there’s a quick Ab and Bb, which create a momentary flash of F blues tonality. There isn’t any particular harmonic logic in the move from there back to Gm, but we’re back at the beginning of this segment of the groove, and that repetition makes the return to Gm sound “right.”

The second half of the verse ends on a big open A chord with a rhythmically complex Latin-sounding piano pattern that continues over a G chord. This figure was apparently inspired by The Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” You could understand this little break to be in A Mixolydian, or as the “Three Blind Mice” melody in F but played as full parallel major triads rather than single notes. Either way, it is a wonderfully strange thing to put in between a verse and a chorus.

The chorus is unambiguously in F major. It begins with an octave leap that Bowie said was an homage to the chorus of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The Am to Gm to C is not typical root movement, but it’s all within the key. On the line “let the children lose it,” there’s a Beatles cadence, Bb to Bbm. That is followed by F and then a nifty secondary dominant, D with F-sharp in the bass, the V chord in the key of G minor. But then Gm and C form a ii-V back in F.

In the guitar solo, we don’t immediately land back on F. Instead, the solo starts on Bb, the IV chord in F. For some reason the Bb doesn’t feel like a tonic to me as much as the first chord of the verse. The guitar solo is simpler, a bluesy IV-I-V-I. The second time through, the last bar gets elided and lands on the first chord of verse two instead.

“Starman” has more harmonic complexity than is typical in rock, but the chords themselves are not the main source of musical interest. The thing that makes this tune so strange and compelling is the hypermeter, the functional grouping of measures. I hear each group of two measures as acting like one hypermeasure. In the Ableton screencaps below, I indicate these two-bar hypermeasures with alternating light purple and pink rectangles.

The intro has a predictable eight bar form, four hypermeasures, each of which contains a single chord. The chords themselves are strange, but the container they sit in is not.

The first part of the verse starts with a hypermeasure of Gm and a hypermeasure of F. In the third hypermeasure, the harmonic rhythm picks up, with just a measure each of C and C7. But then in the fourth hypermeasure, everything gets screwy. It gets cut off halfway through, and within that short time, there is a lot more harmonic activity: half a bar of F, and then one beat each of Ab and Bb.

The second part of the verse has a more regular hypermeter, but in the fourth hypermeasure, there’s another sudden harmonic and textural shift, the Latin-rhythm piano part in A Mixolydian.

The chorus starts innocently enough. The first hypermeasure is a bar each of F and Dm. In the second hypermeasure, the harmonic rhythm is twice as fast, so there’s half a bar each of Am, Gm, C and C7. The third hypermeasure is the same as the first, and the fourth hypermeasure is the same as the second. Then things get weird. The fifth hypermeasure has two chords from outside of F major – the Bbm implies F minor, and the D/F# implies G minor. Finally, there’s a truncated sixth hypermeasure, just half a bar each of Gm and C.

In the guitar solo, the harmonic rhythm slows back down so each hypermeasure has two bars of each chord. At the end of the solo, there is yet another surprise, as the fourth hypermeasure is cut in half and the verse comes in early.

This is a lot of formal surprises to pack into the first minute and a half of a song! Rock is usually hypermetrically predictable. This includes most David Bowie songs. If you listen to “Ziggy Stardust” or “Moonage Daydream”, the hypermeter stays consistent and predictable, with symmetrical sections that are four or eight bars or twelve bars long.

The eccentric form of “Starman” combines with its unconventional chords to create a melody that is only loosely anchored to its original context. The verse melody doesn’t start or end in a way that clearly indicates the key of F. It sounds just as good over grooves in G minor or D minor or C Mixolydian or A Phrygian. Once you have primed the listener to expect one of these other modes, the chorus can plausibly fit into it too. The ending groove starts and ends on A, which makes it especially conducive to reharmonizing as D minor or A Phrygian. The odd phrase lengths can be a challenge if you want to create a predictable dance groove, and I have regularized the form a bit in my remixes.

Here’s a look at the process of making one of my “Starman” remixes:

I don’t feel like I am anywhere close to exhausting the possibilities of this tune. I’m looking forward to hearing what future classes do with it too.

Further update: this great Wenatchee the Hatchet followup post goes deeper into the harmony, check it out.

Further further update: I listened to some live versions of the tune and realized that the Gm in the chorus is really a G7, the V7 chord in the key of C. Very cool, Mr Bowie.