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David Bowie Sings “Let’s Dance”

Listen to this track by pioneering style-shifting era hopper David Bowie. It’s “Let’s Dance”, the title track to his 1983 album of the same name. The new album, his fifteenth, was something of a comeback for Bowie who found himself on top forty radio again after a period of exploring the fringes a bit with the shadowy art rock of 1980’s Scary Monsters. After a brief recording slow down between 1981-82 and a change of record labels from RCA to EMI, Bowie was interested in a more straightforward approach to making music for his next album.

Instead of competing with the New Romantics and post punk bands who were vitally influenced by his past output, he moved to other musical territories entirely. In typical Bowie style, he donned a new look and stage persona to suit the new music he was making; that of a blonde pompadoured R&B frontman inspired by Little Richard and the Isley Brothers. He also sought a more accessible and dance-oriented direction to contrast the layered and more angular approach of his previous few records. The new album title says it all. Or, at least it seems to on first listen.

To help him get the funky and dance-oriented feel he wanted, Bowie co-produced the new album with Chic guitarist, writer, and producer Nile Rodgers. A cast of crack musicians appear on this single, including an up and coming Texan guitar player called Stevie Ray Vaughn whose lead guitar lines on this song show that he had a stunning and unique instrumental voice of his own even this early on. As for Rodgers’ own contributions as an instrumentalist, the co-producer added musical sophistication to this track informed by his instinctual way with irresistibly danceable grooves.

A key element that makes “Let’s Dance” work so well is the A-minor 13th chord featured in the song’s central riff. That small but significant compositional tweak evolved from Bowie’s original straight-ahead A-minor chord. Along with the echoey delay effect, this helped to elevate the song from its folky and funereal original form to being subtly menacing, mysterious, and sexy instead. During this post-disco period, Rodgers steered away from Studio 54-style rhythm parts completely. Instead, he touches on jazz harmony as met with post punk atmosphere. He plays his rhythm guitar part straight not syncopated and lets the delay do most of the work.

The collaboration between co-producers Bowie and Rodgers and engineer Bob Clearmountain resulted in David Bowie’s biggest single. It certainly aided in making its namesake album into his best-selling record. Because of these successes, lot of fans of his Berlin period and of Scary Monsters suggested that Bowie had sold out to the mainstream instead of continuing to push the artistic envelope into edgier territory. To them, his new music was too fit for radio and (worst of all) for casual listeners. Preppies were buying this record! Scandal!

With Grammy nominations and wins and heavy rotation on MTV, it was easy to miss what lies beneath this tune that was a top forty radio staple by 1983. Delving deeper, “Let’s Dance” deals in many of the same areas of concern Bowie explored in his earliest work. One of these is the theme of isolation and the alienation that goes along with it. The lyrical call this tune makes is not about a joyous night out partying or in mindlessly dancing to any old song that happens to be playing on the radio. The dancing described here is a dance of danger.

The moonlight under which that dance happens is not romantic moonlight – it’s serious moonlight. It’s the light in the darkness of the times in which it was more important than ever to gather and to move as a whole society toward something better. “Let’s Dance” is a song about peril. But it’s also one that suggests the importance of facing peril together in whatever way that’s necessary in solidarity; if you say run, I’ll run with you. If you say hide, we’ll hide. As always with Bowie, it’s a fight against the idea that such struggles are those we all must face on our own in isolation.

Bowie was not the first artist to explore the metaphor of dance as struggle, of course. Martha Reeves & The Vandella’s “Dancing in the Streets”, which Bowie would (ill-advisedly?) record later on himself is one high profile example of this from decades before. The lines between a joyful night on the town and taking to the streets in angry protest are pretty blurry in R&B songs of that era. The classic side “Hi-Heel Sneakers” is another example of that and possibly even more of a parallel as reflected in the lyrics. Nearly two decades later, the put on your red shoes line is a subtle nod to what that earlier song suggested.

“Let’s Dance” contains those same elements of danger and struggle that lurk under its celebratory surface. As far as social issues and political climates in which he wrote the song are concerned, not much had changed. With that in mind, “Let’s Dance” is not really a party song. It’s a song of disquiet, tension, and resistance. But it’s also a song about reaching out and rebelling against forces that keep people thinking they struggle on their own. Not much had changed there, either. In fact, this is another example in his work in which Bowie declares “you’re not alone!”, a sentiment he’d put forward to a whole other generation over a decade before.

Regardless of that, a lot of hardcore Bowie fans dismissed “Let’s Dance” as mere radio fodder. It was just too big a song. Even Bowie cut it from his setlists by the Nineties. By then he’d gone in other directions into more experimental areas that a big hit single in his live show wouldn’t allow. Yet for his Glastonbury performance in 2000, it returned again in a re-invented form. Before that, he performed a stripped down version in his appearance at the 1996 Bridge School Benefit. That version revealed it as a song of struggle a bit more than the original pop single version does.

Even if Bowie’s Let’s Dance made him more accessible to a wider audience by deliberately aiming for hits and capturing a new generation of listeners along with it, he was still exploring the core ideas of isolation, struggle, and a search for connection in his songwriting. This period of pop radio success was just another facet of his artistry in a career characterized by near-constant re-invention. But whatever face he wore, and whatever style he applied to his work, Bowie always plotted a steady course into some of the darker regions of the human experience in culturally resonant ways.

To explore more about David Bowie during his Serious Moonlight phase, check out this article about the Let’s Dance record on American Songwriter.

For more about Nile Rodgers’ approach to arranging this song, take a look at this video that has him telling the story of how he adapted the song based on Bowie’s original chord progression.

Enjoy!

Sting Sings “Fortress Around Your Heart”

Listen to this track by former Police bassist, songwriter, and singer turned exploratory solo artist Sting. It’s “Fortress Around Your Heart”, a smash single of a deeply personal nature taken from his 1985 debut under his own name The Dream of the Blue Turtles. This cut was the record’s third single in the UK, and the second in the States. Overall, it was his second number one charting song as a solo artist on Billboard’s Top Rock Tracks chart. Added to the success of two other singles, things were off to a pretty good start for Sting outside of his former band.

The results he won were significant, if not entirely surprising. Sting was a welcome and familiar presence on the radio and on MTV’s video flow at the time. This had been mostly in the context of The Police who scored their highest sales and best reviews only a couple of years before with the landmark Synchronicity album and its ensuing tour. This culminated in an historic appearance at Shea Stadium by the summer of 1983 in front of seventy-thousand fans. That’s Beatle-sized success right there. So, the best thing to do was to keep it all going.

Right?

Sting?

Well, on paper, sure. This was but for an actual dream Sting had of enormous blue turtles invading his garden; bursting out from holes in the walls, doing backflips, and generally making a mess of things. His subconscious was trying to tell him something—or at very least it sparked a great hook for press releases. The retelling of this dream from which the record gets its title was at the forefront of interviews at the time. This stood to reason as the question hung in the air. The Police had been the biggest act on planet Earth. Why he would take such a sharp left turn from the prescribed pop music path to further success that was practically guaranteed with The Police?

Undoubtedly, there were personal reasons for doing this as well as artistic ones. As successful as they were, The Police was not an easy band to be in. All three members have acknowledged that at length by now. And besides that, there really is something to be said for going out on top. The Police definitely did that. As for the creative reasons beyond all that, the impulse to tear up one’s carefully manicured artistic garden in favour of sowing a bit of chaos instead is a pretty rock ‘n’ roll move—as long as it works! To help ensure it would, Sting decided to make a few changes to his approach.

By 1985, pop music was becoming increasingly compartmentalized across both stylistic and racial lines. So first, to buck the system on two different fronts, he hired prominent Black American jazz and fusion musicians to back him up on the record and on tour. The new band included Kenny Kirkland on keyboards, Branford Marsalis on saxophones, and Omar Hakim on drums. Vocalists Janice Pendarvis and Dolette McDonald joined the group as well, the latter of whom having accompanied The Police on the aforementioned Synchronicity tour of the previous two years.

Second, he largely handed bass duties to former Miles Davis sideman and future Rolling Stones hired gun Darryl Jones, another key member of the new band. Sting became the guitarist instead. This subtle instrumental shift helped him serve an essential factor particular to a lead singer of a popular band striking out on his own; a unique sound to separate his past work from his present.

Third, instead of trying to stick to a strict pop rock template, Sting went back to where he came from stylistically. His previous band to The Police was the fusion outfit Last Exit based in his hometown of Newcastle in the days before he decided to go to London to see what all the punk rock fuss was about. With those aforementioned American jazz musicians being first-rate purveyors of the styles Sting was interested in exploring, they all laid the groundwork to planting a new kind of artistic garden together. They recorded the album in Barbados and then took it on tour.

Even with a new approach in place, there were still a few stylistic markings left over from The Police. After all, it was in that band that he came into his own as a singer and writer over eight years as a group. You can hear those influences in “Fortress Around Your Heart”, particularly in terms of atmosphere. The shadowy psychological angles found in the lyrics are of the same variety as the ones Sting explored since at least the Ghost in the Machine era. Saying that, there is another facet of his past that can be found in this tune that makes it an important statement in his catalogue of songs even today.

While he was in The Police, Sting’s first marriage ended. This was difficult enough to navigate without his obligations to millions of fans and steeple-fingered record label executives who all expected him to continue as an untouchable pop avatar. “Fortress Around Your Heart” is an expression of that troubled time and emotional landscape, full of metaphor and symbolism equal to anything on Synchronicity. Today, it remains to be one of the most personally revealing songs he ever wrote. With all of the risks he took in leaving The Police behind and going in what was considered to be an unexpected direction, “Fortress Around Your Heart” represents a risk of another kind.

Sting initially described this song as one of appeasement, of trying to meet someone half-way to keep a connection with them alive. But the language of protection in the chorus begins to blur with allusions to prisons in the verses until “Fortress Around Your Heart” becomes a song about confinement instead. Both parties involved are encircled in trenches and barbed wire, walking through minefields of their own making and trapped inside of oppressive architecture that undoes all of the good intentions they have to stay connected. This song is a desperately sad expression of all that, and all too real as a reflection of what can happen in a marriage despite the love that so often remains even when one ends.

In the meantime, “Fortress Around Your Heart” shines instrumentally. Branford Marsalis’ pleading soprano saxophone lines throughout provide an additional voice to embody the reflective and profound sadness that Sting’s lead vocal conveys lyrically. The track certainly wins in terms of pure atmosphere and emotional tone that seems to embody resignation as much as regret and sadness. Overall, the song reflects the artistic signature of its writer with incredible precision. It complemented the familiar sonic landscapes established with The Police with the new directions Sting was taking by 1985. Together with the whole of the album, it met and exceeded all expectations on those fronts, and on others besides.

As big a solo artist as he would become for the rest of the decade and onward, going solo at the time he did was very risky. With the success of The Police, Sting had to match the potential of that success right out of the box, which was no small task. But the bravest thing when it comes to this song is in revealing his own faults, missteps, and personal regrets that present a unique level of openness. In a profound way, this song that served as a hit single embodied a kind of personal liberty in more than one sense. The song that tells a story about thick walls and barriers also reveals that they could not contain the storyteller for very long as he sings of them. On another level, with the success of this song and the album Sting was free to go his own way.

For more background on Sting’s artistic journey during this post-Police and early solo period, check out this page on his website, sting.com

And for a fuller portrait of Sting and his band around the time of the album and the shows to support it, check out Michael Apted’s 1985 documentary and concert movie Bring on the Night. Check out the trailer for that film right here.

Enjoy!

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