Space Oddity, By David Bowie

My first real musical experience. David Bowie. He probably seems the perfect starting place but the thing about Space Oddity, the thing that made it a turning point in how I saw music, was that it was never Bowie to me.

I heard if first years ago when I was about six or seven. It was summer and I was in the car with my mother. I am not sure where we were headed but we were just by Marley Park and it was bright out. The radio was not of much interest to me back then and I was in the back seat playing with one of my toys. That was until it came on. I don’t know if my mother had raised the volume of the radio or if it was just the shock of that voice coming up from the muted intro but I stopped what I was doing and I listened. The fact that I was a fan of anything to do with space was probably another big selling point.

I sat there listening in disbelief as Major Tom went into the endless unknown and was forever separated from his wife. This wasn’t how songs were suppose to be. Lyrics weren’t meant to have meaning or tell stories. People just wanted something that rhymed and was easy to sing along to. Songs were not meant to give you a space opera. Space was a topic only of interest to us Sci-Fi fans. Normal people just wouldn’t want to listen to that. Most certainly, songs did not end with the hero being lost. No one could possibly be interested in a song like this. No one but me. Whoever this singer was, I was sure that only he and I could understand the importance of this song.

My theory at that age was that it must have been some mistake, a complete fluke, that it had been allowed to play on the radio. I had been lucky to hear it. Of course I grew older and I learned of the importance of Bowie but for some reason I never really made the connection between him and this song for quite a time after that. This meant for a good six years at least the song existed solely as a cherished childhood memory that I thought was only for me. It is nice that I can now pull out the song whenever I want and that I know so many people who love it but, truthfully, I preferred it when it was a song that seemed specially written for me.