Goodbye Mr Bowie and thank you for everything.

After I heard the news that my biggest music and artistic hero David Bowie had passed I knew I'd have to write about it eventually.  It's truly hard to sum up his influence and impact on me as a creative person but I will try.  

Growing up I always felt a bit out of place.. There were many, many times in school I would see very clearly, the difference between how I thought about the world and how others felt. This lead me to be fiercely independent early on and sort of a loner.  To this day I see between the cracks most don't even pay attention to.  As I would learn later this is a great observational skill to have as a songwriter but back then I just felt a bit alien.  

Even back in my teens when I started joining bands and writing songs I didn't quite relate to the other musicians. Their ideas were built on very strict conventions. This was something I knew I didn't want to fall prey to.  Imagine working hard on a song only to think to yourself that it's boring and predictable.  Something was missing and I didn't know what course I needed to take.

Around that same time I saw Bowie's Ashes to Ashes video and it blew my mind! Not only was it very visually exciting, the song was extremely unique and once you dug deeper, the lyrics were creative but also seemed authentic and introspective.  I thought, now this is music!  I immediately became obsessed by who this David Bowie fella was.  From there I worked backwards through his full discography finding one amazing album after another.  Every song infused with a visionary quality and jumped from genre to genre effortlessly.  Once I experienced for myself this sort of musical benchmark there was no going back.

Not too long after I decided that sink or swim I would make my own music, my own way and not be tied down to a conventional band structure. I was convinced that if I wanted the chance to focus on writing interesting material I would have to do it as Bowie always had.  Songwriting is a priesthood that I would no longer compromise.  Bowie also proved to me that the visual presentation of the material is important. I believe people seeing Ziggy helped them more fully understand the vague aspects of what he was trying to express.  It also made his work very hard to ignore.  These are pillars that time and time again Bowie championed for himself and because of it left a body of musical and visual master work that from my standpoint is unmatched.

Now mourning his death I feel there are countless other lessons in his work that I still have yet to discover and understand.  For that all I can say is Goodbye Mr Bowie and thank you for everything. -Enzo

​EnzoSprigg.com

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