Reeves talks about Bowie's 'Earthling'

From Team Rock:

David Bowie's Earthling: Where Led Zeppelin meets Won't Get Fooled Again

As well as playing guitar on the album, you were Bowie’s co-producer and co-writer on Earthling. What was the aim with that record?

There was talk that the album was jumping on the drum’n’bass bandwagon, but it’s more influenced by what came to be called electronica. David loved [electronic artists] Photek and Tricky. Those influences were in the air at the time. I never told David this, but in my head I was thinking more of Won’t Get Fooled Again – the muscular rock band with sequential information.


How did the songwriting collaboration work between the two of you?

We were both into collages. I had gotten into Pro Tools [sound recording and production software], sampling – which now seem like ancient technology. So I’d create these electronic sequences, we’d dump them into the computer, sit in the studio with our little travel guitars, and play and sing against the backing track. The other thing, both of us were art-school kids, so we loved the Burroughs cut-up method. Lyrically, David had been doing it by hand for years. And then a friend came up with a Mac program called the Verbasizer. All you had to do was put in a paragraph and it would shuffle it up. So ‘It will end in tears’ might come out as ‘It will end in chrome’ [laughs].

Read the full article at Team Rock.