Station to Station was Bowie’s tenth studio album, and its name reflects that is a transitional work. It follows on from 1975’s commercially successful Young Americans, and presages the albums of his so-called Berlin Trilogy, which would follow it – the first of which, Low, was released a little over a year later. While its best known song was the hit Golden Years, the title track is perhaps the most significant for his career, introducing the Thin White Duke, Bowie’s new persona.
The album is a critical darling among Bowie’s career, although it was only moderately successful at the time of its release – far from a bomb, but not a great hit either. Perhaps because he recorded it while suffering from cocaine addiction, or perhaps just due to the way one normally changes as one ages, in a 1997 interview, Bowie himself later said it felt like “a piece of work by an entirely different person”, and that it was a “great, damn good” album and also “extremely dark”.
