Top 20 David Bowie Songs: Drawn From 26 Studio Albums, 1967 to 2016
These are my top 20 David Bowie songs, ranked, each one placed on the album it came from across the 26 studio albums I mapped, 1967 to 2016. I researched 166 credited musicians for that print, and the list below notes how many players each song's album carries.
The map itself works like a transit diagram. Each studio album on the map is a station, in release order, and each credited musician is a line running through the records they played on. A one off contributor becomes a branch line. That is why a song list and a map tell you different things: the list is what you remember, the map is who was in the room.
The 20 songs, ranked, with the album each comes from
- "Heroes" (1977), from "Heroes", 9 credited musicians. Co-written with Brian Eno, and the one Berlin period track that turned six minutes of treated noise into something a stadium can sing.
- "Life on Mars?" (1971), from Hunky Dory, 5 credited musicians. Mick Ronson's string arrangement carries it, and on my map Hunky Dory is one of the smallest casts in the whole run.
- "Space Oddity" (1969), from David Bowie, 9 credited musicians. Released days before Apollo 11, with Rick Wakeman on Mellotron and Paul Buckmaster's arrangement.
- "Changes" (1971), from Hunky Dory, 5 credited musicians. The piano song that gave every later reinvention its licence.
- "Starman" (1972), from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, 6 credited musicians. The Top of the Pops performance that changed what a British teenager thought was permitted.
- "Ashes to Ashes" (1980), from Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), 14 credited musicians. Major Tom revisited, with Bowie dismantling his own myth over an elastic bassline.
- "Ziggy Stardust" (1972), from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, 6 credited musicians. Ronson's riff, and a character written out in the third person.
- "Sound and Vision" (1977), from Low, 12 credited musicians. A pop single that keeps the singer waiting a minute and a half for his own entrance.
- "Station to Station" (1976), from Station to Station, 7 credited musicians. Ten minutes in two halves, and the thinnest line up of the mid seventies on my map.
- "Under Pressure" (1981), with Queen. This one is not on my map at all, because it was never a track on a Bowie studio album. See the FAQ below.
- "Let's Dance" (1983), from Let's Dance, 16 credited musicians. Produced by Nile Rodgers, with Stevie Ray Vaughan's guitar solo, and a jump from 7 credited players on Station to Station to 16.
- "Rebel Rebel" (1974), from Diamond Dogs, 6 credited musicians. Herbie Flowers on bass, five years after he played on the 1969 album.
- "Fame" (1975), from Young Americans, 19 credited musicians. Co-written with John Lennon, and the first Bowie record where the cast suddenly gets crowded.
- "Young Americans" (1975), from Young Americans, 19 credited musicians. Carlos Alomar's line starts here and runs for the next 28 years.
- "Blackstar" (2016), from Blackstar, 11 credited musicians. The last station on the map, with Tony Visconti producing, 47 years after he first appears on it.
- "Lazarus" (2016), from Blackstar, 11 credited musicians. A jazz rock ballad written as its own elegy.
- "Modern Love" (1983), from Let's Dance, 16 credited musicians. Fifties rock and roll momentum under eighties production.
- "The Man Who Sold the World" (1970), from The Man Who Sold the World, 5 credited musicians. A deep cut for twenty years, then a cult standard.
- "Moonage Daydream" (1972), from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, 6 credited musicians. Ronson's closing solo is the best argument for the whole glam project.
- "Five Years" (1972), from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, 6 credited musicians. The opening track, building from a drum pattern to a collapse.
The credited musician counts above come from my own research sheet for the Bowie map, which is the document the artwork was drawn from. The map covers studio records only, and it stops before Toy, released in 2021, because that postdates the artwork.
Where the top 20 David Bowie songs come from on the map
Nineteen of the twenty sit on twelve of the twenty six stations. That is the part a ranked list hides: they cluster on a handful of records, and those records have very different numbers of people on them.
| Album | Year | Songs in my top 20 | Credited musicians |
|---|---|---|---|
| David Bowie | 1969 | 1 | 9 |
| The Man Who Sold the World | 1970 | 1 | 5 |
| Hunky Dory | 1971 | 2 | 5 |
| The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust | 1972 | 4 | 6 |
| Diamond Dogs | 1974 | 1 | 6 |
| Young Americans | 1975 | 2 | 19 |
| Station to Station | 1976 | 1 | 7 |
| Low | 1977 | 1 | 12 |
| "Heroes" | 1977 | 1 | 9 |
| Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) | 1980 | 1 | 14 |
| Let's Dance | 1983 | 2 | 16 |
| Blackstar | 2016 | 2 | 11 |
Four of my twenty come off one album recorded by six people. The busiest station on the whole map is Black Tie White Noise at 24 credited musicians, and nothing from it made my list, which tells you how little the size of a cast predicts the songs that last.
Mick Ronson plays on four of my top five, then his line stops
Ronson is credited on six of the twenty six albums: The Man Who Sold the World (1970), Hunky Dory (1971), Ziggy Stardust (1972), Aladdin Sane (1973) and Pin Ups (1973), and then nothing for twenty years.
His line reappears once, on Black Tie White Noise in 1993. Ronson died that year. When I plot a map, that is the shape I am looking for, a line that runs hard for four years, breaks, and comes back for exactly one station at the end. A discography list in date order cannot show you that. A map can, and on the Bowie print it is the first thing most people trace with a finger.
Tony Visconti is the longest line on the print
Visconti is credited on nine of the twenty six studio albums, starting with the 1969 David Bowie and finishing on Blackstar in 2016. That is a 47 year span, longer than any other name on the map, and longer than most bands exist.
He earns his line because he is credited playing as well as producing. That is the rule I apply right across the range: a producer only gets a line if the credits also show them playing something. It keeps the map honest about who was a musician on the record, and it is why some very famous studio names are absent from prints you would expect to find them on.
Carlos Alomar and Mike Garson, eleven stations each
Two names tie for the longest run of guest appearances, both on eleven of the twenty six albums. Carlos Alomar starts on Young Americans (1975) and finishes on Reality (2003). Mike Garson starts earlier, on Aladdin Sane (1973), vanishes after Young Americans, and does not reappear until Never Let Me Down in 1987, a twelve year gap in the middle of his own line.
It would be easy to draw Garson as one continuous line and nobody would complain. The credits say otherwise, so the map shows the gap.
Where the credits came from
When I research a map I work from sleeve credits, session archives and historical databases, one album at a time, into a spreadsheet with a column per station and a row per musician. For Bowie that sheet runs to 167 names, 166 of them on the 26 albums of the print (the other appears only on Toy, which postdates the artwork), and the counts in this post are read straight off it. It is hand work, done without AI, and it is the only way I know to end up with a print a fan cannot immediately argue with. A version of the Bowie map is held in the permanent collection at the V&A David Bowie Centre, V&A East Storehouse, London.
Sizes, paper and framing
The David Bowie discography art print is a Giclée on 230gsm premium acid-free matte fine art paper. A3 (420 x 297 mm) is £35 unframed. A2 (594 x 420 mm) is £45 unframed or £125 in a black wood frame. A1 (841 x 594 mm) is £65 unframed or £175 framed. Three inch formats sit alongside those as separate sizes rather than conversions: 16 x 12 in, 24 x 18 in and 36 x 24 in. A3 is unframed only.
Related reading
If you want the people rather than the songs, I have written up all of the David Bowie session musicians and collaborators on the map. If you want the records rather than the tracks, there is my own David Bowie albums ranked piece. The rest of the range sits in the music maps collection.
Questions I get asked about the Bowie map
How many studio albums did David Bowie make?
Twenty six, on my map, from the 1967 debut David Bowie to Blackstar in 2016. Toy was released in 2021 and postdates the artwork, so it is not a station.
What are the top 20 David Bowie songs?
The twenty above are my own ranking, not a chart position or a critics' poll. I have ordered them by what I think has lasted, and then noted which album station each one belongs to on the map.
Which David Bowie album has the most credited musicians?
Black Tie White Noise (1993), with 24 credited musicians on my sheet. Heathen (2002) is next at 23. The smallest are The Man Who Sold the World and Hunky Dory, at 5 each.
Is "Under Pressure" on the David Bowie discography map?
No. It was a single with Queen and never a track on a Bowie studio album, so there is no station for it to sit on. It is in my top 20 as a song and absent from the print as a record, which is a fair illustration of what a studio album map can and cannot carry.
What is not on the David Bowie map?
Live albums, compilations, soundtracks and singles that never appeared on a studio album. The map plots studio records only, which is an editorial rule I apply right across the range, and it also stops short of Toy (2021).
Start somewhere else on the map
If you are buying for someone whose favourite record is not Bowie, a gift card for music fans lets them pick their own artist from the range.