David Bowie’s “No Plan,” One of His Final Songs, Is a Guiding Presence
Bowie’s history with “My Way” begins before the song as we know it was even written. In 1968, jobbing songwriter David Jones took the tune of French popstar Claude François’ “Comme d’Habitude” and wrote “Even a Fool Learns to Love,” which was never released. Sinatra’s version, written by Paul Anka, was a huge smash a year later, prompting a “pissed-off” Bowie to write what he called “a parody” of it in ’71. You’d imagine that the success of “Life on Mars” nixed the grudge. But going by the newly released “No Plan,” one of the last songs Bowie recorded, “My Way” continued to exert its spell as the terminally ill auteur faced the final curtain.
It’s there in his fragmentary, bittersweet declarations, which build to a belted note in the chorus. “Here is my place without a plan,” he sings, in a faltering flourish of physicality that shakes the spirit to its foundations. Even though Blackstar was one last phenomenal calculated act, it’s a startling admission of acceptance and resignation from the master of reinvention. (Foolhardy as it is to read Bowie’s work as autobiography, you wonder if he left it off the record because it’s such a clear reckoning with his legacy.) On “No Plans,” he doesn’t pick over the highs and lows like Sinatra did, but simply establishes, “All the things that are my life: My moods, my beliefs, my designs/Me alone/Nothing to regret.”
He continues, “This is no place, but here I am/This is not quite yet.” Like the “upside-down,” the “not-quite-yet” is where Bowie seems to confront the liminal state between health and death, and the prospect of leaving behind corporeal existence to become eternal spirit. Donny McCaslin’s ensemble capture the sensation with acuity, melting a trace of “My Way”’s grandiosity into their lucid jazz voyage, marked by starry synths, flurries of horns, and optimistic guitar. Bowie’s performance is similarly nuanced: When he sings, “In Second Avenue/Just out of view,” he nestles the second line into the first like two spooning bodies, evoking how the adopted New Yorker hid in the city in plain sight. In life as in death: Even though, as the memes make clear, earth seems truly fucked without Bowie, his way will always remain a guiding presence.
[Listen to “No Plan” here, at the 46:20 mark]
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