Famous futuristic artist David Bowie was always one step ahead of time.
The visionary rock star had sight of dropping a surprise album long before Beyoncé did in 2013.
He banged out his TOY album in 2000 as David Bowie wanted to release it differently. He was very forward-thinking and wanted to drop the toy in a digitally fashioned manner. But unfortunately, the album was shelved by the then- Virgin records resulting in him moving to Columbia records with his 2002 album “Heathen”.
Well, the Toy finally sees the light of the day after 22 years of being recorded as it gets released on Friday which is supposedly the 75th birthday of David Bowie.
“At the time the label couldn’t kind of get it together to get it out,” “Toy” producer Mark Plati stated. “But he saw the future coming. He knew that things could come out pretty quickly, and sitting around and waiting for a label with all those moving parts and ideas … it just didn’t fit that record. He’d already moved on to the next record — we started doing ‘Heathen’ while we were still finishing ‘Toy.’”
The seeds of this infamous toy were ingrained when Bowie made a special appearance in a VH1 storyteller series back in August 1999.
“He wanted to talk about the mid-’60s, so he needed to have a song to kind of go along with that,” said Plati. “David decided to do ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’ and he just really enjoyed doing it. He had so much fun with it that we continued to play that song on the tour that followed.”
“He and I got together and just went through a lot of those old songs and chose a group of them that we thought would be great to record [again] with the band that he had now,” said Plati.
Drummer Sterling Campbell stated that it is so surreal to listen to the toy after his death.
“We were just laughing and having a good time,” said drummer Sterling Campbell. “It was a lot of comedy and a lot of jokes.”
And listening to “Toy” six years after his death, you can hear the joy in Bowie. “He was happy making music,” said Campbell. “This was the time to just enjoy the music for the sake of making music.”
