Trivia / Heathen

• Career Resurrection: Though Bowie had already bounced back both critically and commercially in the UK with Black Tie White Noise and Outside, it didn't translate to renewed American success. This album however changed that, being his best-selling album in the region since Tonight and marking a true commercial comeback over there.
• Channel Hop: With this album, Bowie completely disassociated himself from EMI, leaving their subsidiary Virgin Records and starting his own ISO imprint on Columbia Records. While EMI would retain the rights for his 1969-1993 output (having previously gained ownership from RCA Records, who coincidentally shared a parent company with Columbia), Columbia would gain the rights to his 1995-1999 material, and Bowie would continue to release music through Columbia until his death in 2016, with the posthumous No Plan EP in 2017 being his final release on the label.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: This became the fate of Toy, the album whose shelving lead to Heathen, for a decade; after a draft of the album leaked in 2011, it was the only way to listen to something that resembled a finished product. A finalized version of Toy was eventually dug up by Parlophone Records and included on the 2021 Boxed Set Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001) before being given a 3-CD expanded edition release the following January.
• Reality Subtext: Though Bowie claimed that every song on the album was written before the September 11 attacks, he did admit that the event played a major role in determining the darker, more troubled mood of the album, which incidentally released on the attacks' nine-month anniversary.
• Refitted for Sequel:
  • The tracks "Slip Away" (under the title "Uncle Floyd") and "Afraid" were originally recorded during the Toy sessions, but reappeared on Heathen in re-recorded forms. The two versions of each song are mostly similar, though "Slip Away" removes the intro in "Uncle Floyd" consisting of sampled audio from The Uncle Floyd Show. The Toy re-recordings of "Conversation Piece", "Baby Loves That Way", "You've Got a Habit of Leaving", and "Shadow Man" (an outtake from the Ziggy Stardust sessions) would also make appearances as bonus tracks scattered across the Limited Edition release, the SACD release, and the 2007 Japanese reissue.
  • The track "Safe" is an odder example; it was originally recorded in 1998 for The Rugrats Movie, but was ultimately not included in the film or on its soundtrack album, due to the scene it was written for being cut from the film. Bowie eventually re-recorded the song as the B-Side for "Everyone Says 'Hi'", before including it as a bonus track on the 2002 SACD and 2007 Japanese reissue of Heathen.
• What Could Have Been: An infamous case in Bowie's back-catalog; Heathen was actually a replacement for an earlier album, Toy, consisting of re-recordings of Bowie's pre-1969 material. However, the album had to be shelved at the last minute for unknown reasons. The shelving of Toy affected Bowie quite badly, and he hopped over to Columbia Records immediately after. The full album was eventually leaked online in 2011, and a number of bootleg physical releases started to emerge shortly after before a finalized version saw release, first on the Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001) Boxed Set in November 2021 before seeing an expanded 3-CD release the following January.

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