Bowie said in an interview about this song, "That song is a very despairing piece of work--a guy qualifying his entirely hermetic, isolated existence by saying, "Actually I'm a lucky guy. I'm not really alone--I just have myself to look after." But in setting up the analogy of the city taken over by weeds, there is this notion that our ideas are inhabited by ghosts and that there's nothing in our philosophy--that all the big ideas are empty containers."
Bowie said in an interview about this song, "That song is a very despairing piece of work--a guy qualifying his entirely hermetic, isolated existence by saying, "Actually I'm a lucky guy. I'm not really alone--I just have myself to look after." But in setting up the analogy of the city taken over by weeds, there is this notion that our ideas are inhabited by ghosts and that there's nothing in our philosophy--that all the big ideas are empty containers."