David Bowie didn’t just write lyrics — he assembled them like puzzles, borrowing a trick from the literary avant-garde. Inspired by the cut-up technique of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Bowie used randomness to shake loose fresh images and unexpected meanings. Whether with scissors and glue or a computer program called the Verbasizer, he fractured sentences to let the subconscious speak. This approach became a powerful tool in his artistic reinvention, fueling some of his most surreal and iconic work.
David Bowie’s songs often feel dreamlike and collage-like and that’s no accident. In the mid-1970s he famously adopted the “cut-up” writing process: literally cutting sentences into pieces and reassembling them into new lyrics. This method – slicing and shuffling text – actually goes back to the Dada artists and was perfected in the 1950s by William S. Burroughs and artist Brion Gysin. In other words, Bowie didn’t invent it; he learned it from avant-garde writers. By literally cutting up newspaper articles, novel excerpts or his own notes, Burroughs and Gysin created surprising juxtapositions of language . Bowie read about this and decided to try it himself – effectively making his lyrics into a living collage.
Bowie Meets Burroughs
Bowie’s first big foray into cut-ups came in 1973-74, when he actively sought out Burroughs. After reading Burroughs’ novel Nova Express, Bowie arranged to meet the author. Preparing for that meeting, Bowie “read everything” in Burroughs’ work and absorbed the ideas . Inspired, he immediately applied the cut-up process to his own music. For his next album Diamond Dogs (1974) – a dystopian, fragmented concept album – Bowie applied the technique to the words fusing Burroughs’ disjointed style with Orwellian themes . As the Guardian notes, “this technique perfectly suited his own fragmented consciousness,” helping Bowie break through the spirals of expectation around his public image. In short, Bowie used cut-ups to reinvent his songwriting at a time when he wanted to break the mold and “make every lyric a piece of finely cut glass,” as he put it.
Cutting Up the Hits
Bowie incorporated cut-ups on several key projects. For example, Diamond Dogs’ most surreal passages – the lyrics for “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise)” – emerged from paper scraps mixed at random (Bowie himself described cutting up “potential lines on pieces of paper, mixing them up and putting them together at random” ). Decades later he would revive the practice on Outside (1995), using a computer app he called the Verbasizer. Bowie programmed the Verbasizer with news clippings, poems and drafts, then let it “randomize everything,” generating kaleidoscopic lyric fragments. In fact, he said that “Most of the lyric content of the Outside album came out of that programme” . Songs like “Hallo Spaceboy” were largely born from this digital cut-up output . In short, Diamond Dogs and Outside bookend Bowie’s cut-up era: the former on paper in 1974, the latter in softeare in the 1990s. (Many other Bowie tracks – particularly from these albums – bear the distinctive odd juxtapositions that hint at cut-up origins.)
Bowie’s Own Words
Bowie spoke about cut-ups with both awe and playfulness. He likened the method to a mystical tool – a “kind of Western tarot” that divines surprising ideas. As he explained to an interviewer, the process is simple: “You write down a paragraph or two describing different subjects, creating a kind of ‘story ingredients’ list… and then cut the sentences into four or five-word sections; mix ’em up and reconnect them” . The result, he said, is that you “get some pretty interesting idea combinations” – even if you still have “a need not to lose control,” in which case you can tweak or rewrite what the random words suggest. In a 2015 interview he affirmed he still used the Burroughs method saying bluntly: “I’ll use cut-ups to provoke a new set of images, or a new way of looking at a subject. I find it incredibly useful as a writer’s tool”.
Bowie also spoke about what the cut-up did for him emotionally. He called it “igniting anything that might be in my imagination” . In other words, unexpected word juxtapositions would spark ideas he never knew he had. He found it illuminating: by randomly pairing disparate images (even cutting up his own diaries or news reports), he discovered “amazing things about me and what I’d done and where I was going”.
Embracing Randomness
Why did Bowie embrace such a seemingly random technique? Because randomness and reinvention were at the core of his artistry. He was famously allergic to routine or genre “purity,” as he put it preferring instead to mix elements wildly – “Little Richard with Jacques Brel and the Velvet Underground backing me ,” as he once joked. Cut-ups fit that ethos. The method let him “allow the accidental to take place,” which he said was “terribly important” in breaking creative deadlock . By forcing himself to use only jumbled pieces, he broke free of his normal voice and avoided writing the same old self. In effect, each song was a mini experiment, a way to “bounce off” the random output and create something new . Philosophically, it tied to themes Bowie loved – fragments, futurism and breaking through identity. Using cut-ups helped Bowie continually remake himself and his music. It’s telling that he once described writing this way as making a mere “ingredients list” on paper – the art came from how those ingredients collided and recombined. The unpredictability of cut-ups felt to Bowie like reading the future: a “Western tarot” of language that could light new paths through his own creative mind .
In the end, David Bowie’s flirtation with the cut-up technique left a permanent mark on his work. It turned some of his signature songs into collages of feeling, and it kept the writer surprised rather than repetitive. As Bowie himself noted, the words on the page may “make no sense” on paper, but when heard in a song they can be “completely” immersive and exciting . By cutting up and reassembling text, Bowie not only generated novel lyrics, but also underscored his lifelong message: embrace change and let the unexpected in. In Bowie’s hands, the humble act of cutting and pasting words became an art form – one he freely discussed, adapted to modern technology, and used to keep his music forever on the edge of surprise.
Sources:
1. William S. Burroughs & Brion Gysin – Writings on the cut-up method, particularly from The Third Mind (1977)
2. Rolling Stone (1974) – Interview: William S. Burroughs meets David Bowie
5.Vice Magazine – “How David Bowie Used William S. Burroughs’ Cut-Up Technique to Write Lyrics” (2016)
6. The Guardian – “David Bowie and the Cut-Up Technique” (2016)
7. BBC Radio 6 Music Interviews (various years) – Bowie discussing the Verbasizer and his writing process
8. Interviews from David Bowie Is exhibition/catalogue (Victoria & Albert Museum, 2013)
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