The Man Who Sold David Bowie to Target
JAN 17, 2025
The name of the band is Slinky Vagabond. The new album is The Eternal Return.
The band’s name comes from a line in David Bowie’s song “Young Americans”: “Scanning life through the picture window/ She finds the slinky vagabond.” Listening to The Eternal Return, released Jan. 14, 2025, you cannot help but think about Bowie.
Slinky Vagabond is an augmented duo, consisting of New York-based musician, designer, and fashion author and academic Keanan Duffty, owner of what is likely the most misspelled easy-to-say name in the English language. His partner in the band is Florence, Italy, based guitarist, producer, and musician Fabio Fabbri, unlikely to be mispronounced in Italian. Duffty sings; Fabbri plays everything else except drums, which feature Christian Dryden. (There are exceptions on certain tracks.)
The Eternal Return is not a tribute to Bowie, except when it is: The song “Ad Astra,” the Latin phrase from Virgil’s Aeneid, meaning “to the stars.” (The Kansas state motto is Ad astra per aspera, “to the stars through difficulties”). It is not inspired by the movie of that name starring Brad Pitt seeking his father (played by Tommy Lee Jones) lost in space.
The sequencing of The Eternal Return has the rises and falls of a Bowie concept album, almost with two sides, like a vinyl LP. The opening track “Lady Bump Discoteque” features longtime backup singer and sometimes companion back-in-the-day, Ava Cherry. The farewell “End of the Show,” is co-written by Earl Slick, Bowie’s preeminent guitarist in the mid-1970s, having replaced the eminent Mick Ronson. There is also a song called “Earthman Go Home,” which takes Bowie’s interstellar enthusiasms into a dystopian yet humorous frame. Earthlings are always worried about whether we will like the aliens who visit us; we never think about how when we visit, they might not like us. And for good reason.