BOWIE With LOU REED ~ HOP FROG

Recorded October-early November 2001, New York. Released 28 January 2003 on Lou’s The Raven Album Despite the occasional public dust-up, David & Lou settled into being friends, living within walking distance of each other’s NYC homes. In the months after 9/11, Reed was working on an album based on Edgar Allan Poe stories and poems, and he asked Bowie if he wanted to sing on a track. Bowie chose “Hop Frog,” a little rant under two minutes long. “That’s him, not me,” Reed told Venice magazine in 2003. “He chose that part. I was pretty astonished myself, because I thought he would have picked one of the other parts. I thought he would go for one of the power ballads, but it turns out that he was a perfect Hop Frog. I realized that David wanted to have some fun, and have some fun just being Bowie. He did the kind of background vocals on this that I really like, all the way back to my Transformer record when he did those kind of things. I liked it then and I still love it now.” “Hop Frog” essentia