Some Are

Written by: David Bowie, Brian Eno
Recorded: 1976; 1991
Producers: David Bowie, Tony Visconti

Released: 27 August 1991

Available on:
All Saints

Personnel

David Bowie: keyboards, synthesizers
Brian Eno: keyboards, synthesizers

‘Some Are’ is believed to be an outtake from the Berlin trilogy sessions. It was first released as a bonus track on the 1991 reissue of Low.

The precise origins of the track are uncertain. Although most likely to date from the Low sessions and co-credited to Brian Eno, it may have been written in 1975 for Bowie’s abandoned score for The Man Who Fell To Earth.

Philip Glass incorporated ‘Some Are’ into the second movement of his Low Symphony in 1993. That version was used as pre-show music during Bowie’s Outside Tour.

The release

Low was remastered and released on CD, vinyl and cassette by Rykodisc/EMI in 1991. The new version contained three bonus tracks: ‘Some Are’, ‘All Saints’, and a remix of ‘Sound And Vision’.

In 1993 Bowie privately pressed 150 copies of All Saints, a compilation of instrumentals which was given to family and friends as Christmas gifts. It received a wider release in 2001 with a different running order.

Philip Glass’s version of ‘Some Are’ was the second track on the 1993 edition, and the final track on the 2001 version.

In 2008 the original recording was chosen by Bowie for inclusion on iSelect, a compilation of deep cuts initially given away with the UK newspaper Mail on Sunday.

A quiet little piece Brian Eno and I wrote in the Seventies. The cries of wolves in the background are sounds that you might not pick up on immediately. Unless you’re a wolf. They’re almost human, both beautiful and creepy.

Images of the failed Napoleonic force stumbling back through Smolensk. Finding the unburied corpses of their comrades left from their original advance on Moscow. Or possibly a snowman with a carrot for a nose; a crumpled Crystal Palace Football Club admission ticket at his feet. A Weltschmerz [world weariness] indeed. Send in your own images, children, and we’ll show the best of them next week.