Marianne Nowottny’s rendition of David Bowie’s I’m Deranged opens like a séance with the past – less an imitation than a dialogue across time. The song, engineered by Gordon Raphael (The Strokes, Regina Spektor), retains the pulse of Bowie’s original yet breathes with a different fever. Where Bowie’s 1995 version glided through the labyrinth of paranoia, Nowottny wanders its corridors barefoot, gathering fragments of melody like torn photographs. Her phrasing, deliberate and disquieting, seems to bend the air around her voice, as if the song were collapsing under its own strange gravity.
In Bowie’s hands, I’m Deranged was the confession of a mind unspooling in real time, a modern prayer to disintegration. Nowottny’s version sounds like its aftermath, a voice sifting through the wreckage. Her delivery is neither theatrical nor restrained; it’s that rare thing in music, an act of surrender without sentimentality. The arrangement lurches with a kind of deranged elegance: jazzy, bizarre, and almost weightless, where guitars hum like anxious thoughts and the percussion shuffles with broken-time insistence.
The accompanying DIY video deepens the delirium. We see her sprinting through the desolate beauty of a resort, pursued by demons both literal and imagined. The setting evokes a fever dream of modern decay: manicured emptiness, architecture as asylum. There’s humour in its horror, a wink behind the mask, as if Nowottny were teasing her own torment. The visual absurdity suits the song perfectly: it’s the theatre of the subconscious, performed in broad daylight.
Her version of I’m Deranged doesn’t seek to clarify Bowie’s delirium but rather extends it, tracing the outline of madness until it resembles grace. In her hands, derangement becomes a way of making sense of the static. The result feels perilously alive, like a transmission Bowie might have sent from another frequency, one to which Nowottny has at last dialed in.
Watch the video for “I’m Deranged” below:
Nowottny has been unsettling the avant-garde since her 1998 debut Afraid of Me, hailed by New York Press as “one of the most astonishing debuts ever.” That same spirit of audacity runs through this album of covers. It’s less a reinvention than a reincarnation: old favourites reimagined as human disarray.
According to the artist, “This album was almost never made!” What followed was an ordeal of “starts, stops and revisions,” as hard drives crashed and sessions vanished into “digital oblivion.” That technological purgatory feels embedded in this track. The production trembles with ghost data—notes glint and dissolve, pianos stagger forward as if resurrected from damaged memory. It’s music caught between erasure and resurrection, and Nowottny treats that tension as her canvas. “I found solace pouring myself into these songs,” she said, “and reaching out to musicians and personal friends internationally to collaborate.”
Listen to I’m Deranged below and order Marzanna here.
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