David Bowie announced the release of The Next Day, the album he’d spent three years shaping in secrecy, on his 66th birthday, only two weeks into this year. The record’s continued rollout throughout 2013 suggested that, despite his age, Bowie was an old legend interested in new tricks. Chief among them was a 3xCD collector’s version. It followed much later in the year, keying on new songs and, most saliently, a 10-minute remix of The Next Day’s coming-of-age terror tale, “Love Is Lost”, by Bowie acolyte James Murphy. With the single and its edit, Bowie effectively joined the remix and YouTube masses.

Murphy’s longest remix in a decade, his rendering is both reverent and revisionist. (He references composer Steve Reich in the title, largely because he turns the sound of a crowd clapping into a rhythm that shifts in phase against the rest of the music at the start. That idea comes from the minimalist’s own “Clapping Music”). He uses every verse and refrain here, and he repurposes the tune’s anxious organ. But Bowie’s rock original gives way to Murphy’s vivified disco, as he rearranges the song’s order entirely and leans more heavily on its central lament than its actual narrative: “Oh what have you done?” he implores Bowie to repeat above colorful keyboard splashes and a springy beat that builds up only for its own comedown. It’s posed less as a question of blame and less as one of general despair: What are you going to leave behind, exactly? —Grayson Haver Currin

David Bowie: "Love Is Lost (Hello Steve Reich Mix By James Murphy)"