Songfacts®:

• This song finds Bowie reflecting on his own mortality. He said: "The words started appearing out of nowhere. I just couldn't control them."
• Written prior to September 11, 2001, the song was released as the title track of Bowie's Heathen album nine months after the attacks giving it an added meaning.
• Bowie's assertion that "all things must pass" was likely a nod to the recently deceased George Harrison.
• David Bowie recorded the song at Allaire Studios, situated remotely on a mountaintop overlooking the Catskills range near Woodstock. He started the tune one July morning as he observed deer grazing on the mountainside and in the distance a car skirting the reservoir.
  
  "The words came tumbling out," Bowie would recall, "and I realized what it was about... Not a dialogue between man and his god, between man and life itself... Confronting the realization that life is a finite thing, and that he can already feel it, life itself, actually going from him, ebbing out of him, the weakening of age."
• Bowie and his crew were still at Allaire when the twin towers came down – they could see the orange glow from 130 miles away. Bowie said that he only amended a few lyrics on the Heathen album after 9/11, including maybe this song's opening lines.
  
  Steel on the skyline
  Sky made of glass