Baby Loves That Way.
Baby Loves That Way (Toy, 2000).
“Baby Loves That Way” sounds like a Herman’s Hermits number as sung by a willing cuckold and masochist (“baby likes to go outside/so I let her/wants to fool with other guys/so I let her”), and as such it’s one of Bowie’s best early records.
The singer’s desperate rationalizations (she’ll still settle down with him one day, and he’s happy as long as she comes back at night) are undermined by a needling guitar line (by Denis Taylor) that erupts into a barbed little solo. The track is built around wave after wave of droning backing vocals singing the title line: Bowie had wanted it to sound like a group of chanting monks.
Released 20 August 1965, wasted as a B-side to the inferior “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving” (Early On).
In 2000, Bowie re-recorded the song during the Toy album sessions, and put it out as a b-side to “Everyone Says ‘Hi'” in 2002. The new version is slower and statelier, with Bowie offering an ember of a vocal; where the singer of the original has retained some sort of delusive hope, the latter version’s is just beaten and broken. “Baby loves that way,” he murmurs, because he simply can’t imagine it otherwise.
Pushing Ahead of the Dame 
I call this David’s “Keith Relf” period.
[…] songs. There O’Leary writes that Bowie “meant for the backing chorus of his [1965] single “Baby Loves That Way” to sound like chanting monks.” Have a listen: And his 1967 “Silly Boy Blue” tells the […]
[…] Buddhism was an early influence in his songs: he had meant for the backing chorus of his single ‘Baby Loves That Way’ to sound like chanting […]