Watch the Poignant Lyric Video for David Bowie’s ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’
A moving, animated video for David Bowie’s third Blackstar single “I Can’t Give Everything Away” has been given a posthumous release.
Visual artist and Bowie’s longtime collaborator Jonathan Barnbrook -- who previously worked on the artwork for 2002’s Heathen, 2003’s Reality and Bowie’s 2013 comeback album The Next Day -- has crafted a captivating, largely black-and-white lyric video for Blackstar’s closing track. The minimal, now-prescient Blackstar album art morphs into a constellation that carries the song’s heartbreaking lyrics. However, by its end, the visual bursts into color and closes on an image of an astronaut.
“This is really a very simple little video that I wanted to be ultimately positive,” Barnbrook said in a press release. “We start off in the black and white world of ★, but in the final chorus we move to brilliant color."
"I saw it as a celebration of David, to say that despite the adversity we face, the difficult things that happen as David’s passing, that human beings are naturally positive, they look forward and can take the good from the past and use it as something to help with the present," Barnbrook continued. "We are a naturally optimistic species and we celebrate the good that we are given.”
Blackstar arrived on Jan. 8 via Columbia on Bowie’s 69th birthday and just two days before his death. Prior to his passing, Bowie shared visuals for the title track and “Lazarus.” After its release, the album jumped to the top of the U.S. Billboard 200 -- Bowie’s only album to do so.