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"Nothing ever happens in my life," David Bowie insists. It's a surprising declaration, coming from the man who introduced bisexual chic to rock culture back in the '70s, and whose passion for experimentation--musical and otherwise--led many to speculate that his space-alien persona was no mere fiction. But Bowie has always loved to surprise people. And apparently he's quite serious in his contention that he leads the most ordinary of lives.

"I really do. For the last 10 years, I've been married. End of story. And before that, in the '80s, what really happened? It all seems pretty tame compared to what I see on Behind the Music! I don't think I would make a very interesting Behind the Music. I feel like my friend Moby, who is constantly complaining, 'I'm really famous, but nothing famous ever happens to me.' I look back over a 40-year period and what's really happened has been on stage and on record. Other than that, it's been a quiet life, and I like it that way."

Bowie's slender, graceful hands ease the lid off a cardboard box containing snapshots of his toddler daughter, Alexandria. The chameleonic, 55-year-old superstar is no newcomer to fatherhood. Zowie, his first son by a previous marriage, was born in 1971. But Bowie says that it's only with the arrival of "Lexie" that he's bought into the domestic, paternal role in a really big way. Home for Mr. and Mrs. Bowie--she is the former fashion model Iman--is Manhattan's downtown, bohemian SoHo neighborhood.

"Down here, I've really fallen prey to the 'never go above 14th Street' law," he says. "I'm so at home here. It seems like everybody I used to know has ended up here. Julian Schnabel lives nearby and Moby is virtually my neighbor. It reminds me a little of Berlin, in that it's very easy to be anonymous down here. Nobody bothers me. To take a book and go sit at a sidewalk cafe is a real possibility. That's something I could never accomplish in London or uptown Manhattan. But Iman and I spend a lot of time at home, especially now that we have a daughter. My wife cooks very well. And if we do go out to a restaurant, it's usually just a few blocks away. We've become neighborhood people in that regard. We don't socialize all that much, and neither of us hanker for it. Life is full and rich because it's about 'us' and we enjoy 'us.' We enjoy bringing up baby--a lot of real corny things. I'm just very happy to do them."

This cozy portrait of Bowie's home life forms a stark contrast with the mood of his new album. Heathen recalls the dark, despairing tone of Bowie's late-'70s Berlin trilogy (Low, Heroes and Lodger). The word "fear" figures prominently in four of Heathen's 12 songs. There's "fear overhead and fear over ground" in "these days, the strangest of all," Bowie sings on one track, "Slow Burn," to the accompaniment of strafing guitar lines by guest guitarist Pete Townshend.

Bowie says he named his new album Heathen, "because Philistine was too on-the-money. But I was trying to rope in all the meanings for the word: a destroyer, someone who doesn't understand, somebody who recognizes no God. It's a quandary, which, I think, is current with the times. This is not the first time I've actually used that word. I used it, quite strangely, in a piece written about the Arab world and Christian world, 'Loving the Alien,' which mentions both heathens and infidels."

It's hard not to regard Heathen as a post-Sept. 11 album. But it isn't. "It was lyrically all together in August, when we recorded," says Bowie. "This is just one of those situations where so many tracks seem to relate to that, but I hesitate to use that as any kind of key to the album, because it doesn't have anything to do with that. But God, it sure is appropriate."

Many of the lyrics, Bowie explains, arose out of the perennial parental question: What kind of world have I brought my child into? One track, "A Better Future," is sung directly to God and takes the form of a helplessly human threat, "I demand a better future, or I might just stop loving you."

"A lot of the songs are addressed to God," Bowie confesses. "And my questions about spiritual life are straightforward and very naive. They are, 'If there is a God, where the fuck are you? If you are there, how can you allow this to happen?' I'm sorry, but to allow any 3-year-old child to bleed away on the street is not something that I find mystical and wonderful. I have a big problem with that. There's a lot of vengeance in this album. I guess sometimes you develop an ambivalence toward the higher spirit, or whatever, which, at points, approaches anger."

Musically, Heathen recalls the glories of classic Bowie. "Oh, not again," he winces. "Not another one!" But this time it's true. Without sounding dated, Heathen embraces the epic ballad drama worthy of "Space Oddity," oblique strategies that wouldn't be out of place on Low, and glam-y slash-and-burn rockers that can stand shoulder to shoulder with "Suffragette City" and "Diamond Dogs."

"I wanted to gather an awful lot of what I'm good at and put [it all] into one piece of work," Bowie admits, "and not be shy or embarrassed or feel, 'Oh, I'm returning to something I've already done.' I think I was able to sidestep the idea of it being at all retro. But it certainly smacks of what I do. It's not trying to be dangerously new. On the whole, I think they're just well-crafted songs. I haven't been scared of melody this time. There were times in the past when melody seemed an encumbrance. But for this album, I was working in kind of an individual cultural restoration."

Heathen also reunites Bowie with producer Tony Visconti, who was at the helm for many of the greatest David Bowie albums, including Space Oddity, The Man Who Sold the World, Young Americans and the aforementioned Berlin trilogy. "I've been waiting to do this for the last four or five years," says Bowie. "Tony and I sort of got reintroduced to each other--over what I really can't remember now. And for both of us, it was just a matter of waiting till the time was right and we knew we could go in and work together with a new sensibility, without trying to recapture old glories."

Strange to say, one of the most poignant ballads on Heathen, "Slip Away" is about New York-area, kiddie-show host Uncle Floyd. A kitsch favorite among rock 'n' rollers (the Ramones were frequent guests on his low-budget show), Uncle Floyd's puppets Bones and Oogie figure as characters in the song.

"In the late '70s, when Iggy Pop and I were living in New York, we'd rush back home to our apartments at five o'clock in the afternoon because Uncle Floyd was on television," Bowie remembers. "It was the most hilarious thing on television at the time. It was supposed to be a kid's show, but it worked extremely well for adults as well. Not that Iggy and I were particularly adult. And Uncle Floyd was offered this huge national slot, to go to NBC or something like that, and become, I guess, a kind of precursor to Pee Wee. Or a latter-day Soupy Sales. But he just said no. He wanted to continue broadcasting from his living room in New Jersey, or wherever it was. And he kind of sank without a trace."

Bowie does a frighteningly accurate impersonation of Uncle Floyd's New York-boroughs, working-class accent in recounting a recent phone conversation he had with the former TV host: "He told me, 'Hey, I still work a lot. I do bar mitzvahs. I did a police stag ball the other day. So if you ever want an opening act. ..."

Out of such low, comedic material, Bowie has fashioned a wistful meditation on lost opportunities and bittersweet nostalgia. "Slip Away" is graced with one of those soaring string arrangements Visconti has always done so well. The slightly out-of-tune piano (Bowie deliberately had it detuned) really tugs at the tear ducts.

"There's a 'loss of innocence' quality about the song," he says. "I suspect that's what it's really about. Or, rather, trying to regain that innocence through the song--that sense of fun, lightness and silliness that's gone now."

Much of what people think of as "classic David Bowie"--particularly when it comes to ballads like "Slip Away"--has to do with the chord progressions. Right from his late-'60s invention of himself as David Bowie, the former David Jones introduced a style of modulation--meandering, ethereal yet highly dramatic--that hadn't existed in rock before. "Frequently, they're the kinds of chord changes you'd find in the French chanson," Bowie explains. "Oh, I used to love Jacques Brel and Edith Piaf and that whole tradition of French song. There were chord changes that were terribly emotive. You didn't find them in rock, but I thought, 'I want to use them!' But at the same time, they were often joined with straight-ahead Motown chord sequences. They sounded like odd juxtapositions at first. But now that's just naturally a part of the way I write. I still use those things. Edith Piaf could have done 'Slip Away.' But I doubt if she had much knowledge of Uncle Floyd."

Tony Visconti was one of the first people to grasp Bowie's "odd juxtapositions." The two first worked together on some tracks Bowie did for BBC radio's Top Gear program in 1967. "Ha! All those BBC things where I didn't know if I was Edith Piaf or Anthony Newley," Bowie laughs. "Probably both." It was the start of a long and fruitful collaboration.

"Tony was one of those Americans who was very much drawn to the British quirkiness when he first came over to Britain in the '60s," Bowie recalls. "He was brought over to do the string parts for Denny Laine's Electric String band, which was Denny Laine's first foray into being a solo artist, having left the Moody Blues. Tony loved England and stayed on. And then he was drawn to our emerging underground there--Middle Earth and all of that. [One of London's first psychedelic venues, Middle Earth was the scene of gigs by an early Bowie band named Feathers.] Tony found Tyrannosaurus Rex. He was always drawn to these weirdies. And I was one of them! Tony has always understood me. We were both into Tibetan Buddhism and things like that. All this esoteric crap. And we both loved the same kinds of music. We both adored the Velvet Underground and the Fugs, which, believe me, were completely unwritten about in England. I will say to this day, I had to drag the Velvet Underground and the Stooges into British life. I think my contribution to changing music to another wave was to make people aware of those two artists. Now, of course, everybody claims them. But until I brought Lou and Iggy over to London and had them perform in London nobody ever wrote about them."

Bowie has been at the epicenter of more seminal music and social scenes than perhaps any member of the rock pantheon. He was there in the thick of mod, Swinging London, the Warhol crowd. ... Does he have any particular favorites?

"Well, the safest was the new German electronic music of the late '70s. Because I was trying passionately not to do drugs. And it was one of the first movements I was connected with, loosely, that I didn't feel was really drug fueled. And that was a good thing. All the others had their drugs attached to them. The mods, particularly. That was a pretty heavy drugs period for me. But it was all pills: reds, blues and blacks; downers, uppers and speed. Pill-popping time for me in the mid-'60s.

"But I do think what Tony, Brian Eno and I did in the late '70s with Low, Heroes and Lodger was the most rewarding, because it was a way of developing a language which I could then use--and have done, off and on--over the years. Before that, it was more like copping an attitude on a certain genre of music. I had nothing much to contribute to soul music, but I had an attitude towards it that came out as Young Americans. And I guess it was kind of interesting, because it was very much from a European sensibility. I was aware of that. That was the difference. It was like, 'All right, Jacques Brel with a Stax band: What happens?'

"Whereas the electronic German and European landscape that we found ourselves involved in in the very late '7Os was more about actually rewriting the way that one works. And no small part of that was due to Brian's very odd ideas, at the time, about how you work in the studio. They're ideas I still apply today. Planned accidents, Brian called them. In fact, the title of Lodger at one point was going to be Planned Accidents."

Bowie last worked with Eno on the 1997 single, "I'm Afraid of Americans." But he says he never considered bringing Eno in to work with him and Visconti on Heathen. "It's not Brian's kind of thing," he shrugs. "He's not interested in doing songs ... although he does work with U2. Brian's a brilliant little magpie. He routinely scours the avant-garde and drags what's interesting back into focus. I think that's what every artist that's worth his salt does--takes things that are too lean and slim and hard to grasp, and makes them accessible for a wide public."

While Bowie's electronic music pedigree is pretty unassailable, he took some stick in the '90s for hitching his wagon to the drum 'n' bass movement on albums like Outside and Earthling. "I think those two albums, and Buddha of Suburbia were incredibly strong and successful albums for me, personally," Bowie counters. "I think I went as far as anyone could go in melding songs onto drum 'n' bass forms. And it's an exciting form to work with as a musician, almost like a latter 20th-Century fusion of some kind. But it is just another rhythm, which is what all drum things are. I couldn't believe people were getting on my case because I was using another rhythm. Especially in Britain. I was a little annoyed by that inverted class system thing. You have to know your place. You cannot move out of the area that you're supposed to be in. It permeates every aspect of the British sensibility. And in fact, I think laddishness promoted that even more. It was absolutely impossible to suggest anything at any kind of intellectual level without being called an artsy fartsy. I had to be, [thickie accent] 'Alright, oi've got it. Big tits! How about that? Is that all right?' Fortunately, it looks like things have worked themselves away from that now. But I'm still bemused by the whole Robbie Williams aspect of British pop. Posh Spice? It all looks like cruise ship entertainment to me."

Bowie adds that he "would not entirely like to lose drum 'n' bass. I think I was not alone in realizing, at the time, that it reached a ceiling where it was not going to get any more popular, because the time signatures were just too complicated. But I think it will become, even more, just one of the ways in which I work. And if you listen very carefully you'll hear that 'Sunday' on the new album is, in fact, drum 'n' bass. I'm not lettin' go!"

But still, Heathen is a marked departure from Bowie's '90s work. This is underscored by the fact that he opted not to use longtime guitarist Reeves Gabrels, bassist Gail Ann Dorsey and keyboardist Mike Garson on the album. Instead, the disc is anchored by drummer Matt Chamberlain, with Visconti in his old role as Bowie's bassist and David Torn on guitar. Guest guitarists include, as mentioned, Pete Townshend, as well as Foo Fighter Dave Grohl and longtime Bowie cohort Carlos Alomar.

"I've often changed musicians in the past," Bowie says. "I don't feel much band loyalty. Friendship isn't part of the contract. Besides, I shall be working with many of my old people when I go back on the road again. I told them flat out that I wanted to try something new this time. It's nothing to do with abilities. It just comes to a point, when you've worked with someone for a very long time, that you can almost predict what they're going to play if you ask them to approach something in a certain way. I just needed to approach this album another way, specifically when it came to the guitar, bass and drums. I wanted to have another interpretation of who I am."

Although Bowie recorded some 17 songs for the album, only 12 made the final cut. Among them are three covers. There are homages to two of Bowie's favorite artists; he performs the Pixies' "Cactus" and Neil Young's "I've Been Waiting for You." But by far, the strangest cover on the disc is "I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spacecraft." On first listen, it seems almost like a parody of Space Oddity-era Bowie. But it's an actual 1969 song written by a character known as the Legendary Stardust Cowboy.

"He was my stable mate in 1969 on Mercury Records," says Bowie, "from whom I nicked the name Stardust for Ziggy Stardust. He was this strange cowboy-type guy from Lubbock, Texas. He plays the guitar in his own way and doesn't really sing, but screams and yells and writes the most extraordinary lyrics. It is true outsider art. It puts Wild Man Fischer in the shade. 'Gemini' was always one of my favorite songs of his. And he did say on his Web site [Texas accent], 'Mah biggest regret is that David Bowie, who used my name, didn't ever do one of my songs.' I thought, 'Well, he's right. I'd better do something about that.'"

Heathen is Bowie's debut release on his own Columbia-distributed label, Iso Records. Even before work began on the album, his former deal with Virgin had started to go sour. "The last two years were a nightmare," he grimaces. The original plan was for Iso to function as an indie, signing new artists and bringing out Bowie's own work. But he ultimately decided to forge a distribution deal with Columbia.

"I really had to throw my eggs in the Columbia basket," he says. "In order to go completely independent with Iso, it would have taken me 18 months to put things together. And I just wasn't prepared to wait that long to put Heathen out. I want it out this year. I'm 55!"

The way Bowie sees it, "there probably won't be a music business in two years. There won't be any copyright and nobody will be making any money from it. The move from analog to digital has rendered everything we know completely useless. I really think this is the Gutenberg Bible. Analog costs money. Digital is free."

Coming from the man behind Bowie Bonds and the highly successful BowieNet, this seems like more than just alarmism. But what about the fate of dear old rock 'n' roll?

"Oh, that's been very sick for a long time," Bowie laughs. "You know the Bible was very powerful when it was only in the hands of the priests. But it changed an awful lot once it was printed up and allowed out and everybody got to read it. People started adding to it and having their own opinions. I think a similar thing has happened to popular music as well. It's no longer some kind of Holy Grail, as maybe it was when it first appeared on the streets in the '50s. Now it's a commodity, an everyday thing like any other product we use or eat. So its value has changed an awful lot. It doesn't have the same place in our hearts that it had before. That's OK. But it will be treated in a different way."

Like the picture of Dorian Gray, rock seems to be showing signs of advanced age while David Bowie remains eternally youthful. "I box," he says by way of explaining his health regimen. "I started in '83 on the Serious Moonlight tour. That's why I'm on the [album] cover boxing. I always liked boxing at school, and I just found it was the best way to stay fit. There's something about the 'round, break, round, break' discipline that's not dissimilar to the 'song, break, song, break' structure of playing a show."

Even more importantly, it seems that Bowie's thinking has remained youthful as well. He keeps abreast of current music, and can drop names like Godspeed You Black Emperor! and Grandaddy without embarrassing himself. He's curating this year's cutting edge Meltdown Festival in London and will probably assemble the most diverse bill in the fest's history--everyone from Little Richard to Daniel Johnston to the Lonesome Organist. Unlike many of his peers--Pete Townshend and Bob Dylan come to mind--Bowie doesn't seem burdened or intimidated by his own past. There's an unself-conscious ease in the way he references his history on Heathen, which is a big factor in why the album doesn't seem retro.

"I guess it's because I don't really feel I have so much of a tradition as someone like Pete, or Mick and Keith," he says. "For those kinds of artists, the genre they work in is pretty clear-cut. I think, because I've always been such a butterfly, I don't really feel genre loyalty in that way. It's never become baggage for me. It doesn't intimidate me at all. I don't look back very much. I'm activated by what I'm doing rather than what I've done."