Welcome to Season Six of the Regarding…Series, where Chaz Charles and Greg "Wolfie" Wolfe welcome new co-host Mikey Pastore for a journey into one of the strangest, most ambitious, and most thoroughly bewildering works in David Bowie's catalog: 1995's 1. Outside — The Nathan Adler Diaries: A Hyper-cycle.

And this time, it's personal.

After all, it was Bowie's extraordinary declaration that Lou Reed's Lulu was a masterpiece that helped launch this entire podcasting enterprise. Five seasons later, the gang has finally come around to examining one of Bowie's own great artistic provocations.

What follows is less an album review than an orientation session for a world in which the year is 1999, a young girl has been murdered and transformed into an art installation, and a detective from the Art Crimes division is trying to make sense of it all.

Sound like a good time?

Mikey arrives armed with an original CD and its accompanying Nathan Adler diary. Chaz brings the historical context, the big questions, and a deeply inappropriate Ricky Gervais musical interlude. Wolfie brings skepticism, curiosity, and the occasional need to Google something.

Together, they begin unraveling Bowie's nonlinear narrative, his reunion with Brian Eno, the industrial-rock influences of the mid-1990s, and the unsettling question at the center of the entire project:

When does art stop being art and become murder?

Along the way:

• Bowie, Laurie Anderson, and the Lulu comment that started it all
• The strange inhabitants of Oxford Town, New Jersey
• Detective Nathan Adler, Leon Blank, Ramona A. Stone, and the mysterious Baby Grace
• The CD booklet as required reading for a musical murder mystery
• The internet in its infancy and Bowie's invitation to explore a story without a conventional beginning, middle, or end
• A debate over what constitutes the album's actual opening track
• Three podcasters attempting to establish a coherent methodology for studying a deliberately incoherent work

And somewhere in all of this, the gang actually starts listening to the record.

THIS WEEK'S MUSIC:

"Leon Takes Us Outside" and "Outside" — David Bowie

FINAL VERDICT:

Five seasons spent trying to understand what artists were thinking.

Now we're investigating a murder committed in the name of art.

And we've only just stepped outside.

We listen so you don't have to. Although this time, you might want to read along. So visit the archived interactive Outside website here.

The Show

In this season of Regarding…, the panel tackles KISS’s Music From The Elder one song at a time—testing whether its epic ambition holds up under scrutiny. Alongside the analysis, Scott D. Monroe’s original screenplay tries to turn the album’s abstract mythology into an actual story.

Ambition meets accountability.

GO BONELESS

Certified boneless in the state of Ohio by the Boneless Podcasting Network. Go Boneless. Boneless Makes a Better Podcast.

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