"Station to Station" is a song by English musician David Bowie. It was released in January 1976 as the title track and opener of his tenth studio album Station to Station, as well as on a promotional 7-inch single in France the same month.
Co-produced by Bowie and Harry Maslin, it was written and recorded at Cherokee Studios in Los Angeles between September and November 1975. At over 10 minutes in length, it is Bowie's longest studio recording.
Opening with a train-like noise, the song's first half is a slow march, built around an atonal guitar riff, while the second half takes the form of a prog-disco suite in a different key and tempo than the first. It has been characterised as art rock and is influenced by the German electronic bands Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream.
Lyrically, the song introduces Bowie's sinister persona the Thin White Duke, who became the mouthpiece for Station to Station and, throughout 1976, often the embodiment of Bowie himself. During the recording, Bowie was heavily dependent on drugs such as cocaine, which is referenced directly throughout. "Station to Station" also makes references to the Kabbalah, occultism, gnosticism, paranoia and other fixations that affected Bowie's mind at the time.
The opening sound effect is a red herring meant to represent the Stations of the Cross, along with a juncture connecting two different stages of his career; it combined the funk and soul of his previous album Young Americans with the experimental sound he would explore on his "Berlin Trilogy".
"Station to Station" has received acclaim from music critics and biographers, who have praised the performance of the band and Bowie himself. Retrospectively, it has been named one of Bowie's greatest songs and, like its parent album, is seen as the indicator of where his career was heading at the time.
He performed the track throughout the 1976 Isolar Tour, often in character as the Thin White Duke, and continued to perform it on different tours throughout his career. It was remastered, along with its parent album, as part of the box set Who Can I Be Now? (1974–1976) in 2016.