The title sent fans one direction. The song was headed somewhere entirely different.
"Loving the Alien" opens 1984's Tonight, an album mostly remembered — when it's remembered at all — as the uneven, cover-heavy comedown after Let's Dance turned Bowie into an genuine pop juggernaut. It's one of only two songs on the record Bowie wrote entirely by himself, and that fact matters, because it's the one moment on Tonight where he sounds like he actually has something at stake rather than coasting on other people's songs and other people's arrangements.
Despite what the name suggests, this has nothing to do with extraterrestrials — a point Bowie made repeatedly and with visible irritation whenever fans assumed otherwise. He'd spent real time reading a stack of fringe "hidden history" religious texts, Donovan Joyce's The Jesus Scroll chief among them, and came away with a working theory that most organized religion had been built on generations of mistranslation and distortion. The "alien" in the title isn't a being from another planet — it's the distance between people who claim to worship the same God and still find ways to go to war over the details.
Bowie had worn a crucifix since his most chaotic years in Los Angeles — not really as a religious symbol by his own account, more as a kind of personal talisman. That tension between wearing the symbol and distrusting the institution behind it runs straight through the song. He told Rolling Stone around the album's release that the writing came from a real frustration with how much of accepted history turns out to rest on knowledge that was simply wrong. This wasn't a costume or a bit the way some of Bowie's other personas could be — by most accounts, he wrote it out of genuine anger.
"Loving the Alien" was recorded at Le Studio in Morin-Heights, Canada, during May and June of 1984, and released as the album's third single in May 1985, reaching number 19 on the UK charts. Bowie reportedly came to prefer an earlier, stripped-down demo recorded in Montreux over the polished final version — feeling the studio production had smoothed over exactly the rawness that gave the lyric its weight in the first place. It's a familiar story for a certain kind of serious song landing on a commercially-minded record: the demo has the nerve the single sanded down.
Tonight isn't an album many people return to on purpose. But "Loving the Alien" is the real exception buried inside it — genuine anger, a genuine point of view, arriving at a moment when Bowie had every commercial incentive to just keep repeating what Let's Dance had already proven would sell. That's worth remembering the next time someone assumes the title is about little green men.