"Strangers When We Meet" is a song by David Bowie, originally recorded for his 1993 album The Buddha of Suburbia. In 1995, Bowie re-recorded the song for his Outside album, and this version was edited and released as the second single from the album, paired with a reworked version of Bowie's 1970 song "The Man Who Sold the World". Development "Strangers When We Meet" is a song that Bowie recorded 3 times: once in 1993 with Reeves Gabrels and his band Modern Farmer (unreleased), once in 1993 with Bowie's band for release on the album The Buddha of Suburbia, and then again in 1994–95 for inclusion on Outside. Both biographers Nicholas Pegg and Chris O'Leary agree that the song seemed out-of-place on Outside: Pegg says that song, "at the end of 1. Outsides art-rock insanity, 'Strangers When We Meet' seems even more incongruous, resolving all the album's angst and black comedy in a soothing slice of conventional pop", and O'Leary calls the song "transient" and not suited on either of the albums on which it appeared, with the song almost seeming like a bonus track appended at the end of Outside. The Buddha version is called "tense, more compact, nervier" compared to the "lush" version on Outside. B-sides While the version of "The Man Who Sold the World" was labeled a "live version", it was actually a studio-recorded track based on a reworked version of the song recorded in late October 1995 and performed on the Outside Tour, and mixed by Brian Eno. This version was re-released in 2020 on the EP Is It Any Wonder? "Get Real" was released as a bonus track to the Japanese release of Outside in 1995, as a b-side to this single, and again on the 2004 re-release of Outside and in the 2007 David Bowie (box set). The song, a leftover from the Outside sessions, was described as a "far more conventional pop-rock composition than anything on the album" with a reference to some of Bowie's own "unlamented" mid-Eighties work. A sheet of paper dated 6 March 1994, on display at the David Bowie Is exhibit, showed that this song's lyrics were at least partly run through the Verbasizer program, which Bowie liked to use like scissors and paper to cut up and re-arrange his lyrics. Pegg called the song "an appealing glimpse into the wealth of extra material recorded during the [Outside]