Visconti's bass "runs scales" under the chorus and a melody "elsewhere", Woodmansey plays "ecstatic" drum fills deep in the mix and Latin-style percussion "trembling" on the surface; Ronson uses feedback to introduce the chorus. Bowie's vocals are "heavily phased" during the verses and briefly doubled (which, in Bowie's words, "came as some surprise"), compressed and again double-tracked during the chorus. Douglas Wolk of Rolling Stone similarly calls Bowie's vocals and lyrics "haunting". Pegg describes the guiro percussion as "sinister", the guitar riff "circular" and Bowie's vocal "ghostly". The tracks ends with a coda, described by Doggett as a "haunting chorale" and by O'Leary as "ominous"; it contains wordless vocals and is primarily in D minor. Title and lyrics According to Doggett, the song's title has multiple "precursors": including a 1949 Robert A. Heinlein science fiction novella "The Man Who Sold the Moon"; a 1954 DC comic, "The Man Who Sold the Earth"; a 1968 Brazilian political satire, The Man Who Bought the World. However, none have a thematic link to Bowie's song. Pegg suggests that the title partly reflects an element of "self-disgust" Bowie has over the thought of "losing control" and "selling" his private life via profoundly personal music. The lyrics are noted as very cryptic and evocative; in Doggett's words, "begging but defying interpretation." Like most of his work during this period, Bowie frequently avoided giving a direct interpretation of the lyrics; he later remarked that he felt it was unfair to give it to Lulu in 1973 because it dealt with the "devils and angels" within himself (she later confessed she "had no idea what it meant"). Bowie once stated that the song was a sequel to "Space Oddity" which, in Doggett's words, is "an explanation designed to distract rather than enlighten", quoting the lyrics "Who knows? Not me". The song's narrator has an encounter with a kind of doppelgänger, as suggested in the second chorus where "I never lost control" is replaced with "We never lost control". Beyond this, the episode is unexplained: as James E. Perone wrote, In common with a number of tracks on the album, the song's themes have been compared to the horror-fantasy works of H. P. Lovecraft. The lyrics are also cited as reflecting Bowie's concerns with family problems and splintered or multiple personalities and are believed to have been partially inspired by the poem "Antigonish" by William Hughes Mearns: "As