When I awoke that Sunday morning, I was so confused. My wife, not much of a music fan, mentioned she’d just read some news about David Bowie. I replied something along the lines of, “Yeah, he just released a new album.” I assumed she’d encountered coverage of Blackstar, which the music legend had dropped on us two days earlier, on her ABC News app or whatever. So it was disorienting when she replied that, actually, Bowie was dead.

This was a stunning revelation — almost biblical, when you consider the Friday-to-Sunday of it all, the true nature of a grand plan suddenly snapping into place. (And that’s before you even get into all the talk of angels and Lazarus and prodigal sons and “the great I Am” on the album itself.) Released 10 years ago today, on Bowie’s 69th birthday, Blackstar had already been received as a late-career masterpiece, a one-of-a-kind oddity in a one-of-a-kind catalog. Bowie’s death from previously undisclosed liver cancer reframed the album as something greater: a strange, inspired farewell from a legend on his way out of this world.

After that initial burst of confusion, it all suddenly made so much sense — at least as much as an album like this can make sense. Gnarled and surreal, cryptic yet heartfelt, physical in its pursuit of the metaphysical, Blackstar is clearly shaped by impending death and by the disease that was gnawing away at its author. It sounds like Bowie stepping into the light as his body falls apart — like one of the pioneers of pop-star reinvention on a vision quest for one last metamorphosis. It made for a perplexing, astonishing finale.

Much of what we know about the recording of Blackstar comes from Tony Visconti, the producer who worked with Bowie off and on throughout his career, dating all the way back to 1969’s “Space Oddity.” Bowie did not do press for Blackstar, but Visconti spoke at length for features ahead of the release, then offered numerous statements and interviews in the aftermath of Bowie’s death. It’s from Visconti that we get the idea that Bowie intended the album as “a farewell album,” “a parting gift.” In a statement posted a year after Bowie’s death, the producer asserted, “Making Blackstar wasn’t a haphazard affair, we knew every minute we were making something akin to constructing a Gothic cathedral.”

Visconti is also the source of the widely circulated factoid that Kendrick Lamar’s then-current jazz-funk freakout To Pimp A Butterfly was a major inspiration for Blackstar. “We wound up with nothing like that, but we loved the fact Kendrick was so open-minded and he didn’t do a straight-up hip-hop record,” Visconti told Rolling Stone. “He threw everything on there, and that’s exactly what we wanted to do. The goal, in many, many ways, was to avoid rock ‘n’ roll.” In that sense, at least, Blackstar was in step with the spirit of the times, as the kinds of indie bands Bowie had rallied around in the 2000s spent much of the 2010s scampering away from traditional rock signifiers.

Or maybe Bowie just felt he’d already reaffirmed his rock bona fides with The Next Day, the tremendous — and straightforwardly rocking — 2013 comeback album that preceded Blackstar. Per Visconti, the pursuit of this unique vision had Bowie operating on another level. “This was a very special album from day one,” he wrote in 2017. “David was so happy and energetic making The Next Day but on Blackstar he was so much stronger, more positive and bursting with creativity.” For better or worse — mostly better — it feels like a pointed attempt to challenge listeners one last time, to put a crooked exclamation point on his legacy.

Bowie famously recruited jazz-rockers the Donny McCaslin Quartet to work on Blackstar after seeing them perform at New York’s 55 Bar. The band laced Bowie’s tracks with bleary horns and off-kilter rhythms, contributing to the album’s pervasive sense of unease, but also sometimes, as on “‘Tis A Pity She Was A Whore,” pushed the music into screaming ecstasy. “David and I had long had a fascination for Stan Kenton and Gil Evans,” Visconti told the New York Times in the lead-up to release, in a feature about how McCaslin’s band wove jazz into the album’s fabric. “We spoke about that virtually the first time we met, back in the ’60s. We always saw pop and rock as something we were quite capable of doing, but we always held the jazz gods on a pedestal above us.”

For what it’s worth, Bowie absolutely held his own with the jazz players, as McCaslin recalled to Nate Chinen:

The thing I remember him saying on the first day of the recording was: “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but let’s just go for it.” Then he got in there and was playing with us right away. There was just a lot of back and forth, with him in the mix. From the beginning, very passionate and very emotional. It was inspiring to us, and we were playing off that. On some of the tunes, we asked that they include his guitar part from the demo track, because it was really gritty and soulful and inspiring. That spirit of collaboration, interplay and stuff, he was encouraging that.

It’s not strictly a jazz album, of course. “Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime),” the first song tracked with the McCaslin players, is a tornado of wild drums and nasty low-end guitar riffs that feels much closer to hard rock. The first half of 10-minute epic “Blackstar” is powered by the kind of softly squelching programmed drums that have often pulsed through Radiohead songs (A Moon Shaped Pool and Blackstar feel almost like 2016 companion pieces) before the bottom drops out and a softer foundation takes root. “Girl Loves Me” thumps along violently, ominously, while “I Can’t Give Everything Away” beatifically floats to the horizon, carried by celestial synths, clattering electronic beats, and the sort of electric guitar shredding Nels Cline laces into Wilco songs. There’s a consistent musical language at play, yet in terms of genre and structure, the album’s music is as slippery as its lyrics.

About those: Blackstar is about more than Bowie dying — there’s so much religious symbolism and vivid personal expression to untangle — but it’s nigh impossible now to hear the album and not notice him gesturing at his demise. Some, such as the “Lazarus” opening line “Look up here, I’m in heaven/ I’ve got scars that can’t be seen,” feel like broad references to Bowie’s secret cancer battle. Other connections are more of a stretch, like the “Where the fuck did Monday go?!” refrain on “Girl Loves Me” — probably not a prophetic prediction that Bowie would die on a Sunday, but let’s not rule anything out. “I Can’t Give Anything Away” begins with the doomed declaration, “I know something is very wrong,” then offers one more riddle to be parsed: Is the title phrase a coy reminder that a magician doesn’t share his secrets, a lament that he still had so much more creativity to share, or something else entirely?

Bowie did have more music in mind, as Visconti and McCaslin have shared at times over the past decade, which muddies the idea of Blackstar as a definitive closing statement on his life and career. But its message was already muddled in the first place. It’s a grand and sometimes grotesque treatise built for contemplation and reaction, not some easily processed memoir or polemic. The idea that Bowie had more to give us is frustrating, the way death always is. But it’s kind of wonderful that this ended up being his last will and testament after all, one final outpouring of personal eschatology from one of modern music’s most vexing demigods.