Visconti tells Rolling Stone: "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. 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."

Last week, Bowie released the sprawling title track from the album which originally clocked in at over 11 minutes. But Visconti reports they cut it back to 9 minutes 57 seconds as iTunes won't post singles over 10 minutes in length.