David Bowie - Young Americans: C or D?

Is it kind of like Revolution in the Head, but for Bowie's songs?

oh yes

Start here, his first drafts: https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/

Hah, awesome! Thanks Alfred!!

Yeah, I dug your contributions to the A+ thread, bird! that mention was more for the gen. public.
Getting back to fascination w permutations of the Philly Soul Gamble-Huff-Bell-Creed-MFSB etc.-associated sound---with YA, and before that, the Philly sessions on Dusty Springfield's The Complete Atlantic Singles 1968-1971, thanks to Alfred's enticing Pitchfork review---wow, too bad she didn't come back there and work with Bowie a little bit (but at least she got in w the Pet Shop Boys)(There's a whole collection of her Philly work. although I see that xgau thought the original releases from that were too similar--should be good for cherrypicking, anyway) (Fave from her Philly singles: "Let Me Get In Your Way," which I can totally imagine Bo and Luther & co. getting in on, though she doesn't really need them.)

Thanks dow!

And yeah, that would've been interesting to see Dusty collaborate with Bowie. I mentioned this in another thread, but if it wasn't for her illness, I could easily see her handling all the lead vocals on Elvis Costello & Burt Bacharach's Painted from Memory. (Costello's phrasing often recalls her own as if he was trying to emulate her, which would have been appropriate.) It's too bad she never got to make a follow-up album on the level of Dusty in Memphis because I think she had it in her to do at least a few more as good as that.

On another topic, here's a later mix of "It's Gonna Be Me" created around 2007:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIPnSu0msFI

If I got this right, when Visconti and Bowie programmed what they thought was going to be THE album (well after they deemed Gouster unsatisfactory), "It's Gonna Be Me" was included with a healthy dose of string overdubs. After it got ditched (along with "Who Can I Be Now?") in favor of two new Lennon recordings ("Fame" and "Across the Universe"), what would've been the master mix was eventually lost. By the time somebody was ready to release it (namely Rykodisc), they had to use an alternate mix without the string overdubs. This is the same alternate used for the Gouster reconstruction in the 2015 box set. The 2007 mix was Visconti's attempt to re-create something closer to the lost master mix, complete with string overdubs, but it's doubtful that it's a close match. To date, the 2007 reissue is the only place to find it, which is unfortunate because not only is it out-of-print, it doesn't sound very good as it was mastered with NoNoise, excessive compression and a very harsh EQ pattern.