Hookpad yet, since I've been under the weather (and this cold is bothering my ears at times), but it is interesting.
I'd checked Wikipedia first to try to verify the key change I thought I'd heard, and found more info than I'd expected, from a book about Bowie's songs, according to the references.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Americans_(song)
"Young Americans" compositionally stands out from Bowie's prior recordings.[5] With an improvisational song structure containing three verses and refrains, a saxophone solo, a bridge, a breakdown, and two additional extended verses and refrains,[9] author James E. Perone says the use of four-measure phrases flow together through the use of dominant chords "in a completely natural way".[5] The song is primarily in the key of C major; the verses end on G major, extending into the refrains with F major before reverting back to C on the title phrases. The bridge deviates into A minor before the guitar closes it with A major, while the fourth verse is in D major.[9]
Actually, that's info from two books on Bowie's music, Perone's
The Words and Music of David Bowie, and Chris O'Leary's
Rebel Rebel: All the Songs of David Bowie from '64 to '76.
And I found more info here,on the website of a musician/producer/songwriter who teaches songwriting:
https://tonyconniff.com/bowie-a-songwriting-look-inside-young-americans/
There are some surprises in store, though. After a 4 bar Dave Sanborn alto sax solo (| Aminor | F | Aminor | F |)… the bridge chords:
|| Aminor Eminor | C | Aminor Eminor | F | Emajor ||
Ah-ha… Key change! Going to an ‘E’ chord here instead of Eminor sets up the next 4 chords – | Dmajor | Eminor | F G | Eminor A | – which glide us into the last part of the song a whole step up – in Dmajor (instead of Cmajor).
A great touch is that the last 4 bars of the bridge/modulation is played solo on a dinky-sounding chorused/out of tune guitar that completely undercuts the potential cheesiness of the new key entering. Brilliant!
There isn't much about this song in producer Tony Visconti's book. He was called in after they'd already done some demos, and was asked to fly to the US immediately. He rushed to the studio, jetlagged, and found out he would have to be the engineer as well, since Bowie wasn't happy with the American engineer there. Who was a good engineer, but Bowie was unhappy with the sound because, as Tony explained, in the UK they were still doing a lot of equalizing and compression on all the instruments during the recording session,as they'd been doing since before they had 8- and 16-track tape, while in America engineers were recording "flat" with no processing, planning to leave the "final sonic solutions" to mixing. Bowie wasn't willing to turn that over to the engineer, so Tony recorded it the way they'd been doing in Britain. And they managed to record the final version of the song that first day, even with Tony jet-lagged. But apparently this wasn't one of the songs where Bowie made last-minute changes while recording the final version.
This has always been one of my favorite Bowie songs.
= new reply since forum marked as read