by Bowie and Maslin. Alongside Alomar, Bowie invited guitarist Earl Slick and drummer Dennis Davis, making their debuts on a Bowie record, as well as bassist Emir Ksasan from the Soul tour band. Newcomers were percussionist Ralph MacDonald and backing vocalists Jean Fineberg and Jean Millington. Mixing for Young Americans was completed at the Record Plant on 12January 1975. Bowie contacted Visconti about the collaborations with Lennon two weeks later. According to Pegg, Bowie was apologetic and asked if two tracks could be replaced by "Across the Universe" and "Fame"; the tracks replaced were "Who Can I Be Now?" and "It's Gonna Be Me". Commenting about the replacement, Visconti said: "Beautiful songs and it made me sick when he decided not to use them. I think it was the personal content of the songs which he was a bit reluctant to release, although it was so obscure I don't think even I knew what he was on about in them!" Songs Young Americans presented a new musical direction for Bowie. Although songs on Diamond Dogs, including "Rock 'n' Roll with Me" and "1984", exhibited a funk and soul direction, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic wrote that the blue-eyed soul showcased on Young Americans "came as a shock". Along with blue-eyed soul, the music has been described as R&B and Philadelphia soul, while Bowie himself labeled the sound of the album as "plastic soul", describing it as "the squashed remains of ethnic music as it survives in the age of Muzak rock, written and sung by a white limey". Ashley Naftule of Consequence of Sound described the album as "a blue-eyed soul album that plays matchmaker between Bowie's artsy rocker tendencies and the warm earnestness of soul and R&B." Biographer Christopher Sandford writes that the album is "a record of high spirits and lively, colliding ideas". Biographer Marc Spitz felt that the album doesn't showcase "Bowie does black music", but rather "Bowie and black music do each other". Side one The opening track is the title track, which Bowie said was "just [about] young Americans", more specifically "a newly-wed couple who don't know if they really like each other. Well, they do, but they don't know if they do or don't." The song also presents new lyrical directions for the artist: instead of "shady" characters living in worlds fraught with darkness, "Young Americans" shows typical American teenagers. References are made to