Stream David Bowie's long-lost album The Gouster.

Stream David Bowie’s Long-Lost Album From 1974, The Gouster

Stream David Bowie’s Long-Lost Album From 1974, The Gouster

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Brow Beat
Slate's Culture Blog
Sept. 26 2016 11:03 AM

Stream David Bowie’s Long-Lost Album From 1974, The Gouster

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David Bowie.

Ron Galella, Ltd./WireImage

David Bowie’s The Gouster is finally seeing the light of day. The album was originally recorded in various studio sessions in 1974 and has now—after four decades—been released for legal streaming via Parlophone Records, as part of a broader compilation dedicated to Bowie’s work in the mid-’70s. The Gouster follows last year’s release of David Bowie—Five Years (1969–1973) and comes in anticipation of Bowie’s final recordings, set for an Oct. 21 release.

The recording process of The Gouster was reportedly a trying experience. According to producer Tony Visconti’s liner notes, the goal was to create a “killer soul album,” inspired by the TV show Soul Train and rooted in “an attitude of pride and hipness.” The album was excessively long, however, with temporal constraints imposed by vinyl despite the fact that Bowie and Visconti, according to NME, “squeezed in everything.” In the end, the finished product is seven tracks—including “It’s Going to Be Me,” which was reissued on Young Americans in 1991, and “Somebody Up There Likes Me.”

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One way or another, many of these tracks have trickled out over the years. But it’s still something special to hear them as originally intended. And while The Gouster never received a formal release, Visconti and Bowie were beyond satisfied with the end result: “Forty minutes of glorious funk,” as Visconti described the album. “That’s what it was, and that’s how I thought it would be.”

Stream The Gouster on Spotify below—or on Apple Music here—beginning at Track 50.