ChangesOneBowie or ChangesTwoBowie

Also "Ashes To Ashes" is a shortened version.

Yeah, 2 is more "heady" but I never cared very much for DJ or JIOD(A) while every song on 1 is the greatest song ever.

ChangesOne had the Bowie you would hear on rock radio, those were pool hall songs that belonged to everyone... Two was a personal soundtrack for the time when I got a car and could drive into the city and begin spending time in seedy places with really weird people. But I ended up with Two mostly because the day I was at the record store and wanted some Bowie, that was what they had!

I didn't even realize until recently that there was anything other than just plain old Changesbowie. Amazing that he knew he was going to do a second one when he titled the first one. Life on Mars being missing from Changesonebowie seems like one of the biggest greatest hits comp oversights in history, outside of every INXS comp that omits Don't Change.

yeah kinda remarkable that neither comp includes heroes or life on mars, which have evolved into his most acclaimed songs

i like sound + vision and ashes to ashes more than any song on vol. 1, but hard to deny that vol. 1 is stronger overall.

actually nvm i'm gonna contradict myself after 2 minutes of thinking--i would reach for two over one 10 times out of 10, so that's my vote.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I don't recall hearing "Life On Mars" on the radio throughout the 80s or 90s. Was it a 70s hit in the US?
I like that One maintains the "Ziggy -> Suffragette" segue although I'm seeing that neither song was a single. Guessing maybe they were more like AOR/FM staples of the era. Idk tho bc I was not around then.

I was around then. Life On Mars was never on the radio in the 70's, nor was John I'm Only Dancing for that matter.

changesone was my bowie world til like 87, but all changestwo since as a preference.

I've heard Under Pressure more times in public than every other Bowie song combined

good poll idea! the vinyl copy of ChangesOne that i found in the basement as a teenager was unbelievably crucial to me. ChangesTwo might have blown my mind even more but c'mon what a stack of songs that is on One! so i'm voting for that, with a strong suspicion that when it switches to poll results the images will vanish and we will have no idea what happened.

My vinyl copy of ChangesOne includes a filled out but never mailed application to join the David Bowie Fan Club by an 18y/o girl named Sue who lists her other favorite recording artists as Lynyrd Skynyrd, Black Sabbath, CSNY, and Led Zeppelin. In the box that asks "Are you also a member of the Mick Ronson Fan Club", she checked 'no'.

like that One maintains the "Ziggy -> Suffragette" segue although I'm seeing that neither song was a single.

wow I never knew that - always thought they were because they are on The Singles, but turns out they weren't, and neither was Starman!

The Singles Collection, I meant

"Life on Mars" was possibly better known as a Barbra Streisand album track in the US in the '70s

That two-cassette version of The Singles Collection hung around two of my car glove compartments for a decade – I loved it.

”Starman” was a single, obviously, and a hit, even in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starman_(song)

xxp

ah I misread the Wiki page, yes Starman was a single

a strong suspicion that when it switches to poll results the images will vanish and we will have no idea what happened.

i hope not! i think the images should carry through to the results. of course, there is a 99.2% chance that imgur will someday be bought out by GloboCorp and tossed in the dustbin with tinypic and photobucket, so we can't completely rule out the possibility of broken image links

Voted ‘One’. Flows really well despite being roughly in chronological order.

It totally does, but I'm not sure what the 'despite' is doing here. Going chronologically from freakfolk to glam rock to plastic soul is what makes it flow. Changestwo seems much more of a hodgepodge to me. I'm in the 'One' camp here.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Karl Malone will understand this...Unfolded exactly like a baseball HOF vote: all the more esoteric, sabermetric voters declare early, the stodgier, more predictable votes (and I voted for ChangesOne myself) come in at the end.

Two is quite interesting in the hodgepodge-iness of the tracklisting isn't it! I'd think I'd reach for that presently but mainly because only "Starman" is prominent on rock radio here while I've been passively exposed to most of One for my entire life. And "Aladdin Sane", "1984" and "Wild Is The Wind" are amongst slightly deeper cuts I'd have pressed for myself if consulted.

hear ye, let the record dee-clare, just in case the popular image hosting Imgur happens to get bought out by GloboCorp and then shut down, the final results were:

CHANGESoneBOWIE: 27
CHANGEStwoBOWIE: 21

all 48 of the ilxors left on the cursed island voted in this poll, and let it be remembered that no one was wrong

TWO is the one i'd currently go for (and the one i voted for) just because i haven't played the crap out of every song to the degree that i have the songs on ONE.

i think Two is a weird tracklist to me because I mentally have this wall between the pop-rock-glam stuff thru 75 and the weirder wilder more dissonant stuff that follows, and it feels soooo weird to have those early-70s cuts (awesome songs tho they are!) alongside fucking "sound and vision" and "ashes to ashes." I mean it definitely does something interesting to juxtapose them! same as the ilx bowie poll results playlist does. just as a record one could buy and put on, my mind really rejects it.

(this is not like, a real problem with it.... there are Beatles comps that run into something similar to this - Past Masters e.g., and i've never had a problem with that. maybe it's cause i got to know the Berlin and Berlin-adjacent material so much later in life.)

got a theory that there's no such thing as a bad bowie compilation, even this poor fucked up thing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collection_(David_Bowie_album)

whoops, broken link! this one works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collection_(David_Bowie_album)

the theory seems to work! that's a weird collection, but Cracked Actor, Width of a Circle, and Always Crashing in the Same Car are both some of my favorite Bowie songs, album tracks or otherwise, and Teenage Wildlife is like the reverso world's version of Heroes

thanks for the link fix!

yeah & i find hearing those lesser album tracks out of context can often provide new insights/pleasure into songs i'd kind of written off (or had just become part of the furniture)

(which i suppose is a long-winded way of agreeing with "it definitely does something interesting to juxtapose them")