David Bowie | Space Oddity | The Man Who Sold the World | Hunky Dory
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars | Aladdin Sane | Pin Ups | Diamond Dogs | Young Americans
Station to Station | Low | "Heroes" | Lodger | Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) | Let's Dance | Tonight | Never Let Me Down
Tin Machine | Black Tie White Noise | The Buddha of Suburbia | Outside | Earthling | 'hours...' | Heathen | Reality | 'hours...'
The Next Day | ★ | Changesonebowie
- Better Export for You: The Japanese version of the album includes the B-side "God Bless the Girl" as a bonus track on both the Vanilla Edition and the Deluxe Edition.
- Cut Song: Producer Tony Visconti stated that 29 songs were recorded during the album sessions, but in the end, only 14 were included on the finished album. Of the 15 not included on the Vanilla Edition, eight would later surface on expanded releases:
- On the Deluxe Edition, "So She", "Plan", and "I'll Take You There" were appended to the album as bonus tracks.
- "God Bless the Girl" first surfaced on the Japanese release, also as a bonus track.
- The second disc of The Next Day Extra includes the above four tracks, plus the exclusive tracks "Atomica", "The Informer", "Like a Rocket Man", and "Born in a UFO".
- Meaningful Release Date: The single release of "Where Are We Now?" was on January 8, 2013, Bowie's 66th birthday.
- No Budget: The music video for "Love Is Lost" was made for just $12.99, all of which was spent on a single flash drive that Bowie stored the video on. Even the elaborate Bowie puppets didn't factor into the budget, as they were made years prior for a never-completed video for "The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell" and simply got dug out of storage.
- Surprise Release: The album was recorded over the course of two years in complete secrecy, with everyone involved being required to sign non-disclosure agreements. Even the executives at Bowie's label, Columbia Records, didn't know about the album's existence until the last minute. Thus, when the lead single "Where Are We Now" suddenly dropped on Bowie's 66th birthday, it caught the general public off guard, as everyone assumed that he retired following an on-stage heart attack nine years prior.
- What Could Have Been:
- The album's cover art went through several iterations. It was originally intended to be an upside-down 1974 photograph of Bowie performing at Radio City Music Hall, which would instead be used for the album's lead single, "Where Are We Now?" The David Bowie Is museum exhibition depicted several other scrapped cover designs, including the cover photo for Aladdin Sane defaced with red paint strokes and the cover for Pin Ups with black circles over Bowie and Twiggy's faces, while biographer Nicholas Pegg described another unseen design featuring a Bridget Riley-esque "riot of op-art monochrome patterns."
- Producer Tony Visconti suggested that some of the songs that were left off of this album could surface on a later one. However, the songs that appeared on ★ were all newly-written following the sessions for The Next Day, and while eight outtakes from this album surfaced across various expanded editions, any idea of Bowie putting the remaining seven on a new album firmly ended with his death shortly after the release of ★.
- Working Title: The album was initially produced under the title Love Is Lost. According to Jonathan Barnbrook, who designed the cover art, The Next Day ended up being picked instead because it was considered a more appropriate title given the emphasis on Bowie looking back on his past. Barnbrook also stated that Table was used as a codename for the album during its production.
