Kristeen Young with Larissa Dalle

As noted in an RFT cover story earlier this year [René Spencer Saller, "Glamour Girl," August 14], expat diva Kristeen Young (pictured) has had an active public life in 2002, most prominently as a guest singer and keyboardist on David Bowie's Heathen. That bit of good fortune came about thanks to Bowie's longtime producer Tony Visconti, who's been behind the board for a series of Young's recording sessions. Having harvested close to twenty cuts from those studio dates, Young and Visconti are shopping the songs to labels big and small, with hopes of a 2003 release. Though the exact makeup -- and even the title -- of the forthcoming album is still in flux, the tracks Young has collected so far indicate a confident, bolder approach to songwriting, with a hard-charging sound that's augmented by a crack backing band and Visconti's expert knob-twiddling. The fully fleshed demos have also led to several dates this fall in France and England, as well as lots of East Coast gigging.

Though Young's weekly gigs at the famed New York club CBGB's have benefited from the power of her guitar-bass-and-drums cohorts, her St. Louis show on Monday night will showcase her in a mode familiar to her local fans from the mid-'90s: voice and keyboards only. For this date, she'll be joined by Larissa Dalle, who plays St. Louis stages on an intermittent basis herself these days. A frequent gigging partner of Young's in the middle and late '90s, Dalle has been playing an increasingly spare set of late, splashed with tinges of Americana with minimal, tasteful accompaniment.