Last week, we talked about “Down a Long Lonely Road,” a demo from mid-to-late 1978 that falls short of being a “song” in the traditional sense. This week, we have “Baby, Baby, Baby”: another home recording from the same period, which comes at least a little closer to “song” territory. For one thing, “Baby, Baby, Baby” actually features instrumentation to go with its multi-tracked vocalizations: an acoustic guitar, to be exact, playing some funky licks reminiscent of the earlier demo “Rock Me, Lover.”
As the perfunctory title indicates, however, there isn’t much else to hold on to here. The only line Prince sings that approaches a complete sentence is, “You must know how bad I wanna be with you”; the rest of the lyrics are, well, “Baby, Baby, Baby,” along with a lot of the wordless falsetto crooning that would pepper his next four albums in particular. And that’s when he’s singing at all: for almost three quarters of the song, Prince drops the vocals and just vamps on the guitar, adding in some finger snaps and jazzy, Spanish-sounding soloing that recalls the original version of “Wouldn’t You Love to Love Me?” It’s charming and catchy, but not exactly a buried classic; just another example of Prince getting some ideas on tape in the months leading up to the sessions for his second album.
What’s interesting about this track, if anything, is the window it provides into Prince’s nascent songwriting process. I’ve noted before that after his debut’s middling commercial performance, Prince explicitly wanted the follow-up to be a hit. From this perspective, a song like “Baby, Baby, Baby” can be seen as a deliberate back-to-basics move: scaling back from the eager-to-please multi-instrumental virtuosity of For You to just the bare essentials of a guitar, a pleasant melody, and lyrics about love (or at least lust) in its most basic, banal form. And Prince would indeed build from this foundation for his 1979 sophomore effort: there may not be one specific song on the record that sounds exactly like “Baby, Baby, Baby,” but its DNA is evident in pretty much every one.
Next time, we’ll look at one of the next links in the evolutionary chain between “Baby, Baby, Baby” and Prince. We’re getting there, I promise!
