Podcast: 40 Years of For You

Are there many that listen to podcasts but don’t read blogposts? Different strokes I suppose, but podcasts make it difficult to get to the content. Thankfully this particular one has actual music, most are just constant talking, which is much faster to digest, not even taking into account accents etc..

As to your podcast review, it’s much appreciated. A few things I’d like to add. The Rick James – Come Get It album was a much more formed and confident product. It proudly says “Produced, arranged and composed by Rick James”. Even though Prince heavily pushed the one-man-band, the idea of the main person that does most everything (Rick James also being a multi-instrumentalist) was very much in the air.

The album itself is very much Prince presenting himself, to both the record company and the audience. Not just the opening “For You” for his audience (much like Work It Out was a message only to the record company), but also the workmanship. Songs like In Love are exercises in form, more than heartfelt songs he created to express his inner feelings. If you listen to the demos, you’ll hear his influences much more clearly (his lower register singing especially being Larry Graham rip-offish, for instance) and that was removed for the released album. Interesting bit of info there is that Parliament’s Flashlight was Bernie going Larry Graham on the synthesizer, Just As Long and especially Soft and Wet was Prince going Larry Graham. More of things being in the air and done across the industry.

I find myself reaching back to the album, although I mostly only go for For You, Soft & Wet, Crazy You (I love the Osunlade cover version of this, making it a bit more Brazil even, available on spotify) and Just As Long.

It is definitely part of the “soft Prince” era, as I like to think of the first two albums, or the “not yet broken out of the mold” era. He was very much perfecting things too much (which unfortunately he completely threw out the window for the throwaway “Prince” album, which just doesn’t have songs that are strong enough), but overall it’s a solid album that gets overlooked for some, to me, unknown reason. Maybe it is because it is an “industrial” album, in that it tries to show and follow industry best practice, which is what he almost completely stopped doing by the time Dirty Mind came around.

Prince swapped credit for the music to “Make it Through the Storm” for lyrical credit on “my Love of Forever”

I have been listening to the podcast in celebration of Prince’s debut album “For You.” These days, in the land of contracts in the recording industry, the world will not get to hear the very early works of an artist. They will already be expected to have ironed out all the wrinkles, pounded out all the dents, and given the final sanding and finish. And though the public gets a very finished product, they aren’t there during the growth process. In the case of Prince, not only did he get the much-needed support of Warner Brothers, but the public was given the opportunity to experience the excitement of watching him grow as an artist and as a person. I love to collect stones and polish them. It is exciting to watch the beauty develop in the process. Prince was so gifted but he was still rough at the beginning of his career. We are fortunate to have the early record of his progress.

The thing that impressed me most about the song “For You” was not the forty-some voices, though creating a choir from just one person’s voice is amazing. But it is the sincerity of his message. Isn’t it so very stunning reading these words so many years later after all of the time that has passed since they were first conceived and penned? The warmth that comes from these words could melt you; so heartfelt and vulnerable. “For You” reads like a wedding vow. I wonder how many people in hearing that song really understood the seriousness of the person on the other end of those words. Is there any other artist that started out their career with such a definitive statement? This was the start of a relationship and what was on his first album and, I would say, on the ones to follow was his gift. And when you see it like that, it puts an additional perspective on his work. Yes, he was an artist subject to criticism of his work, but there was a lot of heart there from someone who really put himself out there in his music. It was his way of having a relationship in his personal and public life. He said it himself, if you wanted to know what he was about, it was all in his music.
Thanks for the space to share these, my thoughts, with you.