Prince's pop life, song by song, in chronological order.
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17 Days
With “Doves” now on deck for his next single, Prince was in the market for a suitably killer B-side–a role “17 Days” would fill with aplomb.
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Automatic
On “Automatic,” Prince distills the intricacies of romantic and sexual connection into a clean, simple cause-and-effect relationship: love and lust as a computer programmer’s conditional expressions.
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Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)
If “Something in the Water”’s music wasn’t so beautiful, the self-pity and solipsism of its lyrics would begin to feel ugly: an adolescent projection of self-loathing into a spitefully generic female tormenter.
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How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore?
“How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore?” feels in many ways like Prince’s Ur-song: a pure expression of the carnal and emotional longing at his core, drawn from the deep well of the African American musical tradition.