(Featured Image: “A favorite with the ladies”; Victorian advertisement card for Clark’s O.N.T. sewing threads. Photo stolen from Antique Images.)

As we mentioned last week, Prince recorded 14 finished songs at Moonsound in the summer of 1976; when it came time to shop his work to record labels, however, he and Chris Moon pared it down to a four-song tape with just “Soft and Wet,” “(My) Love is Forever,” “Aces,” and “Baby.” The idea was to concisely demonstrate the full breadth of what the 18-year-old prodigy from Minneapolis was capable of. “Soft and Wet,” of course, was the naughty funk number. “Love is Forever” was slick and commercial–assuming it resembled the released version, anyway–with a pronounced disco flavor and arena-rock guitar leads. “Aces” was, according to Moon, the experimental showpiece: a seven-minute-long, proggy-sounding opus intended to “give Prince an ability to step into many different directions–Mediterranean, Indian, all these different feels I envisioned him experimenting with” (Thorne 2016). And “Baby” was the ballad.

Prince initially asked Moon to come with him to New York and represent him as a manager–an idea his collaborator flatly refused. “I said to him, ‘The piece I do is putting the music together, writing the lyrics, producing,'” Moon recalled to Per Nilsen. “‘The piece I don’t do, the piece I have no experience in, is booking your hotel, making sure that your ass is on a particular point at a particular time, making sure that you’re wearing the right kinda clothes. I don’t care about that, I’m not interested in that'” (Nilsen 1999 29). So Prince made the trip solo, staying in New Jersey with his older half-sister Sharon Nelson.

Continue reading “Baby” →