Tag: 1995

Prince Track by Track: “Dinner with Delores”

Prince Track by Track: “Dinner with Delores”

(Featured Image: Cover art for the “Dinner with Delores” CD single, 1996; photo by Steve Parke, © Warner Bros.)

Darren Husted’s Prince: Track by Track podcast has reached the end of the Warner Bros. era, and I was lucky enough to discuss SymbolSmallerBlue.png’s final single for the label, the elegaic-but-also-kinda-sexist “Dinner with Delores.” Check it out here:

Prince Track by Track: “Dinner with Delores”

While I’m in podcast-plugging mode, allow me to shout out the first episode of Muse 2 the Pharaoh, the latest addition to Michael Dean’s purple podcast empire hosted by friend of the blog Darling Nisi. I had the opportunity to hang with KaNisa and three of her guests (Stephanie, Crystal, and Erika) at Celebration last month and they are warm, funny people; so it comes as no surprise that their conversation for the podcast is heartwarming and positive, a perfect balance of intelligence and totally relatable fangirlishness. I can’t wait to hear the second episode:

Muse 2 the Pharaoh #1

And if you enjoy that, then keep an eye out for when Erika shows up on my other podcast, Dystopian Dance Party, on Friday! We’ll be talking about our Paisley Park experiences, and she’ll quiz my sister and I on some Prince songs we love to hate.

Finally, I’m hoping to get back in the weekly-post groove and knock out another song from The Time by the end of the week. Wish me luck!

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Prince Track by Track: “Shy”

Prince Track by Track: “Shy”

(Featured Image: From the Gold Experience CD booklet, 1995; © Warner Bros.)

My latest guest appearance on Prince: Track by Track actually went up last Wednesday, but I was too busy to write anything up about it, so here it is now:

Prince Track by Track: “Shy”

The subject this time around is one of my favorite songs from The Gold Experience, which also happens to be one of my favorite Prince/SymbolSmallerBlue.png albums of the ’90s. Hopefully my affection for it comes through. Also, because I forgot to do it while we were recording, allow me to shout out friend of the blog Erica Thompson for her excellent writeup of the song for Diffuser’s 365 Prince Songs in a Year series.

Despite appearances to the contrary, I’m currently working on the last few posts for the Time album, which I hope to wrap up in May; then, it’s onward to Controversy. Those of you who have been following along, thanks for bearing with me while I juggled other projects for the past few months. Looking forward to getting back into the regular routine!

4 Paisley Park’s Consideration: The NPG Era Needs Its Own “4Ever”

4 Paisley Park’s Consideration: The NPG Era Needs Its Own “4Ever”

(Featured Image: Booklet from Emancipation, 1996; © NPG Records.)

Here’s a follow-up to last week’s guest post on Andresmusictalk, this time pitching a collection that does for Prince’s “NPG era” what Prince 4Ever did for the Warner years:

4 Paisley Park’s Consideration: The NPG Era Needs Its Own “4Ever”

Next week, more 1978 home recordings you probably don’t remember or care about. I’ll try to make them interesting, though!

Baby

Baby

(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” →