Tag: 2010

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Welcome 2 America, 2011

Hot Summer

Photo by Mike Ruiz; © Sony Legacy/the Prince Estate.

We’re now exactly one week out from the release of Prince’s shelved 2011 album Welcome 2 America–i.e., just enough time for Sony Legacy to push out one last promotional single to streaming services and, uh, TikTok. As a certified Old, I don’t have much to say about the last bit; but I can certainly share my thoughts about the song itself.

“Hot Summer” is one of a handful of tracks on Welcome 2 America that stretches the definition of “previously unreleased.” Prince premiered the song on Minnesota Public Radio station 89.3 The Current on his 52nd birthday, June 7, 2010, shortly after a heat wave pushed the temperature in Minneapolis to a record-breaking 95 °F on May 24. Initial reactions were, to put it kindly, mixed. Music blog Stereogum compared the song variously to Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl” (!) and Hanna-Barbera mascot-suit bubblegum act the Banana Splits (!!), before concluding, “At least the lyrics are positive.” A 35-page thread on prince.org began with tepid praise but swiftly descended into mayhem, with arguments over whether the woman singing the hook was Janelle Monae (it’s Liv Warfield) and much hand-wringing over Prince’s “decline in writing ability.” Perhaps the most trenchant burn came a little less than two years later, when ex-Family frontman Paul Peterson responded to a subliminal swipe from Prince by remixing the track into a parody ad for Midwestern home improvement chain Menards.

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Welcome 2 America, 2011

Born 2 Die

Photo by Randee St. Nicholas; © Sony Legacy/the Prince Estate.

We now have just under two months to go before the release of Welcome 2 America, the album Prince recorded and shelved before his tour of the same name in 2010 and 2011. So, with the 63rd anniversary of the artist’s birth right around the corner on Monday, the time was ripe for another promotional single; and Sony Legacy has delivered with a track previously teased on 60 Minutes back in April, “Born 2 Die.” In fact, the drop appears to have been timed to commemorate not just one date, but two: Thursday, June 3 would have been the 79th birthday of Curtis Mayfield, whose early-’70s sound was a transparent source of inspiration for the song.

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Welcome 2 America, 2011

Welcome 2 America

© Sony Legacy/the Prince Estate.

Even after the news was leaked by a French fansite earlier this year, I was still pleasantly surprised when the Prince Estate confirmed the shelved 2011 album Welcome 2 America for official release in July. Up until now, I’ve found the Estate’s posthumous release strategy to be laudable but predictable: alternating between expanded reissues from Prince’s critical and commercial peak (Purple Rain, 1999, Sign “O” the Times) and sure-thing one-offs engineered for mainstream attention (i.e., the Originals compilation of Prince’s versions of the hits he wrote for others). Even the closest thing to an odd one out, 2018’s Piano & A Microphone 1983, had the distinct commercial advantage of coming from the sessions for his most popular album.

Welcome 2 America, however, is something different: a complete album of almost entirely unreleased material, from a period of Prince’s career that even some of his biggest fans neglect. Case in point, well, me; I’d followed along with Prince’s contemporary music for 2004’s Musicology and 2006’s 3121, but fell off after 2007’s Planet Earth and 2009’s Lotusflow3r/MPLSound/Elixer threefer left me cold (for the record, I’ve since come around on Lotusflow3r and, thanks to friend of the blog Darling Nisi, even Elixer; Planet Earth and MPLSound, not so much). When the next album, 20Ten, wasn’t officially released in the U.S., I didn’t even care enough to try and pirate the MP3s. All of which is to say that Welcome 2 America is even newer to me than to many of the active fans who were following the news of its planned release at the time–and while that was my loss in 2011, a decade later it’s now my gain.

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Ephemera, 1981-1982

Purple Music (Welcome 2 the Freedom Galaxy)

Languishing on the inner sleeve of 1999, 1982; photo by Allen Beaulieu, © Warner Bros.

It’s difficult to pin down when the color purple took on the deep significance it would come to hold in Prince’s universe. The reference to a “purple lawn” in his 1976 song “Leaving for New York” was an interesting piece of trivia, but it felt more like an early attempt at Joni Mitchell-esque lyrical impressionism than the genuine birth of a motif. It wasn’t until much later, after the pastel pinks and blues of 1979’s Prince and the stark monochrome of 1980’s Dirty Mind, when the color began to show up in earnest. The album cover for 1981’s Controversy featured a lavender font, with Prince sporting one of his trademark studded trenchcoats in a matching color. And of course, at some point after he moved into his house on Kiowa Trail in Chanhassen, Prince had the exterior painted from its original cream color to an electric purple.

Whether the color’s importance to Prince was a recent development or a long-simmering fixation, it was on his fifth album that he finally shared it with the world. 1999 is rife with lyrical references to purple: it’s the color of the title track’s apocalyptic sky; the “rock” he invites listeners to “take a bite of” in “D.M.S.R.”; the “star in the night supreme” to which he compares his lover in “Automatic”; the promised “love-amour” and the “high” he craves in “All the Critics Love U in New York.” The artwork, too, is dominated by purples of all shades: from the deep royal purple of the background to the phallic, red-tinged shades of the lettering, to the cool violet tones of the inner sleeve photo of Prince with his backing band. Yet not even this veritable explosion of purple makes as clear a statement as another song, recorded on May 22, 1982 and titled simply “Purple Music.”

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1999, 1982

Delirious

Courtship rituals of early '80s French rocker gang the Del Vikings; photo by Gilles Elie Cohen, stolen from VICE.

After a string of songs exploring, to various degrees, the darker side of his emotional spectrum, Prince capped off his late April and early May 1982 sessions at Sunset Sound with something light and frothy. Sonically, “Delirious” is cut from the same cloth as most of its predecessors on the album that would become 1999: from the driving Linn LM-1 beat to the sparse, but infectious synth line. Yet where songs like “Automatic” and “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” assemble these building blocks into complex, ever-shifting structures, “Delirious” offers more straightforward pleasures: it’s a simple eight-bar blues, as pure and elemental as Leiber and Stoller’s “Hound Dog” or Jesse Stone’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll.”

With its solidly retro foundation, “Delirious” is arguably the pinnacle of Prince’s brief, but intense infatuation with 1950s rock ‘n’ roll: an “obsession,” according to guitarist Dez Dickerson, that began when the band caught a show by rockabilly revivalists the Stray Cats while in London on the Dirty Mind tour. “We were all blown away with them,” Dickerson told Nashville Scene magazine in 2014, “the look, [singer] Brian Setzer’s amazing sound, just the sheer authenticity of it.” The experience inspired a handful of songs–most famously “Jack U Off” from 1981’s Controversy, but also tracks like the unreleased “You’re All I Want.” Perhaps even more notably, according to Dickerson, it also inspired both him and Prince to style their choppy punk hairdos into Little Richard-style pompadours (Shawhan 2014).

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