Tag: moonbeam levels

Patreon Exclusive: Review – The Beautiful Ones

Patreon Exclusive: Review – The Beautiful Ones

(Featured Image: Cover art for The Beautiful Ones by Prince, from Amazon.)

As promised, I’ve sorted through my thoughts on The Beautiful Ones, the new part-memoir, part-scrapbook from the Prince estate, and have made them available for patrons here:

Patreon Exclusive: Review – The Beautiful Ones

TL;DR version for non-patrons: it is what it is, I’m glad it exists, but it’s inescapably dwarfed by the possibilities of what a completed memoir might have been. On the other hand, this is Prince we’re talking about, so who’s to say that the book would have ever come out even if he’d lived to finish it?

I’m sure a lot of readers have also been digging into The Beautiful Ones this last week, so I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Please leave a comment and let me know how you’re processing the book, what you think of it, what’s most (or least) compelling to you, etc.! And of course, if you haven’t bought the book yet, feel free to do so using my Amazon affiliate link.

A few housekeeping-type notes before I go: first, now that I’m pretty sure I have my shit together again, the blog is moving back to a Patreon-first schedule: I’m hoping to have the next post (on “Horny Toad”) up for patrons tomorrow, to appear on the regular blog next week. After that, I’m once again leaving the next post up to patrons: the choice is between “Lust U Always” and “Don’t Let Him Fool Ya,” and as of this writing the former is winning. If you have a dog in this particular fight and want your voice to be heard, you can become a patron at the $5 level or above and vote–preferably by the end of the weekend, as I’ll need to start writing soon!

Finally, you might have noticed that the blog is now ad-free; this is an intentional choice, both because I’m shilling the Patreon enough without involving other revenue streams and because frankly today’s Internet ad rates are too low to justify the ugliness of advertisements all over the website. Thanks for tolerating them while they were here.

I think that’s it for now. Looking ahead, if I can keep to my current schedule, we’ll be closing out 2019 with a real big one. I can’t wait!

Patreon Exclusive: Preliminary Thoughts on the New 1999 Reissue

Patreon Exclusive: Preliminary Thoughts on the New 1999 Reissue

(Featured Image: The very shiny cover of the new “Super Deluxe” edition of 1999; © Warner Bros./NPG Records.)

When I saw yesterday’s official announcement of the long-rumored deluxe reissue of 1999–the album, to state the obvious, which I’m currently working through on the blog–I realized that my private goal to get started on Purple Rain by the end of the year had become, to put it mildly, complicated. If I’m going to hit a scheduling snag, though, a compilation with two new discs of previously-unreleased material is pretty much the best possible way for that to happen. If you’ve been reading my posts this year, you already know that 1999 is one of my favorite Prince albums: easily in the top three. So it goes without saying that I am very, very excited by this release, and have already spent money I don’t technically have to get my paws on that frankly excessive 10-LP configuration.

But I’m also a blogger, which means that I am duty-bound to turn this exciting new announcement into content. So, much like I did with the deluxe Purple Rain reissue over two years ago, I’ve written down some quick thoughts on the (very, very long) track list, which you can now read on the d / m / s / r Patreon:

Preliminary Thoughts on the New 1999 Reissue

Speaking of Patreon, thanks to Freek Claassen for becoming my 18th patron this week! If you’re interested in joining Freek and supporting the blog for just a dollar a month (or more!), you can sign up from the link above. It really does help me make time for writing, has massively increased my productivity, and starting this week, it will also allow you to read my song posts a week ahead of when I release them to the public! If you don’t care to become a patron–and seriously, no hard feelings if that’s the case–you can also support the blog by preordering 1999 Deluxe using these Amazon affiliate links for the CD, 2-LP, 2-CD, 4-LP, 5-CD/1-DVD, or 10-LP/1-DVD versions of the set. If you (quite reasonably) don’t want to line Jeff Bezos’ already well-laden pockets, that’s fine too; I appreciate all of you just for reading. Patrons, look forward to “777-9311” by Friday night; everyone else, see you next week!

Turn It Up

Turn It Up

(Featured Image: “This one goes to 11”; Nigel Tufnel’s custom Marshall stack in This is Spinal Tap, Rob Reiner, 1984. © MGM Home Entertainment.)

Along with the Time tracks and “International Lover,” Prince also cut a few orphan songs at Sunset Sound in mid-January 1982. The first, “You’re All I Want,” was recorded on January 16: the day after an unreleased Time song called “Colleen,” and three days before “Wild and Loose.” The recording has never leaked into wide circulation, though Prince Vault reports that its synth line would later be repurposed for the 1983 B-side “Horny Toad.” Prince reportedly gave a tape to Sunset Sound engineer Peggy McCreary as a birthday present; later, the song would reemerge (retitled “U’re All I Want”) as a potential track for his and Eric Leeds’ jazz fusion project Madhouse.

The second orphan had a shorter, but arguably more fruitful history. Prince recorded “Turn It Up” on January 20, the day after “Wild and Loose”; it was the second-to-last track he recorded in Los Angeles before resuming the Controversy tour in Richmond, Virginia. And, while it also hasn’t received an official release at the time of this writing, it is in circulation as a bootleg: quite possibly the most widely-heard 1999-era outtake this side of “Moonbeam Levels.”

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Mary Don’t You Weep

Mary Don’t You Weep

(Featured Image: Cover art for the forthcoming Piano & A Microphone 1983. Photo by Allen Beaulieu, © the Prince Estate.)

Since the official release of “Moonbeam Levels” in November 2016, the Prince fan community has been clamoring for more unreleased music. The results to date, however, have been more of a trickle than the flood many would prefer. Last June’s deluxe Purple Rain reissue got mixed reviews from the hardcore for its track selection and 2016-ized mix (just for the record, I liked it). Since then, there have been rumors of a remastered edition of Prince and the Revolution’s August 1983 First Avenue debut, an expanded version of 1999, and an official release of Prince’s final “Piano & A Microphone” shows at Paisley Park–none of which have come to fruition. It was only with the single release of “Nothing Compares 2 U” this April that the drought showed any real signs of ending. Shortly thereafter, representatives of the Prince Estate (whatever that means at this point) announced two full-length projects featuring unreleased material: one from the Warner Bros. years and coming this September, the other of more recent vintage and premiering, at least initially, on TIDAL in 2019.

While the latter project remains a mystery, today–the 60th anniversary of Prince’s birth–Warner and the estate finally revealed what to expect from the former: a long-circulating collection of 1983 piano rehearsals, cleverly retitled Piano & A Microphone 1983. For better or worse, it’s on brand with the posthumous releases we’ve seen to date: tasteful, collector-approved, and dating from the 1982–85 zenith of Prince’s primacy in the pop market. It’s so on brand, in fact, that for the first time in the last 18 months of Prince releases, I actually caught myself feeling a slight tinge of disappointment. The Vault has been open for almost two years; isn’t it about time we got something that hasn’t already leaked?

Continue reading “Mary Don’t You Weep” →