Prince and the Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions by Duane Tudahl

Author:Duane Tudahl [Tudahl, Duane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2017-10-12T04:00:00+00:00

Monday, February 13, 1984*

Another song he and I cowrote was “Noon Rendezvous,” which was about our relationship at the time.—Sheila E.26

Prince continued recording, but it was becoming more obvious that he was working on a new project. Engineer Terry Christian explains his theory: “Prince always had a big locker of songs he was recording. Some had titles, some not. He had so much material and he wanted to keep recording, but he didn’t want Warner to know what he was up to.”

Something had drastically changed in the last week, and Prince had a new plan that he kept from practically everyone. Prince had recently spent time with Sheila and had jammed with her family. She and Prince shared a musical lineage passed down to them from their fathers, but Sheila’s bond with her father probably struck a chord inside of him and helped him realize that she was someone he could communicate with both musically and emotionally. “It’s really the music that brought us together,” Sheila explained in 2004. “The fun part about being his friend was I think he hadn’t met anyone who was as competitive as he was. And being a woman, he was like ‘Oh, I have to beat her!’ It was that kind of thing. Growing up in a family that was very competitive, my mom and all her brothers and sisters were very athletic. I was very athletic, and so was Prince. We’d play basketball, we’d play ping-pong, we’d play pool. We did everything besides recording music. And so I was able to hang with him as a buddy, almost as a friend.”27

Prince decided to produce an album for Sheila E. and sell the project to Warner Bros., but he would need more music before it could be assembled, so once again Sheila and Prince recorded together in the studio. “We started writing ‘Noon Rendezvous’ when I let Prince listen to a ballad I’d written and played castanets on,” she explained in her 2014 autobiography. “We talked about it, and I told him my dream was to write a song commercial enough to be played on the radio, which was something totally different for me. Prince was excited by the idea.”28

“It was almost as if he could rely on inspiration,” states Christian. “He could come in and it would flow and turn into something great. Sheila E., Jill Jones, Wendy, and Lisa were around. It was just the women and [his bodyguard] Chick [Huntsberry]. He was probably as close to a friend as Prince has. He needs a guy around, and Chick was that guy.”

“Noon Rendezvous” was recorded over a six-hour session that included Prince singing his own vocals. The final two hours were spent creating a mix.

Status: Almost forty seconds of percussion were eventually added to “Noon Rendezvous” (3:16) at the beginning and end of the track before it was included on Sheila E.’s The Glamorous Life album (3:56). The percussion used for that section was likely inspired by the Linn drum pattern from the backward woman/crying girl scene that was being worked on the previous week.

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