Prince by Matt Thorne

Author:Matt Thorne [Thorne, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780571279203
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2012-10-02T04:00:00+00:00

In 1989, road manager Alan Leeds took over as president of Paisley Park. He remembers: ‘Paisley Park as an entity had really just been an orphan. No one was in charge of the label. It had no phone number, no office, no personnel. It was merely an imprint. Theoretically, Cavallo and Ruffalo were in charge of running the label, but they were more interested in running Prince’s film career and his music career, and they had other artists. They only saw it as worthy for an act they thought was worth taking a crap shoot on. Like there was a couple of kids called Good Question who made a dance record. Tony LeMans was another Fargnoli thought was worth recording. So I said to Prince, “Let’s start treating it as a real label.”’

Prince’s work with protégés had previously been largely separate from his main career, but as the 1990s approached, it began to bleed over into his main work. The prime example of this is Graffiti Bridge, which ended up becoming a showcase for Prince’s entire stable. As well as the return of The Time, the project also involved Robin Power, Elisa Fiorillo,21 George Clinton, T. C. Ellis, Tevin Campbell, The Steeles, Mavis Staples and Ingrid Chavez, but during and after the production of his own album Prince was also writing music for almost all of these artists. Prince had already produced (and written six songs for) Mavis Staples’s first Paisley Park record, Time Waits for No One, and after her role on the soundtrack and in the film Graffiti Bridge he would also contribute nine songs to her second, The Voice.22 But though turning her into ‘Melody Cool’ may have not been the most sympathetic use of this artist, and while the first album featured several songs from the Vault – including the standout ‘Train’ from the post-Parade, pre-Sign era and ‘I Guess I’m Crazy’, as well as ‘Jaguar’ and ‘Come Home’, songs originally written for other artists – he also made a real effort, especially on the second album, to draw from Staples’s life and persona in his writing for her. Of the two songs specifically written for Time Waits for No One, the title track (a co-write with Staples), which echoes in theme and sound ‘Still Would Stand All Time’, works better than ‘Interesting’, but the latter, an account of a sleazy man approaching Staples in a bar, is still far more compelling than any of the non-Prince tracks on the record, such as the soporific nostalgia of ‘The Old Songs’.

Prince pursued his interest in time as a subject for lyrics once more on The Voice, suggesting that ‘Blood Is Thicker than Time’ in a song that seems much more suited to Staples’s personality, combining gospel, biblical references (Moses, Cain and Abel) and her biography, though still in the slightly sickly style of Graffiti Bridge. It’s a far more thematically coherent record than their first collaboration, with the Prince tracks linked by content (in particular, a dismay

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.