Prince

Prince---Purple Rain No enbedding of spotify With Prince I think its safe to say in my own humble opinion that his death affected me more than Bowie's. As a 12 year old Bowie was touching 40 and was always like the elder statesmen of music with a long back catalogue. With Prince he was obviously very successful in the states before the UK. In 1984 when the album was released it was the power of the instrumentation that got me. The film 'Purple Rain' also took the success to another level. The film was semi autobiographical and made the album sell millions. With Prince he was talented spotted and warner bros invested heavily on his work. With Prince I saw on a documentary about the early 80s was that he used to use two keyboards and a drum machine and would construct the songs in a basic format, he would overlay the drum sound with the song roughly how he wanted it performed and then the band(in the case at the time the revolution) would bring their own talents to bear. With Prince he was a workaholic in terms of output and searching out tracks and songs that would be successful, this meant that he recorded 1000s of tracks and at times could not find the avenue to release them. So he started giving the tracks to other artists and other bands like the Time. Now going back to Purple Rain the formative first outing of the tracks was played at the Avenue Club in Minnesota in 1983 he debuted tracks like 'Lets go Crazy', 'I Would Die for you ' , 'Purple Rain' and 'Baby I’m a star'. If you get a chance check out the concert online while you can. Within 6 months of this concert and after numerous sessions the album was released almost to instant success. Now with the Prince his sound went from Soul to Funky, to almost pop between 1978-1982. the 1999 album was the sound of artists finding his feet. But with the 'Purple Rain' album it is the sound of an artists doing an album that features a myriad of styles. The guitar work on this album is excellent. For me the Revolution era of his work is amazing, even the album that followed that was critically panned 'Around the world in a day ' was really good. The Purple rain album that starts with 'Lets go Crazy' which is an anthem. The album features tracks that were really good but were not UK smash hits like 'Take me with u' and 'I would die for you'. The two tracks that really took the album to another musical plain was 'Purple Rain and 'When Doves Cry'. The latter single was initially recorded with bass, but at the last minute it was removed and made the song even better. With Prince after the 'Sing of the times' album his music went back to its roots, but at this time his music in a band format really related to R&B but almost to alternative and pop crowds. It was a truly all conquering album. The loss of Prince was a massive loss to the American music industry but also to the world. Maybe a few years ago his influence was under estimated , but never has an artists transmitted almost sexual, almost tongue in cheek arrogance based on talent. RIP Prince.