Prince Track by Track Presents Stevie Wonder Classics: “If You Really Love Me”

(Featured Image: Cover art for Where I’m Coming From, © Motown Records.)

I know, I know, this isn’t what you want from me right now–but I recorded this podcast with Darren Husted of Prince: Track by Track fame a couple of months ago and I wanted to share it here for anyone who might be interested. If you’ve listened to any of my appearances on Track by Track, this will be familiar territory–with the obvious exception that we’re talking about Stevie Wonder, an artist with whom I am less familiar than I am with Prince, but who I obviously still appreciate on account of my functioning ears:

If you enjoy this, there’s more on the way: I’ve already recorded an episode for each of Wonder’s albums from 1972’s Music of My Mind to 1976’s Songs in the Key of Life. Also, while we’re on the subject of stuff I’ve done recently that is only vaguely Prince-related, my other project Dystopian Dance Party released a podcast the other week about George Clinton’s 2014 memoir Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?, co-written by Prince book author Ben Greenman (and if you remember my review of said Prince book, rest assured that this one is better):

Dystopian Book Club vs. George Clinton’s Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?

That concludes my shilling for this week! The next time you hear from me, it will be with a full post for “Purple Music.”

Annie Christian

(Featured Image: “The Number of the Beast is 666,” William Blake, 1805.)

As we noted last time, the late spring and summer of 1981 was an extraordinarily prolific time for Prince; it was also a notably experimental one. The artist’s home studio on Kiowa Trail in Chanhassen allowed him to try out new musical styles and approaches, without having to beg W.B. for expensive L.A. studio time. It’s thus no coincidence that the resulting album, Controversy, would be his oddest and most indulgent to date. Standing head and shoulders above the rest in the “odd and indulgent” category was “Annie Christian”: a tuneless, four-and-a-half-minute slice of apocalyptic post-punk that isn’t quite like anything else in Prince’s catalogue.

“Annie Christian” begins with a manic-sounding drum machine pattern, quickly interrupted by an atonally pulsing synthesizer and a sound effect of a tolling bell. The closest thing the song has to a hook is the cascading synth line that follows, as shrill and piercing as an early cellular ringtone. Prince recites the lyrics–a fever dream of the End Times as mediated by CNN–in a nasally monotone. It’s the kind of thing Gary Numan’s Tubeway Army might have rejected for being too dour.

Do Me, Baby

(Featured Image: Prince, Kim Upsher, and André Cymone, early 1980s; photo by Sylvia Amos, née Anderson. Stolen from Neon Rendezvous.)

Around the same time that Prince was co-opting Flyte Tyme for his project with Morris Day, he was also falling out with another of his oldest comrades: the co-founder of Grand Central and his closest musical partner, André Cymone.

André’s and Prince’s musical fates had been linked since the moment they first locked eyes in the Bryant Junior High gymnasium. Both were budding multi-instrumentalists, the children of talented jazz musicians: André’s father, Fred Anderson, used to play bass with Prince’s father, John L. Nelson. Both, too, possessed a preternatural drive far beyond the norms of their age and circumstance. “There was a sixth sense between the two of us,” Cymone told Billboard in 2016. “It’s something that doesn’t happen, I don’t think, very often where you find two people come together who are really passionate about what they do at a time when they’re both growing and learning” (Cymone 2016).

When You Were Mine

(Featured Image: Cover art for “Is She Really Going Out with Him?” by Joe Jackson, 1979; © A&M Records.)

In early March, 1980–right around the same time Rick James was absconding with their Oberheim–Prince’s band took a break from the tour and spent a day at Disney World. “In Orlando, we decided to have some fun being tourists,” keyboardist Dr. Fink told journalist Mobeen Azhar. “We asked Prince to come along, too, but he said, ‘Go ahead. Have fun.’ I remember leaving him sitting outside the hotel room on the balcony, with his guitar. By the time we came back, he’d written ‘When You Were Mine’” (Azhar 23).

If “Head,” as suggested last week, was “the foundation upon which Prince’s racial, sexual, and personal preoccupations of the next decade were built,” then “When You Were Mine” laid the groundwork for his musical expansion. It was his first real foray into crossover territory: a masterful capital-“P” pop song with all the literary value of contemporary New Wave troubadours Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson. It wasn’t Prince’s first classic song–that, again, would be “I Wanna Be Your Lover”–but it was his first standard: timeless, durable, and rewarding of endless reinterpretations by other artists.