{"id":1942,"date":"2017-01-11T22:15:09","date_gmt":"2017-01-12T03:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/?p=1942"},"modified":"2017-01-23T22:58:08","modified_gmt":"2017-01-24T03:58:08","slug":"prince-4-prince","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/prince-4-prince\/","title":{"rendered":"Prince #4: Prince"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"tweetbutton1942\" class=\"tw_button\" style=\"\"><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/share?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Fprince-4-prince%2F&amp;text=Prince%20%234%3A%20Prince&amp;related=&amp;lang=en&amp;count=horizontal&amp;counturl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Fprince-4-prince%2F\" class=\"twitter-share-button\"  style=\"width:55px;height:22px;background:transparent url('https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-tweet-button\/tweetn.png') no-repeat  0 0;text-align:left;text-indent:-9999px;display:block;\">Tweet<\/a><\/div><div id=\"fb_share_1\" style=\"float: right; margin-left: 10px;\"><a name=\"fb_share\" type=\"box_count\" share_url=\"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/prince-4-prince\/\" href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php\">Share<\/a><\/div><div><script src=\"http:\/\/static.ak.fbcdn.net\/connect.php\/js\/FB.Share\" type=\"text\/javascript\"><\/script><\/div><p>There are two types of songs on <em>Prince<\/em>, Prince&#8217;s 1979 named-like-a-first-album second album: there are the songs you forgot you knew (&#8220;I Wanna Be Your Lover,&#8221; &#8220;Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?&#8221; and &#8220;I Feel For You,&#8221; the latter of which was reshaped into a giant Chaka Khan hit five years later); then there are the songs that make you go, &#8220;Wait, this is <em>Prince<\/em>?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Not to take anything away from 1978&#8217;s <em>For You<\/em>, Prince&#8217;s actual debut. That album is full of life and personality, and fits nicely into the man&#8217;s overall catalog. But <em>Prince<\/em> has something else &#8212; a musical adventurousness, restlessness even &#8212; that lets the listener know they&#8217;re just hearing the near edge of what this guy can do. The songs I&#8217;m thinking of are &#8220;Bambi,&#8221; &#8220;When We&#8217;re Dancing Close and Slow,&#8221; and &#8220;It&#8217;s Gonna Be Lonely.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Bambi&#8221; is a notorious for being a come-on to a lesbian, but it presents as more clueless than hateful. Musically, it&#8217;s closest to a Grand Funk Railroad rocker, with a riff that&#8217;s SO &#8217;70s it makes me smile every time I hear it.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;When We&#8217;re Dancing Close and Slow&#8221; and &#8220;It&#8217;s Gonna Be Lonely&#8221; are mirrors of each other. They each close a side of the album, and they feel it. This is not just Prince stretching out musically (more on that in a minute), this is Prince learning how to sequence an album. Both songs are the longest on the album at 5+ minutes each, and both start out sounding like &#8217;70s songs before blooming into something else. &#8220;Dancing Close and Slow&#8221; is a gorgeous, piano-and-acoustic-guitar ballad that sounds for all the world like something off of Beck&#8217;s <em>Sea Change<\/em>, particularly when the beat goes from half-time to a more driving 4\/4\u00a0under Prince&#8217;s icy piano runs. That is to say, it&#8217;s a mature, rock-based ballad from a guy who was just barely 21.<\/p>\n<p>Prince played every instrument on every track on his first albums, and that&#8217;s really something to ponder when you&#8217;re listening to &#8220;It&#8217;s Gonna Be Lonely.&#8221; It&#8217;s not a straight-ahead drum part &#8212; there&#8217;s a coda with lots of stops and starts &#8212; yet he either had to have recorded the drums while keeping track of the melody <em>in his mind<\/em>, or he tracked straight drums and recorded everything over that before erasing his initial guide tracks. Either way, &#8220;Prince plays everything!&#8221; is a lot easier to get your head around when listening to a straight 4\/4 disco cut like &#8220;I Wanna Be Your Lover,&#8221; or the drum-and-synth-based albums of the early &#8217;80s. When you stop and think how he did a track like &#8220;It&#8217;s Gonna Be Lonely,&#8221; it&#8217;s enough to make your head hurt.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s Gonna Be Lonely&#8221; is a perfect album closer, somewhere between a ballad and an anthem, breaking into a pop-prog coda that reminds me of Journey&#8217;s early Steve Perry records. It&#8217;s a million miles &#8212; radio programming-wise, anyway &#8212; from the opening track, &#8220;I Wanna Be Your Lover,&#8221; given\u00a0that song&#8217;s chiming Nile Rodgers-style chords and disco beat. And yet, while none of it sounds like the Prince that would be, it all sounds like the same artist. Even this early, he&#8217;s something special.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Stray Thoughts:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>On &#8220;When We&#8217;re Dancing Close and Slow,&#8221; Prince sings right up against the mic in a whispered falsetto, and damn if he doesn&#8217;t sound exactly like <em>Diana<\/em>-era Diana Ross.<\/li>\n<li>My wife would be sad if I didn&#8217;t mention her favorite detail: apparently, when Prince did his own background harmonies, he gave each &#8220;singer&#8221; his or her own personality, including <em>level of skill<\/em>. So while Prince is always Prince on lead vocals, his &#8220;background singers&#8221; tend to sound like real people, some of whom could have used another take. This is on display in &#8220;Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad,&#8221; where the singers aren&#8217;t all on the same beat. Meanwhile, his love of a big (all-Prince) chorus is on full display on\u00a0&#8220;It&#8217;s Gonna Be Lonely,&#8221; where it sounds like ten people are crowded around a single mic.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s weird to listen to these early albums and realize they&#8217;re all sung in falsetto, every track. In fact, he\u00a0never used his natural tenor on a whole song\u00a0until the album\u00a0<em>1999<\/em>. The closest we come to hearing it\u00a0before that is on <em>For You<\/em>, where he sings in a baritone for a second leading to the chorus on &#8220;Soft and Wet&#8221;; and then on\u00a0<em>Controversy<\/em>, where it&#8217;s in the Lord&#8217;s Prayer in the title track, and then again on &#8220;Annie Christian,&#8221; where all the vocals are\u00a0spoken\/chanted. One of the most distinctive lead voices in popular music, and we never really heard it until five albums in.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div id=\"tweetbutton1942\" class=\"tw_button\" style=\"\"><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/share?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Fprince-4-prince%2F&amp;text=Prince%20%234%3A%20Prince&amp;related=&amp;lang=en&amp;count=horizontal&amp;counturl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Fprince-4-prince%2F\" class=\"twitter-share-button\"  style=\"width:55px;height:22px;background:transparent url('https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-tweet-button\/tweetn.png') no-repeat  0 0;text-align:left;text-indent:-9999px;display:block;\">Tweet<\/a><\/div><p>TweetShareThere are two types of songs on Prince, Prince&#8217;s 1979 named-like-a-first-album second album: there are the songs you forgot you knew (&#8220;I Wanna Be Your Lover,&#8221; &#8220;Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?&#8221; and &#8220;I Feel For You,&#8221; the latter of which was reshaped into a giant Chaka Khan hit five years later); then there [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prince"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1942"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1942\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1961,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1942\/revisions\/1961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}