Prince - Originals

[Jonathan]

It’s a rare singer-songwriter who can just give away undeniable hits like “Nothing Compares 2 U,” “Manic Monday” and “The Glamorous Life” to other artists, but that’s exactly what Prince did throughout his 40-year career.

And on his birthday, June 7, the late artist’s estate, in partnership with Warner Bros. Records and Tidal, will release “Originals”, a 15-track album featuring 14 previously unreleased recordings by Prince of such songs. The tracks were selected collaboratively by Troy Carter, on behalf of The Prince Estate, and Jay-Z.

Starting June 7, “Originals” will stream exclusively on Tidal for 14 days. The announcement notes, “In the spirit of sharing Prince’s music with his fans as he wanted, the album will be available to stream in Master quality via Tidal’s HiFi subscription tier. Members will be able to hear the recordings just as the Artist intended the tracks to sound.”

On June 21, Warner Bros. will release the recordings, sourced directly from Prince’s archive of “Vault” recordings, via all download and streaming partners and physically on CD, while 180 gram 2LP and limited edition Deluxe CD+2LP formats will follow on July 19th. (Pre-order the album here)

Prince was a monumentally prolific artist and by the mid-1980s, in addition to releasing nine of his most commercially successful albums, he also wrote and recorded many dozens of songs for proteges The Time, Vanity 6, Sheila E., Apollonia 6, Jill Jones, the Family, and Mazarati. Often, Prince’s original demo recordings would be used as master takes on their albums, with only minor alterations to the instrumentation and a replacement of the vocal tracks. Other times, artists would rely on his demos to guide them through their own recording process, with Prince’s initial take informing their final version of his song.

“Originals” reveals the origins of these songs — many of which were substantial hits — along with deeper album cuts such as Vanity 6’s “Make-Up,” Jill Jones’s “Baby, You’re a Trip,” and Kenny Rogers’ “You’re My Love.” The only previously released song is Prince’s original 1984 version of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which was released in 2018 as a standalone single (and as a stellar live duet with Rosie Gaines in 1993). The song was originally released in 1985 by The Family, and made into an unforgettable No. 1 single by Sinead O’Connor five years later.

Song Title | First Released by (Artist: Album – year) | Year of Prince’s Recording Included on Originals
1. Sex Shooter | Apollonia 6: Apollonia 6 – 1984 | 1983
2. Jungle Love | The Time: Ice Cream Castle – 1984 | 1983
3. Manic Monday | The Bangles: Different Light – 1985 | 1984
4. Noon Rendezvous | Sheila E.: The Glamorous Life – 1984 | 1984
5. Make-Up | Vanity 6: Vanity 6 – 1982 | 1981
6. 100 MPH | Mazarati: Mazarati – 1986 | 1984
7. You’re My Love | Kenny Rogers: They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To – 1986 | 1982
8. Holly Rock | Sheila E.: Krush Groove (OST) – 1985 | 1985
9. Baby, You’re a Trip | Jill Jones: Jill Jones – 1987 | 1982
10. The Glamorous Life | Sheila E.: The Glamorous Life – 1984 | 1983
11. Gigolos Get Lonely Too | The Time: What Time Is It? – 1982 | 1982
12. Love… Thy Will Be Done | Martika: Martika’s Kitchen – 1991 | 1991
13. Dear Michaelangelo | Sheila E.: Romance 1600 – 1985 | 1985
14. Wouldn’t You Love to Love Me? | Taja Sevelle: Taja Sevelle – 1987 | 1981
15. Nothing Compares 2 U | The Family: The Family – 1985 | 1984

SOURCE

[Mugen]

I cannot wait to buy this!

[Brad]

They’ve given it a dreadful cover but this is great.

[Mugen]

Two links:


Depending on the country you're living in, you can attend a listening party on June 6th, before the album drops on Tidal on June 7th.


Here's a NY Times article about the album along with interviews with former collaborators. It's a good read.

[Jonathan]

Rolling Stone review: 4/5

Prince in the early-to-mid ‘80s was spitting out hot songs at such a clip, it’s no wonder he shared the wealth. And wealth it was: his “Manic Monday” was The Bangles’ first hit, reaching top 5 in the U.S., while Sinead O’Connor never had a more successful song than “Nothing Compares To U,” a near-global #1. Prince’s overflow songs also functioned as brand extensions, especially when covered by acts in his creative camp: Vanity 6, Apollonia 6, The Time, Sheila E.

Originals, the latest release from Prince’s vaults (see Piano & A Microphone 1983 and the posthumous Anthology 1995 – 2010), demonstrates that he wasn’t handing off sketches. It collects Prince’s own versions of these songs, all fully-formed. Many, in fact, in their instrumentation and arrangements, are nearly indistinguishable from the gifted versions. The opener, “Sex Shooter,” mirrors the Apollonia 6 performance in Purple Rain and on the group’s debut, with minor lyrical rejigging. “Jungle Love” is a near-Xerox of The Time’s, down to the monkey noises and the “oh-way-oh-way-oh” backing vocals. “The Glamorous Life” begins with apparently the same unhinged sax and funky cello as on Sheila E’s signature, and proceeds similarly, omitting little besides the five-minute drum fireworks coda. The 15 songs range from entertaining throwaways to top-shelf Prince, making this basically a very good golden-era Prince album, with material recorded entirely between 1981-85 but for the ’91 version of “Love… Thy Will Be Done,” a hit that year for Martika.

But what’s most fun about the set is how Prince’s glancingly non-binary persona comes out to play in such a big way — it’s arguably the genderqueer-est set in his catalogue. Sometimes it’s in the lyrics, like when he dreams of “kissin’ Valentino by a crystal-blue Italian stream” on “Manic Monday.” Other times it’s more about the delivery. He delivers “Noon Rendezvous,” another song he passed on to Sheila E, entirely in falsetto. It’s dazzling. Jill Jones laid into her version of “Baby, You’re A Trip” with gospel fire, which Prince matches here and then some, shrieking through a spectacularly horny denouement. Elsewhere, he butches up. He sings Vanity 6’s “Make Up” near the bottom of his register, bringing out the song’s Kraftwerk debt while savoring its wardrobe (“If I wear a dress/He will never call/So I wear much less/I guess I’ll wear my camisole”). And “You’re My Love,” recorded by bear-ish country-pop crooner Kenny Rogers, is almost a drag-king performance here — it sounds like a genuine effort for The Artist to keep his inner queen buttoned up.

It’s unclear exactly how many songs on Originals were cut with specific singers in mind (an exception is the purple funk-cum-old-school-rap “Holly Rock,” where he sings “Sheila E’s my name…”). Regardless, you can almost always hear the author’s hand in the other artist’s recordings, making these versions feel completely lived in. And if Prince’s takes on “Nothing Compares 2 U” and “Manic Monday” — good as they are — won’t replace the more iconic ones, they certainly prove his ownership, and add to a catalogue that only grows more astonishing with each newly-unearthed jam.

[Jonathan]

Pitchfork review: 9.5/10

It was said that only Prince knew the combination to his legendary, quite literal vault with the spinning wheel doorknob. But sometime after his death on April 21, 2016, the hulking door was drilled open, revealing an astounding archive of unreleased songs—so many thousands of tapes and hard drives that his estate could allegedly release a Prince album every year for the next century. Now, the latest from the vault, comes Prince: Originals, a compilation of 14 previously unreleased songs written for other performers that prove once and for all that a Prince demo was often better than most other musicians’ finished songs. It offers a window onto the playfulness of his improvisations and, in a structure that mimics the range of an actual Prince album, shifts nimbly between up-tempo songs and ballads, sweat and tears, near impossible to stay sitting still while listening.

In the winter after the release of his third album, Dirty Mind, 21-year-old Prince moved into what he’d call Kiowa Trail home studio in suburban Chanhassen, Minnesota, not far from what would become Paisley Park. Prince had its cream-colored exterior repainted with his favorite hue; it was nicknamed the Purple House. Outside was the driveway where he’d do motorcycle laps practicing for Purple Rain and the gates he decorated with a sculpted heart and peace sign. Inside, he outfitted his studio with a 16-track recorder and later upgraded to a 24-track Ampex MM1200, with a piano upstairs for any sudden inspiration.

Inside the Purple House, large parts of Controversy, 1999, Purple Rain, and Sign o’ the Times were recorded, as well as about half the songs on Originals (most of the rest were recorded at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles). In 1985, when he sat with a Rolling Stone reporter on the white plush carpet of the bedroom at Kiowa Trail, he said that he finally came to understand why his musician father was so hard to live with. “When he was working or thinking, he had a private pulse going constantly inside him,” Prince said. “I don’t know, your bloodstream beats differently.” Discovering some of the unscripted moments in Originals feels like taking that pulse.

Written into his Warner Bros. contract was a clause that allowed him to recruit and produce other artists. It essentially assured him access to a congregation of performers who would spread the gospel of his music—the pop-funk he’d canonized in his early records, and a vast and uncharted road ahead, both under his own name and others. Sometimes he adopted an alias—as Joey Coco, for instance, for the power crooner “You’re My Love,” one of the surprises on Originals. It appeared on Kenny Rogers' 1986 album They Don't Make Them Like They Used To, but Rogers’ version pales next to Prince’s, who uses a deeper, full-throated register that sounds an imitation of what he thought Kenny Rogers should sound like. But the Prince of Dirty Mind and Controversy didn’t exactly mesh with Nashville of the 1980s—what would the world have thought then if he released a country song? Giving that song to another voice freed him to fly elsewhere.

Better known is his alias for “Manic Monday,” which charted at No. 2 for the Bangles, second only to Prince’s own smash “Kiss.” Here, Prince is “Christopher,” a reference to his character from his 1986 film Under the Cherry Moon. The song, triggered by a dream he wrote into the lyrics, is essentially a rewrite of “1999,” and Prince’s rendering of it here centers on a synthesized harpsichord and the psychedelic flourish of the song’s bridge, which sounds as if Alice just dropped in the rabbit hole.

Most of the other tracks on Originals represent even greater gifts. Prince gave songs to Minneapolis’ great performers: Morris Day, Sheila E., Jill Jones, Apollonia, among others. By spreading out the credits, “he was creating the wave, but he made it seem like there was a lot of people doing that thing in Minneapolis, which was brilliant,” engineer David Z once said. To the press, Prince acted nonchalant. “I usually try to give up a groove to somebody if they ask me,” he said.

These grooves are the dance-floor core of Originals. Prince’s version of “Jungle Love” is close to the rendition on the Time’s Ice Cream Castles and the Purple Rain soundtrack, down to the “oh-we-oh-we-oh” chorus, but embedded with his ad-libs (“If you’re hungry, take a vitamin!”). Prince had showed up in the studio shirtless with one bandana around his neck and another tied on his ripped red pants, but he loosens up in the recording. “Somebody bring me a mirror!” you hear him shout midway through. He gets it in “Make-Up,” a torrid electric number that was fine on Vanity 6’s lone solo album but made surprising and transgressive by Prince, who voices the lyrics in robotic staccato bursts: “Blush. Eyeliner. Hush. See what you made me do.” It has the percussive electricity of Liquid Liquid and maybe a little Kraftwerk too, androgynous Prince at his most diva: “Smoke. A. Cigarette,” he retorts to an impatient lover. “I’m. Not. Ready Yet.”

How wild that a chronicle of a lost era can feel so modern when all over it are musical markers of the ’80s: synths and drum machines and clap tracks and extended breakdowns and of course, sax solos. Nostalgia, even rendered fresh, works on the ear in invisible ways, as does the sequence of these songs. We careen between slow-burning love songs (witness Prince’s glorious falsetto over the heartbeat percussion of “Baby, You’re a Trip,” which Prince wrote for Jill Jones, about the time she snooped in his diary after he read hers) and more quintessential dance hits. “Holly Rock,” which he gave to Sheila E. for the Krush Groove soundtrack, is snappily upbeat, Prince punctuating the chorus with James Brown-esque flourishes (“I’m bad, good god!”) and a snarky taunt at the end: “Now try to dance like that,” he says.

“Nothing Compares 2 U,” the best-known and most-loved of all the songs here, became a massive hit for Sinéad O’Connor, whose rendition was, in fact, a cover, not one of Prince’s gifts. Here, in its original incarnation, Prince turns it into a torch song for himself. He lets a love-worn raggedness occasionally creep into his voice, lets it tremble ever so, powered by the saxophone accompaniment of longtime Family and Revolution member Eric Leeds. The video shows a collage of Prince and his band running through stage choreography: dressed in a scarf worn as a backless shirt, or suspenders and white high-heeled boots, he delivers perfect splits, kicks, and spins. But the arrangement here is stark and lonely and beautiful, the closest you get to hearing Prince’s own pulse. Arriving at the end of this set of originals, and with the promise of hearing more from that vault, it becomes an affirmation too. Maybe all those flowers you planted in the backyard will bloom again.

[Mugen]

I have a Tidal subscription so I heard this and it's fantastic. "Baby, You're a Trip," "Love...Thy Will Be Done," "Dear Michaelangelo" and "You're My Love" are the highlights for me. It'll be available everywhere else on 6/21. It's worth the wait.

[Jonathan]

[Erotica]

I like his version of the song

[Mugen]