Prince's "Sign O' the Times" (1987) : Track by Track!

<v Speaker 1>All right, Jason, So here's my idea. Two doors open
<v Speaker 1>up and you're sitting in a steamy, hot bath and
<v Speaker 1>then you like get out and you're naked and you're
<v Speaker 1>crawling across the floor and you're looking at me in
<v Speaker 1>this like seductive kind of way. Yes, okay, but why
<v Speaker 1>are we doing this for a podcast? Who's anything about
<v Speaker 1>a podcast that's the Windows Cry?
<v Speaker 2>What?
<v Speaker 3>Well?
<v Speaker 1>Okay, who said anything about Win Dove's Cry?
<v Speaker 4>Hello everybody, and welcome to the Surely you Can't Be
<v Speaker 4>Serious Podcast with your.
<v Speaker 1>Co hosts James D. Graves and Jason's Halliwen. All right, everybody,
<v Speaker 1>welcome back to the Shirley you Can't Be Serious podcast.
<v Speaker 1>We are here for the Prince Sign of the Times
<v Speaker 1>portion of our two part episode Sign of the Times
<v Speaker 1>versus Joshua Tree by YouTube. I am pumped about this comparison.
<v Speaker 4>This is going to be major because these albums in
<v Speaker 4>nineteen eighty seven are considered to be the best of
<v Speaker 4>these iconic artists.
<v Speaker 1>Absolutely. Yeah, And that's it's really interesting because I am
<v Speaker 1>a Prince fan, but I was not a Sign of
<v Speaker 1>the Times fan, but Sign of the Times, even though
<v Speaker 1>it wasn't as successful as Purple Rain. It's considered his
<v Speaker 1>best piece by most reviewers, right, I know, right, and
<v Speaker 1>I'm with you.
<v Speaker 4>For me, before we dove into this, Purple Rain was
<v Speaker 4>my go to one of the best albums of the
<v Speaker 4>nineteen eighties, absolutely top of the heap for me, I
<v Speaker 4>knew the hits on this one, but for us to
<v Speaker 4>take a deep dive and this has been a lot
<v Speaker 4>of fun. I'm anxious to hear what you think. We've
<v Speaker 4>got a lot of songs to cover. I hope you'll
<v Speaker 4>stick around and join us on this journey. We're going
<v Speaker 4>to talk about each song. We'll talk a little bit
<v Speaker 4>about the history of Prince and his discography and what
<v Speaker 4>was happening right before Sometimes came out.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and this is an iconic moment for me and
<v Speaker 1>you because this is the first time we've been recording
<v Speaker 1>in the same room, I know, since we did our
<v Speaker 1>Coming to America Versus Trading Places episode. This is this
<v Speaker 1>is a huge deal. I mean, COVID hit and all
<v Speaker 1>of a sudden zoom was the way that we handle things,
<v Speaker 1>I know, right, But because of my mess ups in
<v Speaker 1>various areas, we're here in the same room recording together,
<v Speaker 1>and I'm glad to be back together this. Yeah, I
<v Speaker 1>didn't see it much better, much better way to do things. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>So are we ready to jump in too? Sign of
<v Speaker 1>the times? Let's do it man. Okay, So we got
<v Speaker 1>we typically start with the history of the artist in
<v Speaker 1>this portion. But Prince was a very shy kind of reserved,
<v Speaker 1>was not out there given a story to a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of people, and so there's not a whole lot out
<v Speaker 1>there about him as a young man. Right.
<v Speaker 4>He was the son of a singer and a musician jazz,
<v Speaker 4>both of them, right, both gifted musicians known really as
<v Speaker 4>a child prodigy.
<v Speaker 1>His mom and dad were in a trio, a jazz
<v Speaker 1>trio called the Prince Nelson Trio, Okay, because he was
<v Speaker 1>named after his dad, But he didn't really Junia. He
<v Speaker 1>didn't really like the name Prince, and so everybody who
<v Speaker 1>went to school with him growing up called him Skipper
<v Speaker 1>because he liked the name Skipper. And I'm listen, like
<v Speaker 1>you had the choice between Prince and Skipper, really you
<v Speaker 1>want Skipper? Okay? All right, Okay, So he grew up
<v Speaker 1>in Minneapolis, yes, and he just loved he loved the town. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>But the other side effect of growing up in Minneapolis
<v Speaker 1>as a young man of color is he didn't really
<v Speaker 1>get a whole lot of exposure to music beyond what
<v Speaker 1>was just on the basically one radio station they had
<v Speaker 1>up there, which was a whole lot of rock as
<v Speaker 1>opposed to motown and rhythm and blues and that kind
<v Speaker 1>of thing. And he got those things from the record stores.
<v Speaker 1>But he and the other guys who grew up with him,
<v Speaker 1>who also became kind of well known musicians, they were
<v Speaker 1>listening to led Zeppelin, they were listening to Jimmy Hendrix,
<v Speaker 1>they were listening to all of the seventies rock bands
<v Speaker 1>of the day, and so that had obviously a profound
<v Speaker 1>influence on the way that he played.
<v Speaker 4>I know he's a big fan of the Beatles and
<v Speaker 4>Joni Mitchell.
<v Speaker 1>He grew up playing music, just teaching himself how to
<v Speaker 1>play various instruments, and unfortunately his dad left when he
<v Speaker 1>was very young, like eight years old, and his mother remarried.
<v Speaker 1>His stepdad took Prince to a James Brown concert and
<v Speaker 1>it had this profound influence. Like he got to get
<v Speaker 1>up on stage and then like as he walked backstage,
<v Speaker 1>he saw all the dancing girls and the musicians and
<v Speaker 1>how James Brown kind of controlled the musicians, and how
<v Speaker 1>the dancing girls interacted with James Brown, and like he
<v Speaker 1>was ten years old at the time, and this was
<v Speaker 1>like a huge pivotal moment in his life. And he's like,
<v Speaker 1>I can see my future. I know the two things
<v Speaker 1>that I'm going to do. I'm going to run a
<v Speaker 1>band and I'm going to have dancing girls. So he
<v Speaker 1>started learning instruments and he started his first band, was
<v Speaker 1>called Grand Central. Okay, No, I didn't know that. No, Okay. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>at some point they said, hey, you know you should
<v Speaker 1>come to the studio. Would you like to come to
<v Speaker 1>the studio and see how that goes. The Warner Brothers
<v Speaker 1>guys came to listen to him and they're like, let's
<v Speaker 1>sign him up. I heard that.
<v Speaker 4>They fall in love with his abilities. They want to
<v Speaker 4>sign to a record deal. They bring in Prince and
<v Speaker 4>they say, we think we've got a producer for your
<v Speaker 4>first album.
<v Speaker 1>It's one of the guys in earth Wind and Fire,
<v Speaker 1>Maurice White, Marris White.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, which for a nineteen year old kid, who I
<v Speaker 4>mean earth Wind and Fire?
<v Speaker 1>Are you kidding? Yeah? Sign up?
<v Speaker 4>And Prince says, no, thanks. I'm not going to turn
<v Speaker 4>this over to anybody else. I'm gonna produce.
<v Speaker 1>Myself, right, And they're like, you're a nineteen year old kid.
<v Speaker 1>He's like, yeah, I want to produce. And they saw
<v Speaker 1>something in his eyes, and so they came in first day.
<v Speaker 1>They're like, okay, I want to see what you can
<v Speaker 1>do before we agree to let you produce the album. Right,
<v Speaker 1>So he comes in, he sits at the board for
<v Speaker 1>a second, then he goes in, lays down the guitar
<v Speaker 1>track perfect, messes with the board, goes lays the drum
<v Speaker 1>track down perfect, goes messes with the board, lays the
<v Speaker 1>base down perfect, and they're like, okay, we can see
<v Speaker 1>that you can handle this. And he's like no wait, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I really want to show you. And they're like, no,
<v Speaker 1>you're good, you can do He's like, no wait, you're
<v Speaker 1>gonna see what I can do, and then lays down
<v Speaker 1>every instrument and before he could get to the voiceter's like, okay,
<v Speaker 1>we get you're a genius. Will go now have fun
<v Speaker 1>with your album.
<v Speaker 4>Okay, d So they get him in the studio he
<v Speaker 4>is producing. His first album, called for You, comes out
<v Speaker 4>in nineteen seventy eight. It's released on April seventh, nineteen
<v Speaker 4>seventy eight, so he's still nineteen years old.
<v Speaker 1>So Prince's music from the beginning is about either sex
<v Speaker 1>or God.
<v Speaker 4>Nineteen seventy nine comes along, he doesn't waste any time
<v Speaker 4>back in the studio. Boom another album, nineteen seventy nine. Okay,
<v Speaker 4>so nineteen seventy nine he comes out with an album
<v Speaker 4>called Prince and a song that he made off that
<v Speaker 4>I Want to Be Your Lover. It's kind of his
<v Speaker 4>first well nine out of the gate, right, right, and
<v Speaker 4>then how about this song? So he did that back then,
<v Speaker 4>and then then Shaka Khan did that in nineteen eighty five. Right,
<v Speaker 4>it's like a number one hit nineteen eighty five.
<v Speaker 1>So after his second album, he's got a stay back down,
<v Speaker 1>I'm a little bit better. He goes to perform, and
<v Speaker 1>then he gets an invitation in nineteen seventy nine to
<v Speaker 1>go on to American bandstand Dick Clark for the first time.
<v Speaker 1>And it's interesting to see his performance back then because
<v Speaker 1>he's doing some kind of silly dancing. It was not
<v Speaker 1>the coordinated pop and lock amazingness that he had. It
<v Speaker 1>is a little goofy, but you know, you know, he's
<v Speaker 1>on the American Bandstand, so he's already hit one level
<v Speaker 1>of success, right, and then what were you doing at
<v Speaker 1>twenty years old? Right? Yeah, yeah, I was quitting college.
<v Speaker 1>That's so. Then Nick Clark comes to interview him after
<v Speaker 1>his set, after his song, and he totally locks up,
<v Speaker 1>like he's got total stage fright, and Dick Clark is like,
<v Speaker 1>so I've heard you know, you play a lot of instruments.
<v Speaker 1>How many you play? And it's like silence, awkward, long silence,
<v Speaker 1>and like as he's about to answer, Dick Clark puts
<v Speaker 1>the microphone back and he's like, we're be with you
<v Speaker 1>in just a minute here, and he's like a thousands
<v Speaker 1>and he just he freezes up. He just panicked because
<v Speaker 1>suddenly he realized, oh my gosh, millions of people are
<v Speaker 1>listening to what I'm about to say, and he's not
<v Speaker 1>It's not this well boiled practice machine. It's I'm speaking
<v Speaker 1>from the hip. And he wasn't ready for it. But
<v Speaker 1>after that he said that will never happen again.
<v Speaker 4>Wow, he turned into Garth Algar. I like to play
<v Speaker 4>nineteen eighty dirty mind comes out. I had a friend
<v Speaker 4>of my church who carried this tape around with him
<v Speaker 4>all the time, okay, and he got in trouble for
<v Speaker 4>doing that, which you know at church, having Prince dirty mind.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, So I mean Prince had a lot of really
<v Speaker 1>graphic poor no for the topic, right yeah. Lyrics, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>for sure, we want to talk about those lyrics or no,
<v Speaker 1>I would go for it. No better know sorry, family friendly? Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>family friends. So your friend had this tape and to
<v Speaker 1>get in trouble for carrying it around all the.
<v Speaker 4>Time, Well it was, you know, it was on the
<v Speaker 4>confiscate whenever you find it.
<v Speaker 1>List how many songs did Prince have on a filthy fifteen?
<v Speaker 1>We once had sugar Walls, which Sheena Easton played. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>he had Darling Nikki from Purple Rain. Oh yeah, and
<v Speaker 1>then what was the other one? He had three magazine?
<v Speaker 2>What?
<v Speaker 1>Sorry he had three?
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, I can't remember what the third one was when
<v Speaker 4>we covered the fifty fifteen. Yeah, flashback to our ac
<v Speaker 4>DC episode, right right, nineteen eighty one comes around. You've
<v Speaker 4>got controversy. Let's just paint the picture a little bit.
<v Speaker 1>Okay. After the first or second album, he had come
<v Speaker 1>to his band and said, you guys need to find
<v Speaker 1>a character or personality. My character is going.
<v Speaker 4>To be sex Okay, quickly moving on past controversy. We
<v Speaker 4>could do a podcast in each one of these. Yeah,
<v Speaker 4>we're just grazing through these.
<v Speaker 1>So my first time, the first time that I saw
<v Speaker 1>Prince was I can remember this. This is I've told
<v Speaker 1>my first movie's story because it was in California. But
<v Speaker 1>it was nineteen eighty three. Are on our we were
<v Speaker 1>driving out to California, okay, and I can remember going
<v Speaker 1>into the hotel room, turning on the TV and seeing
<v Speaker 1>Prince and the Revolution singing nineteen ninety nine and thinking, Wow,
<v Speaker 1>this is different. I've never seen anything like this before,
<v Speaker 1>and it was shocking and amazing and I loved it.
<v Speaker 1>At seven years old, I was like, wow, this is
<v Speaker 1>pretty cool stuff.
<v Speaker 4>So nineteen ninety nine is where I jump on board.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, nineteen ninety nine is such a great pop song,
<v Speaker 2>but the subject matter made it the song of the millennium.
<v Speaker 1>He had to see that coming. I mean, you know,
<v Speaker 1>I don't even know what to call it a millennium,
<v Speaker 1>right right. I mean he's he's singing the song with
<v Speaker 1>like seventeen years sixteen years before the year that he's
<v Speaker 1>singing about, and it's about kind of this armageddon apocalypse
<v Speaker 1>kind of idea. But he has to know this song
<v Speaker 1>is going to and when nineteen ninety nine rolls around,
<v Speaker 1>this song's gonna be big again. And it was, Oh
<v Speaker 1>for sure, and it was. And the video for that song,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, it's just to them on stage, but he
<v Speaker 1>his dance moves have moved from mediocre to phenomena. Right,
<v Speaker 1>also off of nineteen ninety and you have Little Red Corvette, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>which is another thing, huge song, huge and so American.
<v Speaker 1>So I mean it's just yeah, that's great. I love it. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>So we're blowing and going right now.
<v Speaker 4>Then he comes to Warner Brothers and says, I think
<v Speaker 4>I want to be in a movie, right, right. I
<v Speaker 4>want to write and star in a movie, and I
<v Speaker 4>also want to write the soundtrack, right.
<v Speaker 1>And they're like, well, we like nineteen ninety nine and all,
<v Speaker 1>but are you sure you're ready for the movies? Right?
<v Speaker 4>No, trust me, I've got this great story. It's kind
<v Speaker 4>of semi auto biutographical, and let's do it. So that
<v Speaker 4>movie is probably right now. Now there's two days.
<v Speaker 1>To talk about. There's the movie, yep, and then there's
<v Speaker 1>the album, right And We're not here to talk about
<v Speaker 1>either one of those today, right, but we can't avoid
<v Speaker 1>it either. Oh, one hundred percent, yeah, no, it's it is.
<v Speaker 1>Wait wait, wait before we talk about it.
<v Speaker 4>Go ahead, you really need to purify yourself when the
<v Speaker 4>Waters of Lake mannitaka Okay, Purple Rain might be the
<v Speaker 4>best album in the nineteen eighties.
<v Speaker 1>I mean it's arguing, it's arguable, it's in the story,
<v Speaker 1>and it's it's in the lineup for sure. Yes, there's
<v Speaker 1>no question about that. I mean, Prince was not a
<v Speaker 1>megastar at this time. This this movie is the thing
<v Speaker 1>that made him a mixed start. But somehow by the
<v Speaker 1>time this movie comes out, By the time this movie
<v Speaker 1>is released, and I you know, they had the album
<v Speaker 1>come out first. That was brilliant on their part, obviously,
<v Speaker 1>but by the time this movie comes out, it was
<v Speaker 1>an event. I mean, you had superstars showing up for
<v Speaker 1>the premiere of Purple Rain, but.
<v Speaker 4>You have the song when Doves Cry come out that summer, right,
<v Speaker 4>turned out to be the song the biggest hit of
<v Speaker 4>nineteen eighty four.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, we could go on and on.
<v Speaker 4>You've got Let's Go Crazy, You've got Purple Rain, You've
<v Speaker 4>got I would die for you, darling, Nikki. I mean,
<v Speaker 4>you've got all these wonderful, wonderful songs. So he's at
<v Speaker 4>the absolute zenith of his popularity.
<v Speaker 1>This is one of the few times in history that
<v Speaker 1>an artist has had a number one movie, a number
<v Speaker 1>one album, and a number one song all at the
<v Speaker 1>same time. The time that had happened before that was
<v Speaker 1>A Hard Day's Night with the Beatles. All Right, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that's a that's a pretty incredible accomplishment. What an amazing zummer.
<v Speaker 4>Right, Okay, So, coming off of this explosion in popularity
<v Speaker 4>and personal achievement, you roll into nineteen eighty five and
<v Speaker 4>you've got an album that comes out and it's called
<v Speaker 4>Around the World in a Day.
<v Speaker 1>Right, more psychedelic. He's completely changed the way he's doing things.
<v Speaker 1>The Purple Rain was a significant different, significantly different sound
<v Speaker 1>than what had come before, except maybe nineteen ninety nine,
<v Speaker 1>nineteen ninety nine, nineteen eighty four. There was a change
<v Speaker 1>in the way that he had done stuff. His albums
<v Speaker 1>from the seventies were much more funky. There was there
<v Speaker 1>was a bit more of a disco feel, which made sense, right, sure,
<v Speaker 1>I mean sure, but he really dove into the rock
<v Speaker 1>scene with nineteen ninety nine and Purple Rain, and that
<v Speaker 1>brought a whole new audience to his shows. Then when
<v Speaker 1>he moves from Purple Rain into Around the World in
<v Speaker 1>the Day, it's another different sound it is.
<v Speaker 4>It's definitely got a Beatles influence. You bring in the sitar,
<v Speaker 4>You've got some Indian type of feels to it. You
<v Speaker 4>do have two big hits off that album. You have
<v Speaker 4>Raspberry Beret and a song called pop Life. So that
<v Speaker 4>album comes out and it's a disappointment. Raspberry Bray big hit,
<v Speaker 4>but after that, not a lot of sales and certainly
<v Speaker 4>nothing compared to Purple Ray. Right, Okay, so that's eighty five.
<v Speaker 4>Nineteen eighty six comes around. He says, I'm going to
<v Speaker 4>do another movie, and this time I'm going to direct.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, now, then, for this.
<v Speaker 4>Podcast the rented and watched Under the Cherry.
<v Speaker 1>Moon, you made a significant sacrifice, and I honor you
<v Speaker 1>in that sacrifice. Here's the thing.
<v Speaker 4>Let me just let me just talk about this for
<v Speaker 4>just a second.
<v Speaker 1>Okay.
<v Speaker 4>It was an hour and forty minutes of beating Okay,
<v Speaker 4>but here's what you got. You got Prints in his Prime,
<v Speaker 4>You've got the bad guy from Beverly Hills, cop Rambo
<v Speaker 4>and Octopusy we talked about.
<v Speaker 1>Him, Oh right, Stephen Burker, Stephen Burkoff, there we go.
<v Speaker 4>You've got Kristen Scott Thomas and her opening movie. She
<v Speaker 4>looks gorgeous, okay, right, and then at different points in
<v Speaker 4>the movie, whenever he sings and performs, he's spectacular. So
<v Speaker 4>Under the Cherry Moon bombs critics kill it in Cherry
<v Speaker 4>Bombs and.
<v Speaker 1>Cherry Bombs, and nobody went to see it.
<v Speaker 4>So the album that goes with Under the Cherry Moon
<v Speaker 4>is called Parade. Yeah, there's a song on there that
<v Speaker 4>I personally love. It's called Mountains, one of my favorite
<v Speaker 4>print songs. But the song that everybody knows is kiss
<v Speaker 4>right Pretty Woman.
<v Speaker 1>Julie Roberts sings it in.
<v Speaker 4>For Kids, very very famous number one hit. Actually when
<v Speaker 4>the Grammy in nineteen eighty six for Best R and
<v Speaker 4>B Song.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, okay, yep.
<v Speaker 4>But still Under the Jerry Moon bombs. Parade as an
<v Speaker 4>album not well received.
<v Speaker 1>Right, and it's not like he's not doing good stuff.
<v Speaker 1>Then it's just not he's not doing good stuff for himself.
<v Speaker 4>So he's got two we'll call it three disappointing events
<v Speaker 4>that may make people wonder if Purple Rain is just
<v Speaker 4>kind of a shooting star. Right now, keep in mind you,
<v Speaker 4>I just want to point out nineteen seventy nine, eighty
<v Speaker 4>eighty one, eighty two, eighty four, eighty five, eighty six.
<v Speaker 4>He puts out an album almost every year. Yeah, and
<v Speaker 4>just very very prolific artists.
<v Speaker 1>Right.
<v Speaker 4>So you get to nineteen eighty seven and you say
<v Speaker 4>to yourself, well, maybe he's out of music.
<v Speaker 1>No, false, that is not true. That's not the problem.
<v Speaker 4>He has three albums that he wants to put out
<v Speaker 4>in nineteen eighty seven, all at once.
<v Speaker 1>Right. So Jimmy Jam was a part of the Time,
<v Speaker 1>which was one of Prince's side projects, and Jimmy Jam said,
<v Speaker 1>just just speaking to his work ethic, he said he
<v Speaker 1>would come and rehearse the Time for four hours or something,
<v Speaker 1>you know, just making sure that they were flawless. Then
<v Speaker 1>he would go rehearse with the Revolution himself, and then
<v Speaker 1>he'd go and go to the recording studio by himself
<v Speaker 1>and just write these amazing songs. And he'd show up
<v Speaker 1>the next morning to work with the Time again and
<v Speaker 1>he's like, oh, hey, listen to this, and they're like
<v Speaker 1>when did you make this? He's like, oh, last night.
<v Speaker 1>He's like, yeah, do you sleep man? Yeah? You just
<v Speaker 1>your NonStop workaholics. So he just, like I said, Minneapolis,
<v Speaker 1>you didn't have stuff to go do because it's cold,
<v Speaker 1>so you just he holed up and made amazing music,
<v Speaker 1>a lot of it, extremely prolific, a lot of it. Yeah.
<v Speaker 4>So there's three things we got to talk about as
<v Speaker 4>we entered nineteen eighty seven.
<v Speaker 1>This to me was fascinating.
<v Speaker 4>There's an album called The Dream Factory that he had
<v Speaker 4>been working on. Okay, and the Dream Factory is a
<v Speaker 4>project that he had worked on with the Revolution YEP.
<v Speaker 4>And it was just a as you went you collected
<v Speaker 4>these odds and end songs and then he would collect
<v Speaker 4>enough of them to have them on an album.
<v Speaker 1>This is the album that he was really he had
<v Speaker 1>a lot more of Lisa and Wendy being a part
<v Speaker 1>of the writing of the music that was going to
<v Speaker 1>be in this album.
<v Speaker 4>Right at the same time he's collecting songs for the
<v Speaker 4>Dream Factory, he's also collecting songs for an album called Camille,
<v Speaker 4>And we talked briefly about this in our George Michael episode.
<v Speaker 4>Camille is an album once again, he makes so many songs.
<v Speaker 4>He sings so much that he had grown tired of
<v Speaker 4>hearing his voice naturally, right, and so he would speed
<v Speaker 4>it up. You'll notice on you got the look and
<v Speaker 4>if I were your girlfriend, so that you have this
<v Speaker 4>Camille album and then you have this triple album called
<v Speaker 4>Crystal Ball.
<v Speaker 1>Right. He was dating and ultimately engaged to Susannah Melvoin,
<v Speaker 1>who was the twin sister of Wendy Melvoyin, who was
<v Speaker 1>his guitarist. Right, Yeah, Yeah, Wendy melvoy came on whenever
<v Speaker 1>Dez left the band because Des had gotten very religious
<v Speaker 1>and wasn't really cool with all of the sex stuff
<v Speaker 1>that was going on in prints at the time. Right,
<v Speaker 1>And so she's his guitarist. He ends up dating her sister.
<v Speaker 1>They become close, they're living together, they're engaged to be married.
<v Speaker 1>And so she's a part of building Paisley Park, which
<v Speaker 1>is this compound that he has where he's not only
<v Speaker 1>going to have his own recording studient, you, he's going
<v Speaker 1>to have his own clothes making manufacturer. I mean he's
<v Speaker 1>doing it where he got he has everything in one spot.
<v Speaker 1>And so she, you know, she's in there like a
<v Speaker 1>new wife. Like decorating the place and doing this stuff,
<v Speaker 1>and she ends up painting this mural of this crystal
<v Speaker 1>Ball on the wall, and that is what the inspiration
<v Speaker 1>for album crystal Ball is.
<v Speaker 4>Okay, that's cool, that's cool. So he has dream Factory,
<v Speaker 4>which he ultimately says uh nah, and Camille, which had
<v Speaker 4>a cover image and a catalog number. It wasn't like
<v Speaker 4>this is just a jink around project. There was a
<v Speaker 4>press records. There were some pressed records of Camille. Then
<v Speaker 4>he came up with this triple album called crystal Ball,
<v Speaker 4>and he takes it into the record executives and he says, hey, guys,
<v Speaker 4>here you go. This is my epic masterpiece, crystal Ball.
<v Speaker 4>And they listened to it and they were uncomfortable with
<v Speaker 4>the length and they weren't blown.
<v Speaker 1>Up right, And Princeton had free reign on what he
<v Speaker 1>was doing, like he was given complete creative freedom in
<v Speaker 1>all albums up until this point.
<v Speaker 4>And keep in mind this is after the failures of
<v Speaker 4>Around the World in the Day and Parade, right, And
<v Speaker 4>so the executives were like, this is we can't have
<v Speaker 4>a triple album. We have to charge forty bucks for it, right,
<v Speaker 4>Sales will be in the tank and we can't do this, and.
<v Speaker 1>They don't know how to tell him because they've given
<v Speaker 1>him all this freedom. So they're like, Okay, we just
<v Speaker 1>need to carefully break it to him. I don't want
<v Speaker 1>him to know what we're going to say. Carefully break
<v Speaker 1>it to him, all right, right, And so they call
<v Speaker 1>and he won he won't to answer their phone call,
<v Speaker 1>and then he has somebody call them back. It's that
<v Speaker 1>they're waiting on the phone, and as soon as he
<v Speaker 1>picks up the phone, he says, so here, you don't
<v Speaker 1>like my album, right, right?
<v Speaker 4>And the guy tries to backtrack and he's like, well,
<v Speaker 4>that's that's not really the case, and right, I believe him.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, so that he didn't like the album. It's just
<v Speaker 1>too long, too much, too.
<v Speaker 4>Much, and so he said, we got to cut it back.
<v Speaker 4>Record executive said to himself, well, appease him. We'll make
<v Speaker 4>it a double, right, not a treble, a double right.
<v Speaker 1>He doesn't know what Prince's reaction is at this point
<v Speaker 1>other than he's mad. He's mad, And so in preparation
<v Speaker 1>they're like, Okay, I guess maybe we should pick the
<v Speaker 1>best two albums worth of songs and we'll bring it
<v Speaker 1>to him, and they do that, and he calls and
<v Speaker 1>Susan Rogers's engineer answers the phone and they're like, hey,
<v Speaker 1>we need to talk to Prince and she says, well,
<v Speaker 1>you can't talk to him right now. He's been up
<v Speaker 1>all my editing the album down because you guys didn't
<v Speaker 1>want all of these songs. So he had already starteds
<v Speaker 1>like he's obviously mad, but he's just like, Oh, I'm
<v Speaker 1>just gonna do it. It's going to beat him to
<v Speaker 1>the bunch. Cut a third of my Baby, you know,
<v Speaker 1>cut it off.
<v Speaker 4>So he takes Crystal Ball wills it down, yep, and
<v Speaker 4>that becomes signing the Times.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. The other thing of importance is while this stuff
<v Speaker 1>is going on, there's a problem with the revolution.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, we really need to backup and talk about that.
<v Speaker 1>He had been working on Factory with Wendy and Lisa,
<v Speaker 1>and there were definitely songs that were coming about there,
<v Speaker 1>but then the band started to have some concerns about
<v Speaker 1>how much money they're getting paid. I mean, they are
<v Speaker 1>a huge driving force behind what he's doing. And yes
<v Speaker 1>he's the one with the work ethic, and yes he's
<v Speaker 1>the one that's brought him to this point, and he's
<v Speaker 1>the obvious genius and artists, but they're like, hey, there's
<v Speaker 1>a lot more money coming in, but we're still making
<v Speaker 1>the same amount of money that we were back in
<v Speaker 1>nineteen eighty one, right, and so we you know, like
<v Speaker 1>to talk to you about maybe, and that made him furious.
<v Speaker 1>And so they are on their parade tour. You know,
<v Speaker 1>they're getting some bad vibes from him initially, and then
<v Speaker 1>for their last show, he destroys his cloud guitar on
<v Speaker 1>stage and they're looking at each other and you know,
<v Speaker 1>this is not like the who you know breaking their instruments.
<v Speaker 1>They can tell he is pissed, and they turned to
<v Speaker 1>each other and they're like, we're fired. Were fired, and
<v Speaker 1>they were right, yep, they were fired.
<v Speaker 4>They still don't really understand what went wrong, but asking
<v Speaker 4>for more money did not sit well, right, and it
<v Speaker 4>just caused tension and he just wanted to change, yeah,
<v Speaker 4>and they got the boot.
<v Speaker 1>When he talked to them, he was like, I need
<v Speaker 1>to go places that you guys can't follow me on
<v Speaker 1>and like, well, what are you talking about, and he's like, well,
<v Speaker 1>crossless panties and nippoles, bross, Like what I mean, We've
<v Speaker 1>we've reached the stage that we are artists. We don't
<v Speaker 1>need to do that give me attention stuff anymore.
<v Speaker 4>Well, plus he had his other band projects, my of
<v Speaker 4>them lost their singer, and so he brought in a
<v Speaker 4>horns player, a couple of horns players, and so the
<v Speaker 4>band was morphing into something different.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, doctor Fink is the only member of the
<v Speaker 1>Revolution that comes to be a part of the new band.
<v Speaker 4>The drama and the changing of parts and the evolution
<v Speaker 4>of the band and the firing of the Revolution and
<v Speaker 4>all these songs in a fight with the record company,
<v Speaker 4>and you have all this drama and disruption and failure,
<v Speaker 4>and it brings us to the doorstep.
<v Speaker 1>Of Sign of the Times. Let's talk about the album cover. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>let's talk about the album. So the album cover is
<v Speaker 1>shot by Jeff Katz, who's a famous photographer, especially for
<v Speaker 1>musical artists. And he goes in and they've got this
<v Speaker 1>stage kind of set up. You know, if you did
<v Speaker 1>you watch Sign of the Times, the movie I did,
<v Speaker 1>you are a trooper. Yes, I'm just I'm I'm honored
<v Speaker 1>to be sitting in the same room with you watching
<v Speaker 1>these movies that I like. I watched I didn't get
<v Speaker 1>through the first song on the Times, and I like, okay,
<v Speaker 1>I got other things to be doing. So anyway, they've
<v Speaker 1>got this kind of weird stage set up and they've
<v Speaker 1>done a bunch of shooting with Jeff Katz of all
<v Speaker 1>these photos and Prince just they're wrapping it up and
<v Speaker 1>they're leaving, and Prince says to Jeff like, wait, take
<v Speaker 1>one more picture, and Jeff Katz is like, you know
<v Speaker 1>you're not gonna being focused in right there, and Princess, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I know, he says, Okay, takes the picture, develops it
<v Speaker 1>brings it to him. Prince is completely out of focus
<v Speaker 1>and you've just got this mess of a stage behind him,
<v Speaker 1>and he says, that's it. That's the album cover. Okay.
<v Speaker 1>Before we dive into the album, I just got one
<v Speaker 1>more Okay, one more thing to that which got so
<v Speaker 1>this album, as we said, is significantly different, and it
<v Speaker 1>has a whole lot more jazz elementation to it than
<v Speaker 1>the other albums that he has, which is interesting because,
<v Speaker 1>as we discussed before, both his mom and his biological
<v Speaker 1>dad were jazz musicians, right right. Miles Davis ended up
<v Speaker 1>on stage with Prince on the sign of the Times tour, right, yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>And so he's he's excited that he's got his parents
<v Speaker 1>in the audience. But the other aspect of Prince's personality
<v Speaker 1>is that he is this incredibly competitive guy. Right. We
<v Speaker 1>know this Michael Jackson history. Like he's up there playing.
<v Speaker 1>When Michael Jackson come to see his show, he'll go
<v Speaker 1>and play the bass in his face. When Michael Jackson
<v Speaker 1>would come to his house, he would beat the pants
<v Speaker 1>off of him in ping pong and basketball.
<v Speaker 5>You know.
<v Speaker 1>It was just he's such a competitive guy and he
<v Speaker 1>has to prove that he's the best. And so knowing
<v Speaker 1>that Miles Davis is about to come on stage with him,
<v Speaker 1>he's thinking, I'm gonna I'm gonna mess with him. I'm
<v Speaker 1>gonna totally screw him up, right, I'm going to change,
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna give the band the queue that they're supposed
<v Speaker 1>to change. I'm gonna change in the middle of see
<v Speaker 1>if he's really still got it, because I mean he's
<v Speaker 1>Miles Davis's been doing this for years and years, right, right.
<v Speaker 1>And so they're up on stage. He's excited because his
<v Speaker 1>parents are excited, but he's ready to establish that he's
<v Speaker 1>the man and Miles Davis is just you know, we'll
<v Speaker 1>see right, and so he's all, you know, middle of
<v Speaker 1>the song, all of a sudden, he gives the band
<v Speaker 1>the queue to change what they're doing, and the band
<v Speaker 1>is so in awe of Miles Davis and just staring
<v Speaker 1>at him that they completely miss print queue and it
<v Speaker 1>doesn't work at all.
<v Speaker 6>But it is like what what you know, He's just
<v Speaker 6>frustrated and angry on stage because they his trick didn't work,
<v Speaker 6>and all the band is just you know, enamored of
<v Speaker 6>Miles Davis, and so it's a failed attempt to establish
<v Speaker 6>that he is the rock king.
<v Speaker 1>That's funny.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, our buddy Pat Kannagalla would be very proud of
<v Speaker 4>you in your jazz story.
<v Speaker 1>Are our friends of the thirty something movie podcast.
<v Speaker 4>When you get out done with this, go check them out.
<v Speaker 1>There are good friends over there. Yeah. Check out the
<v Speaker 1>Misery episode. It is amazing and disturbing and wonderful all
<v Speaker 1>at the same time. Are we ready? I think we're
<v Speaker 1>ready to actually jump into the album at this time.
<v Speaker 1>Let's do it, Okay, okay, all right. So the first
<v Speaker 1>song on the album is Sign of the Times. Sign
<v Speaker 1>of the Times.
<v Speaker 4>This song was released February eighteenth, nineteen eighty seven.
<v Speaker 1>This is the first single.
<v Speaker 4>It was a ridge only on Dream Factory. It reached
<v Speaker 4>number three in the US Hot one hundred, but it
<v Speaker 4>was number one on the R and B S.
<v Speaker 1>So Printz is at Sunset Sound in La and while he's.
<v Speaker 4>There with his fiancee, Susanna Melvoine, there's an earthquake. That
<v Speaker 4>earthquake didn't sit well with him, and so he felt
<v Speaker 4>like the world is in peril right now. This earthquake
<v Speaker 4>really set him off, and so he went out and
<v Speaker 4>got to copy the newspaper. And on the July thirteenth,
<v Speaker 4>nineteen eighty six copy of the La Times, the headlines
<v Speaker 4>were AIDS epidemic out of control, star Wars leads all
<v Speaker 4>defense costs, New AIDS findings to alert the world at risk.
<v Speaker 4>And then he got a copy of the Star Tribune
<v Speaker 4>for the Minneapolis murder trial by a gang called the Disciples,
<v Speaker 4>And so he took all of these things plus the Challenger.
<v Speaker 1>Explosion you were doing. I was in my class.
<v Speaker 4>I was in my math class and we watched it
<v Speaker 4>live in school.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, kids were watching it live. I had gone to
<v Speaker 1>do something and I saw it through the window in
<v Speaker 1>another class happened.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, So he had all these events and kind of
<v Speaker 4>swirl of problems in the world and he just got
<v Speaker 4>to work on it on a Sunday and by Wednesday
<v Speaker 4>he had completed the song, lyrics, music, everything.
<v Speaker 3>Fly.
<v Speaker 1>Yes. So, do you know what the name of the
<v Speaker 1>song is based on.
<v Speaker 4>No.
<v Speaker 1>So he was a Seventh day Adventist and they have
<v Speaker 1>a magazine that's called Sign of the Times, and so
<v Speaker 1>he you know, he said he recorded this on a Sunday.
<v Speaker 1>Susan Rogers said that that would be his most contemplated
<v Speaker 1>like he recorded most of his songs on because it
<v Speaker 1>was his most contemplative time. And obviously, I mean this
<v Speaker 1>is the lyrics in this song are much more poignant
<v Speaker 1>than most of his work up until this point.
<v Speaker 2>Right.
<v Speaker 1>It's not darling Nikki, right, No, it's it's talking about
<v Speaker 1>the you know, the tragedies that are going on in
<v Speaker 1>the world right now and some amazing tragedies too. And
<v Speaker 1>the video it completely focuses on the lyrics. I mean
<v Speaker 1>there's no prints in the video. Word, there's no band
<v Speaker 1>in the video. It's all words going with scroll and
<v Speaker 1>vice that you you have to focus on the words
<v Speaker 1>Sammy Hagar would have been proud. That's right.
<v Speaker 4>So on the single you have a giant black heart
<v Speaker 4>being held up by Kat Glover, who was his dancer, right, Okay.
<v Speaker 1>So Kat Glover, just since we're bringing her up for
<v Speaker 1>the first time, kat Glover got her fame from Star
<v Speaker 1>Search from a dancing routine that she did with somebody
<v Speaker 1>named Patrick. It was called Cat and Pat. Everybody would
<v Speaker 1>talk about how much Prince looked like Kat Glover, and
<v Speaker 1>it's at some point she did. She did a few
<v Speaker 1>of the album covers, but one of them she really
<v Speaker 1>really looks like him. And she gets a call from
<v Speaker 1>Prince's dad who says it was this cover. Yes, she says,
<v Speaker 1>please tell me that you ever this album. She's like yeah.
<v Speaker 1>That means like, oh, thank Gonnis, I thought my son
<v Speaker 1>had completely lost his mind. The heart is covering her face.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, And so it would be possible for Prince to
<v Speaker 4>be dressed in drag behind his hiding the spaceband this art.
<v Speaker 4>So this song really dives deep into issues of the day.
<v Speaker 4>You have aids, you have gangs, you have drugs, you
<v Speaker 4>have the Challenger explosion.
<v Speaker 1>What do you think of the song?
<v Speaker 4>You like it?
<v Speaker 1>So it's interesting musically, like this is it. I love
<v Speaker 1>this song. It's a great song, but very stripped down
<v Speaker 1>it is. I mean, this is very wind Dove's cry.
<v Speaker 1>He was using one of the Fairlight synthesizers, which was
<v Speaker 1>not unusual for the time. We talked about that with
<v Speaker 1>def Leppard deaf Leppard. That was a big mutt laying thing,
<v Speaker 1>was the Fairlight synthesizer. But what was unique about what
<v Speaker 1>he was doing was he was using the stock sounds.
<v Speaker 1>Musical artists are going to go adjust the delay and
<v Speaker 1>the ambience and the reverb and getting the sound that
<v Speaker 1>they exactly want, and he was just like, nope, I'm
<v Speaker 1>just going to use the stock sounds that come out
<v Speaker 1>of the synthesizers. That that makes it another layer of
<v Speaker 1>the uniqueness. And then he does something in this song
<v Speaker 1>and then it kind of you see more of it
<v Speaker 1>in the other songs, and that is he's throwing off
<v Speaker 1>the melody in the rhythm a little bit like when
<v Speaker 1>he says, my cousin tried reefer for the first time.
<v Speaker 1>Now he's smoking horse. It's June. The rhythm is off
<v Speaker 1>like you expect the rhyme to hit and he says horse.
<v Speaker 1>But then it's like delayed and he hits it's June,
<v Speaker 1>which is not what other people were doing at the time.
<v Speaker 1>They weren't throwing the rhythm of the melody off like that.
<v Speaker 1>He's not rapping, no, he is sort of talk singing. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it is interesting. It is stripped down, huge hit Spring
<v Speaker 1>of eighty seven. Let's talk about the B side on
<v Speaker 1>this one real quick, okay, sure. So the B side
<v Speaker 1>is a song called La La La he he he.
<v Speaker 1>I gotta say, I'm sorry. I like this song better
<v Speaker 1>than probably ninety percent of Sign of the Times like this.
<v Speaker 1>This song should have been on the album. This song
<v Speaker 1>is fantastic. It's ridiculous and the dog barking kind of
<v Speaker 1>rhythm that they have going on, but it's a fantastic song.
<v Speaker 1>I can't believe it didn't make it on the album.
<v Speaker 1>But I'm glad they put it on the B side.
<v Speaker 1>We don't with Silotimes. Yeah, all right, let's move on.
<v Speaker 4>The next song is called Play in the Sunshine Time.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, so this song is not stripped down. This is
<v Speaker 1>that full what you expect from Prince kind of song.
<v Speaker 1>I like it a lot.
<v Speaker 4>Oh man, it's fun, it's joyful, it's playful. This song
<v Speaker 4>reminds me of nineteen ninety nine, which is sort of
<v Speaker 4>this idea of tonight, we're gonna have fun. It doesn't
<v Speaker 4>matter what's going on in our lives. Tonight is for fun, right.
<v Speaker 4>The piano in this sounds like a toy piano.
<v Speaker 1>You know I'm talking about this, right, so, and I
<v Speaker 1>love at the beginning he's has that squeals. He says, oh, doggies. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it's a good song. I like it. The intro has
<v Speaker 1>this kind of, you know, ambient noise of if you
<v Speaker 1>were sitting out at a park somewhere, the sounds that
<v Speaker 1>she would be hearing. It's got kind of a Beatles'
<v Speaker 1>White album style about that. But yeah, good sound. And
<v Speaker 1>I like how he interacts with his band a little bit.
<v Speaker 4>There's some back and forth, he says drummer, and the
<v Speaker 4>drummer's like some fun stuff that they do with the song.
<v Speaker 4>Especially after the serious tone of Sign of the Times.
<v Speaker 4>This is full on fun.
<v Speaker 1>Let's not get too serious, right, all right?
<v Speaker 4>So we both love playing the Sunshine. Let's move on
<v Speaker 4>to the next song is called Housequake. Shut up already, damn.
<v Speaker 1>So we're back to strip down again, right, Yeah, this
<v Speaker 1>kind of sounds like storm or something. Yeah, with the
<v Speaker 1>rhythm that's going on. So what do you think? I
<v Speaker 1>like it.
<v Speaker 4>I don't like it as much as Playing the Sunshine
<v Speaker 4>and some of the Times, but it's good. It's it's funny.
<v Speaker 4>You've got that sped up voice, that Camille voice.
<v Speaker 3>Right.
<v Speaker 4>It was originally intended to be on the Camille album.
<v Speaker 4>It was on the Camille album, right that part of
<v Speaker 4>the beginning with this shut up already. Damn it's kind
<v Speaker 4>of funny, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 4>This was recorded the day that he fired the revolution wow.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and had to be inspired by the earthquake that
<v Speaker 1>he actually experienced, right, I think so? Yeah. Yeah. So
<v Speaker 1>the music on this one it's simple and not complex.
<v Speaker 1>I mean it's just weird to me because we know
<v Speaker 1>that Prince is this incredible musician, but he's doing something
<v Speaker 1>with basically like three instruments. It's not right. It's not
<v Speaker 1>out there to wow yet.
<v Speaker 4>You know, this was considered to be the first single
<v Speaker 4>released on side of the Times. Why that he liked it.
<v Speaker 4>He wanted it out there, okay, but in my opinion,
<v Speaker 4>not in the top half of this up.
<v Speaker 1>But I like it. This song was born out of
<v Speaker 1>a jam session with the Bengals, Suzanna Hoff's Majors. Ye,
<v Speaker 1>her movies terrible? All right, does anybody know about the quake?
<v Speaker 1>Shut up already? Damn. Okay, you're done with that, all right.
<v Speaker 1>Let's get to a song called the Ballad of Dorothy Parker. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>so this one, the drum machine is obvious. Yes, that
<v Speaker 1>drum machine is unmistakable. It is the whnn LM one
<v Speaker 1>drum machine that has that totally eighties. This is what
<v Speaker 1>we're listening to in the eighties. Did you like this song?
<v Speaker 4>No?
<v Speaker 5>Wow?
<v Speaker 1>Okay, so this is one. I mean, this is a
<v Speaker 1>huge like everybody loves this song and you don't like it? No,
<v Speaker 1>I don't. I don't like it either. I don't get it.
<v Speaker 1>I mean it's he's doing something very, very different. I'll
<v Speaker 1>say that, you know, and I told you whenever we
<v Speaker 1>were talking about Michael Jackson that I was disappointed that
<v Speaker 1>when Michael Jackson, after five years from Thriller, comes out
<v Speaker 1>with Bad, which I just felt like was Thriller Part two,
<v Speaker 1>and that prince you know, say what she will. He
<v Speaker 1>completely changed the way he was doing stuff. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>he's mixing funk he's mixing soul, he's mixing psychedelic and
<v Speaker 1>pop and electro and rock, and he's got all of
<v Speaker 1>these things going on. And I don't know what the
<v Speaker 1>song mean. Sorry.
<v Speaker 2>No.
<v Speaker 4>In fact, I read enough and then listened to enough
<v Speaker 4>that I felt a little browbeaten by people telling me
<v Speaker 4>how great it was. Yeah, and I just I couldn't
<v Speaker 4>get there.
<v Speaker 1>We're gonna get a lot of hate for saying that.
<v Speaker 1>I'm sorry. I'm sorry to all the Prince fans out
<v Speaker 1>there who love the song. You've got to be honest
<v Speaker 1>about how we feel. This is just not my taste.
<v Speaker 1>It's not me either.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, but I got a couple of interesting things on this, Okay,
<v Speaker 4>go all right. So despite the fact that neither one
<v Speaker 4>of us enjoy the song. Dorothy Parker is a mid
<v Speaker 4>twentieth century writer known for her wit.
<v Speaker 1>That's who Dorothy Parker is.
<v Speaker 4>Prince just chose a name that he thought sounded cool.
<v Speaker 4>This was the first song recorded at Paisley Park. Okay,
<v Speaker 4>So he and Susan Rodgers are working in the studio.
<v Speaker 1>He's anxious to get going.
<v Speaker 4>This is the time in his life when he could
<v Speaker 4>couldn't go one day with that recording some type of
<v Speaker 4>music and the sound system had set up at his
<v Speaker 4>new house and he was wanting to test it out
<v Speaker 4>and see how it went. And he asked the guy,
<v Speaker 4>is it ready and the guy says, yeah, it sounds good.
<v Speaker 1>It's ready to go.
<v Speaker 4>And he's like, all right, great, and so he and
<v Speaker 4>Susan Rodgers go through there this twenty four hour marathon
<v Speaker 4>session where they're going to record and refine the ballot
<v Speaker 4>to Dorothy Parker.
<v Speaker 1>Right.
<v Speaker 4>But the whole time she's listening, she's like, sounds crappy, right,
<v Speaker 4>it sounds the recording board is a huge influence on
<v Speaker 4>how the thing sounds.
<v Speaker 1>And they've got this brand new recording board in brand
<v Speaker 1>new studio and she's like, this sounds like we're underwater. Yep.
<v Speaker 4>And she's like, I can hear it. I know he
<v Speaker 4>can hear it. He's going to kill me and think
<v Speaker 4>about working on it for twenty four hours straight. But
<v Speaker 4>she did not have the freedom or didn't feel like
<v Speaker 4>she could say, hey, hold on a second, we got
<v Speaker 4>to call this off and do this tomorrow.
<v Speaker 1>No, she said, you do not interrupt prints. That's right.
<v Speaker 1>If he's on a roll, you let him wrong. Yep.
<v Speaker 4>And so that's why the sound is a little bit
<v Speaker 4>garbled in this song.
<v Speaker 1>I think she corrected most of it. But well, he
<v Speaker 1>gives it. I mean, it gives it a unique sound,
<v Speaker 1>which obviously that's what he's going for on this album.
<v Speaker 1>By the way, you were talking about Dorothy Parker being
<v Speaker 1>this famous writer, right, Yeah, you know he had no
<v Speaker 1>idea who she was when like this. Eric Leads is
<v Speaker 1>one of the guys from the family that he brought
<v Speaker 1>in to play the saxophone and a lot of these
<v Speaker 1>songs on this album, And so he hears it and
<v Speaker 1>he's like, wow, I had no idea that he knew
<v Speaker 1>who Dorothy Parker was. I'm super excited. And then he
<v Speaker 1>tells him and Prince is like, I just like the name.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know who that is. Oh, Lyrically, I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>Have you looked at the lyrics of this song?
<v Speaker 4>He talks about taking a bath with this pants on?
<v Speaker 4>Sure because he's dating somebody else. Yeah, sure, Dorothy, I'll
<v Speaker 4>take a bath with you. I'm slowing my pants on.
<v Speaker 4>One of his musicians, talking about this song said, I've
<v Speaker 4>listened to this song now for thirty years, and I
<v Speaker 4>still can't.
<v Speaker 1>Tell what genre of music that is. Yeah, it's not
<v Speaker 1>our taste, not our tastes all right, we're not smart
<v Speaker 1>enough for this song. It's our congratulations to everyone else.
<v Speaker 4>Who is I guess, yeah, okay, this is a spot
<v Speaker 4>where you flip the record over to the side two of.
<v Speaker 1>Record one, right on side of the Times, Yes, and it.
<v Speaker 4>Starts off with a song called it.
<v Speaker 1>All right. So once again you get that obvious drum
<v Speaker 1>machine going on here, and there are very few fills
<v Speaker 1>in this song. And then once again you've got that obvious,
<v Speaker 1>fair light standard sound on the keyboards and that's almost
<v Speaker 1>all you've got. I mean, obviously him singing too, but
<v Speaker 1>that's it for the song. And it's really repetitive. I
<v Speaker 1>like this one, okay, I like this one. Korea a
<v Speaker 1>mood and the repetition creates a mood. What do you
<v Speaker 1>love about it? Well, it's just it's got a nice
<v Speaker 1>beat to it. He's really leaning into his.
<v Speaker 4>Vocals here, and I know he likes it, you know
<v Speaker 4>how I know he likes it. This song was on
<v Speaker 4>two versions of Dream Factory on Crystal Ball and made
<v Speaker 4>the final cut for SI of the Times. Curiously, he
<v Speaker 4>likes to play with his lyrics a little bit.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 4>So in the lyrics to this song it is capitalized. Okay,
<v Speaker 4>so I t every time it's mentioned. I want to
<v Speaker 4>do it all night long.
<v Speaker 1>U What is it he wants to do?
<v Speaker 4>I don't know, all right, yep, okay, moving on the
<v Speaker 4>next song, Starfish and Coffee.
<v Speaker 1>So I'm glad we have the bell at the beginning
<v Speaker 1>of this. Let us know that other song is over.
<v Speaker 5>It was some botifil on a night Miss Kathleen was
<v Speaker 5>Kevin losing food line?
<v Speaker 1>Was I really dig this song. It's just it's fun.
<v Speaker 1>It's not typical of him at all, and it's fascinating
<v Speaker 1>because it's based on a real person. It is as
<v Speaker 1>tells the story of Cynthia Rose, who was actually a
<v Speaker 1>schoolmate of Susannah Melvoye and would actually they would you
<v Speaker 1>have for breakfast? This morning? Is morning Cynthia? And she
<v Speaker 1>would say starfish and peepee. So Prince, you know, took
<v Speaker 1>a little liberty with that because Peep doesn't is not
<v Speaker 1>quite as marketable. Yes, but starfish and coffee, maple syrup
<v Speaker 1>and jam, butterscotch clouds, a tangerine and a side order
<v Speaker 1>of hands jamange. I mean it really sounds like something
<v Speaker 1>that you would hear on Sesame Street.
<v Speaker 4>That you say that Becau because he actually did a
<v Speaker 4>TV show called Muppets Tonight where the Muppets actually Rizzo
<v Speaker 4>the rat comes to him, which we love the Muppets.
<v Speaker 4>He says, what do you get the ideas for your songs, Prince?
<v Speaker 4>And he's like, actually, they make a joke because he
<v Speaker 4>can't pronounce his name. And he's like, oh, you can
<v Speaker 4>get it from anywhere. I can get him from this
<v Speaker 4>or that or this or that. And he's like, why
<v Speaker 4>dont you tell me what's on the menu today? And
<v Speaker 4>he writes a song based on what's on the menu
<v Speaker 4>called Starfish and Coffee. So Cynthia Rose was a autistic
<v Speaker 4>savant friend of Susannah and Wendy. Yeah, and they asked
<v Speaker 4>her every day. She'd come in, you know what I
<v Speaker 4>had for breakfast?
<v Speaker 1>Starfish and peepee.
<v Speaker 4>So and so one day Prince came and said, you know,
<v Speaker 4>I've been thinking about the girl that you told me about.
<v Speaker 1>Write down.
<v Speaker 4>Everything was like, write it all down on a piece
<v Speaker 4>of paper, and so Susannah would write, She'd write the
<v Speaker 4>whole story down. Prince took that wrote the lyrics to
<v Speaker 4>the song and actually gave Melbourne co.
<v Speaker 1>Writing credit on this song. Love this song.
<v Speaker 4>This was originally on Dream Factory. It makes me feel good. Listen,
<v Speaker 4>that's great music is The music is cool.
<v Speaker 1>It's you've got this piano, you've got this backward guitar
<v Speaker 1>bit coming in. But it's not overwhelming. It's just subtle
<v Speaker 1>and kind of a nice little accent to the song.
<v Speaker 1>The playful lyrics that you have. It's it's a beautifully
<v Speaker 1>put together a little song. It just makes you happy. Okay.
<v Speaker 1>Moving on to a song called slow Love. Oh my gosh, this.
<v Speaker 1>I know this is great for some folks, but this
<v Speaker 1>is not my I'm not into very white. I'm not
<v Speaker 1>into the slow love making. No, I'm sorry. I know
<v Speaker 1>other people love it, forgive me again. It's just not
<v Speaker 1>my not my taste.
<v Speaker 4>There's some interesting things about this song that I want
<v Speaker 4>to talk about. Yeah, but it's not my It's not
<v Speaker 4>my thing either.
<v Speaker 1>Okay.
<v Speaker 4>This was originally on Dream Factory back in the day
<v Speaker 4>when Prince Prince would split time between Minneapolis and LA
<v Speaker 4>and he would get a hankering for a song and
<v Speaker 4>a hankering a hankering. So he's out in LA and
<v Speaker 4>He's like, I want to work on Slow Love today. Well,
<v Speaker 4>the master is back in Minneapolis, and so he would
<v Speaker 4>he would call and say, hey, I need I need
<v Speaker 4>that ship to me. Well ups is like next day.
<v Speaker 4>Well that's not that is not fast enough for him.
<v Speaker 4>So he would have somebody drive it over the airport.
<v Speaker 4>They'd put it on an airplane like the next flight,
<v Speaker 4>so it would be there in an hour, right, and
<v Speaker 4>sometimes you'd have barbecue from.
<v Speaker 1>When you get a hankering. When he got a hanker
<v Speaker 1>in a hankering for barbecue, he'd have that son too,
<v Speaker 1>that's great.
<v Speaker 4>So he had this master tape manually airshipped to him,
<v Speaker 4>like in the next hour, so he could work.
<v Speaker 1>Wendy and Lisa worked.
<v Speaker 4>On this song with him again. This is before they
<v Speaker 4>were fired. But he co wrote this song with a
<v Speaker 4>named Carol R.
<v Speaker 1>Davis.
<v Speaker 4>Apparently she was a friend of Princes, but she is
<v Speaker 4>a actress and singer. Rumor was that she would was
<v Speaker 4>dating Prints at the time, but swears that they were just.
<v Speaker 1>Friends all right.
<v Speaker 4>Moving on, Moving on, That brings us to a song
<v Speaker 4>called hot Thing.
<v Speaker 1>This song has that drum machine and that kind of
<v Speaker 1>repetitive melody behind it. I still I like it better.
<v Speaker 5>Though.
<v Speaker 1>I like this song. It kind of is gives us
<v Speaker 1>a taste of what's coming up on bad Dance. It's
<v Speaker 1>got a very bad dance feel to me, you think, so,
<v Speaker 1>oh yeah, for sure. See I would go to the opposite.
<v Speaker 4>I would say this song belongs on Dirty Mind or Controversy.
<v Speaker 4>But hey, that's what it feels like to you, all right,
<v Speaker 4>this is a striverer song, ho.
<v Speaker 1>I THINGK Streber song. Sure.
<v Speaker 4>This song reached number fourteen on the Hot R and
<v Speaker 4>B chart, not a Hot one hundred, but the RB chart. Yeah,
<v Speaker 4>so it's a good one. I don't love it, but
<v Speaker 4>it's it's fun. So the next song is called Forever
<v Speaker 4>in My Life.
<v Speaker 1>So this one I have to think that he wrote
<v Speaker 1>for Susannah Melboyne. Right right, they were engaged, right, who's
<v Speaker 1>supposed to I mean, they were already living like they
<v Speaker 1>were married. He has made this decision to settle down
<v Speaker 1>with just one woman, and so I think that he
<v Speaker 1>wrote it for But what I love is that after
<v Speaker 1>he says it makes me want to settle down. Maybe
<v Speaker 1>it's true, I think I do. I mean, I don't
<v Speaker 1>know if this has to be a firm decision or not.
<v Speaker 1>But that's the way I'm leaning. I think it's funny.
<v Speaker 4>When he played this for Susanna the first time. Yeah,
<v Speaker 4>He's like, I want to play this song for you.
<v Speaker 4>It's called Forever in my Life.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. She's like, who's it about. He's like, we're engaged.
<v Speaker 1>That doesn't mean anything. Yeah, I know you, by the way,
<v Speaker 1>just because we didn't mention this before. When he fired
<v Speaker 1>her sister, she didn't stay engaged to him after that.
<v Speaker 1>It's a little hard.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, Thanksgiving would be tough, right, all right, take that
<v Speaker 4>record off back in the sleeve, pull out record too.
<v Speaker 1>Before we jump in. Unlike many other albums that are
<v Speaker 1>double albums, this album was not a two pocket album.
<v Speaker 1>The records the final were in their own individual sleeves
<v Speaker 1>inside of the one pocket. The sleeves though, had this
<v Speaker 1>cool these cool photographs of Prince and I think, I
<v Speaker 1>think awesome. Cat Lever was on the other one too.
<v Speaker 1>So there's two records, two records in one in one sleep. Okay, now,
<v Speaker 1>two records in one pocket, two sleeves, two slaves, just
<v Speaker 1>as confusing.
<v Speaker 4>But yes, I'm all right, okay, right, this is where
<v Speaker 4>I get excited. Okay, starting off record too, You got
<v Speaker 4>the look.
<v Speaker 5>You here.
<v Speaker 1>I love the way that it starts off in this
<v Speaker 1>kind of dreamy sound and then bam, it's in the
<v Speaker 1>face with the drums. That is very cool, very cool. Okay.
<v Speaker 1>This song was a number two hits.
<v Speaker 4>You Got That, peaking at number two the week of
<v Speaker 4>October seventeenth, nineteen eighty seven, behind Lost in.
<v Speaker 1>Emotion by Lecay. Lisa called James, this is a duet?
<v Speaker 1>Was she leasing? Right? And it's funny.
<v Speaker 4>When he called her, he said, hey, I'd love for
<v Speaker 4>you to sing on this song I'm working on, right,
<v Speaker 4>So he called her up.
<v Speaker 1>She came over.
<v Speaker 4>When she got there, she listened to it. She's like, well,
<v Speaker 4>this song's basically done. So she didn't know it was
<v Speaker 4>going to be a duet, so she just kind of
<v Speaker 4>sang the whole thing. And when he listened to it,
<v Speaker 4>she's kind of all over the place and took his
<v Speaker 4>vocals and her vocals and constructed it into a duet.
<v Speaker 1>It was back and forth in the World.
<v Speaker 4>Series as well, Boy Versus Girl the World Series. Interestingly enough,
<v Speaker 4>the Minnesota Twins won the World Series in nineteen eighty seven.
<v Speaker 1>Year nice, Thank you. Minnesota is important because that's where
<v Speaker 1>Minneapolis is. Okay, she's not doing that geography thing and
<v Speaker 1>a little trouble. Why I do it? Why is that good? Okay,
<v Speaker 1>I get it.
<v Speaker 4>This is the third single released July fourteenth, nineteen eighty seven.
<v Speaker 1>Right, So she and Easton didn't know. I mean at
<v Speaker 1>the time, before the song came out, she had no
<v Speaker 1>idea she was a backup singer, which she was pretty
<v Speaker 1>big at the moment, right, she was doing well, But
<v Speaker 1>I was like, well, why would she come over if
<v Speaker 1>she's only a backup singer? But then I remember we
<v Speaker 1>talked about in the Motley Crue episode that Freakin Steven
<v Speaker 1>Tyler and Brian Adams were singing backup on the Motley
<v Speaker 1>Crue songs. I guess yeah, all kinds of people with
<v Speaker 1>all kinds of fame don't mind coming to sing backups sometimes.
<v Speaker 4>Okay, I've got an interesting story about this song. Okay, Okay,
<v Speaker 4>this is gonna blow your mind.
<v Speaker 1>Okay.
<v Speaker 4>So Prince had this female friend that loved particular radio
<v Speaker 4>songs that were pop friendly. She could not get enough
<v Speaker 4>of this one particular song, I'm gonna play for you
<v Speaker 4>here in just a second. Okay, And so Prince was
<v Speaker 4>certain that she just liked him because she was familiar
<v Speaker 4>with him, not because she really recognized or understood what
<v Speaker 4>it takes to make a good pop song.
<v Speaker 1>And so when he set out to write You Got
<v Speaker 1>to Look, he wanted to write.
<v Speaker 4>The most radio friendly, most ear candy song to try
<v Speaker 4>and test this theory on her. But this is the
<v Speaker 4>song that she liked at the time. So she loved
<v Speaker 4>the song Addicted to Love by Robert Pauler, right, and
<v Speaker 4>she could not help herself, but she would dance every
<v Speaker 4>time that song came on. And he's like, you don't
<v Speaker 4>know what a good pop song is.
<v Speaker 1>In the world. So and so You.
<v Speaker 4>Got the Look is based on Addicted to Love.
<v Speaker 1>Can we talk about the video? Yeah, so dreamy beginning
<v Speaker 1>makes sense because he's fallen asleep sitting in front of
<v Speaker 1>his makeup mirror, right, and he dreams the video basically, right,
<v Speaker 1>And when the video starts, you've got Sheena Easton in
<v Speaker 1>this outfit that looks like what Prince would be wearing.
<v Speaker 5>Right.
<v Speaker 1>She's got the shoulder pointy shoulder pads, she's got the
<v Speaker 1>ruffled collar, and she's got her hair styled to the
<v Speaker 1>side just like he did. So it's just very you're
<v Speaker 1>kind of confused about what's going on, and he's where
<v Speaker 1>a freaking fur coat right, singing like Emil. It's this
<v Speaker 1>very confusing, lust filled song. But I think they shot
<v Speaker 1>the video over two days, and so there's this weird
<v Speaker 1>if you go back and watch the video. I don't
<v Speaker 1>know if you noticed this, but there's this weird part
<v Speaker 1>where they're singing back and forth. If you're looking at him,
<v Speaker 1>like and it's a two shot and you're looking at
<v Speaker 1>her back. She's in that prince outfit with the shoulder pads,
<v Speaker 1>but then when it shoots to her, she's in like
<v Speaker 1>a bra top I mean in June and a ponytail,
<v Speaker 1>and you've got the cleavage and you're like, oh.
<v Speaker 4>Hello, Yeah, I didn't notice that this was shot over
<v Speaker 4>two days in Paris during the Sin of the Times tour.
<v Speaker 4>This one MTV Best Male Video was the thirty eighth
<v Speaker 4>biggest hit of nineteen eighty seven. But this is the
<v Speaker 4>interesting thing about this song. This track was recorded at
<v Speaker 4>the time he was shrinking Crystal Ball, So this is
<v Speaker 4>the only song on Sign of the Times that was
<v Speaker 4>not on either Camille crystal Ball or Dream Factory. This
<v Speaker 4>is how good he is. Oh, I've got all these songs.
<v Speaker 4>Oh well, I've got another one.
<v Speaker 1>I'll just throw together this massive hit.
<v Speaker 4>Oh and it'll be a huge song for nineteen eighty seven,
<v Speaker 4>she Easton and Prince. I mean he wrote Sugar Walls
<v Speaker 4>for her. But on the Batman soundtrack there's a song
<v Speaker 4>called Arms of Orion. Love it and it's a Prince
<v Speaker 4>Sheena Easton do it right. If you haven't heard it,
<v Speaker 4>go listen to it.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's well since you've been gone up in seven
<v Speaker 1>see a joke. So this song in the video you
<v Speaker 1>have she and Easton. Obviously you've got Sheila e doing
<v Speaker 1>her kind of acrobatic percussive thing. She looking good. She
<v Speaker 1>had and by the way, she was one of those
<v Speaker 1>people that Prince wrote big hit songs for, like her
<v Speaker 1>biggest hit was a song that he wrote life Right.
<v Speaker 1>And you've got Kat Glover as well doing herd catscat
<v Speaker 1>amazing dances. A couple of things on this.
<v Speaker 4>In the lyrics of this song, yeah, he talks about
<v Speaker 4>coloring it peachin black. The Side of the Times tour
<v Speaker 4>was only in Europe. The European audiences were very involved audiences,
<v Speaker 4>and so he encouraged them to come to the concert
<v Speaker 4>wearing either peach or black or both. Based on this song,
<v Speaker 4>Susan Rogers, also his producer, said this song was birthed
<v Speaker 4>out of one forty eight hour session.
<v Speaker 1>Holy two days, no sleep.
<v Speaker 4>Don't stop him when he's on a roll, all right?
<v Speaker 4>Next song, If I was your girlfriend?
<v Speaker 3>Would you man Man?
<v Speaker 1>Hall of thing you forgot when I was Joel Man.
<v Speaker 4>This was the second single released May sixth, nineteen eighty seven.
<v Speaker 1>Originally on the Camille album.
<v Speaker 4>Only reached number sixty seven on the Hot one hundred
<v Speaker 4>in the US, but this was a hit in the UK.
<v Speaker 1>Nineteen eighty seven. The UK is going to be a
<v Speaker 1>little more accepting of a guy singing a song if
<v Speaker 1>I was your girlfriend and a girl voice, right. This
<v Speaker 1>is interesting because he puts himself in the shoes of
<v Speaker 1>like Wendy and Lisa, like being a lover and a
<v Speaker 1>friend of you know, like if I was your lover
<v Speaker 1>and if I was your friend, would you come to
<v Speaker 1>me if someone broke your heart even if it was me?
<v Speaker 1>Which is an interesting thing, you know, that's not something
<v Speaker 1>that other folks, I guess, tend to think about this song.
<v Speaker 4>If you've ever seen the movie strip tease with Demi
<v Speaker 4>Moore and Bert Reynolds.
<v Speaker 1>It always comes back to the strip. Demi Moore does
<v Speaker 1>a little dance to this song, a little dance, particularly
<v Speaker 1>private dance for Bert Royland's character. He's so slimy and
<v Speaker 1>that things moving on.
<v Speaker 4>To a song called Strange Relationship.
<v Speaker 1>This song I love Hey.
<v Speaker 4>This song was originally on Dream Factory, then it went
<v Speaker 4>on Camille.
<v Speaker 1>He is using his Camille voice here.
<v Speaker 4>There's a lot of speculation about who this Strange Relationship
<v Speaker 4>is about.
<v Speaker 1>I can't stand to see you happy? Yeah, I hate
<v Speaker 1>to see you sad, babe, all you and I wa'ts
<v Speaker 1>this strange relationship ship ship.
<v Speaker 4>Okay, So the original thought is that this was about
<v Speaker 4>Susannah Melboyne okay, okay, or maybe about Wendy or Lisa.
<v Speaker 4>But the truth is this song was created in nineteen
<v Speaker 4>eighty three, Okay. This song is about Vanity.
<v Speaker 1>Love Oh Vanity six Vanity. Yeah. So Vanity was the
<v Speaker 1>lead singer of Vanity six, and we discussed her in
<v Speaker 1>our Montley Creu episode as well, because when she broke
<v Speaker 1>up with Prince, she started dating Nicky six, the bass
<v Speaker 1>player and foundation of Motley Crew. Yep. It's a good
<v Speaker 1>bit in that episode about Prince sending her roses and
<v Speaker 1>NICKI six seeing them. You should get check it out.
<v Speaker 4>He gave the song to Wendy and Lisa in nineteen
<v Speaker 4>eighty three and told them to finish it once they
<v Speaker 4>were fired, and they heard the version that was on
<v Speaker 4>the album. Yeah, they were jealous and angry because he
<v Speaker 4>had taken all of their stuff out of it and
<v Speaker 4>morphed it into something different. This song, I love it.
<v Speaker 4>It's one of my favorite songs in the whole album.
<v Speaker 1>It's still got the drum machine in there, which is
<v Speaker 1>not my favorite. I mean it's not that I don't
<v Speaker 1>like a drum machine in songs from time to time,
<v Speaker 1>but I kind of wish, especially on this song, that
<v Speaker 1>he would have had an actual drum drum set go.
<v Speaker 1>It feels like a revolution song.
<v Speaker 4>I think it's interesting that it was about Vanity when
<v Speaker 4>she heard the song, Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>She was not happy. Stories are wife are right?
<v Speaker 4>She is beautiful and crazy. Moving on to the fourth
<v Speaker 4>single song called I Can Never Take the Place if
<v Speaker 4>You're a Man.
<v Speaker 1>So now this song you have the real drum set right.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, this is old school Prince to me. This
<v Speaker 1>is not This is straight off of you know what
<v Speaker 1>this is? This is like Manic Monday. That's what this
<v Speaker 1>I mean. This song has a real similar vibe. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>yeah to Manic Monday. I can see that. Yeah, this
<v Speaker 1>is very much mid eighties Prince as opposed to late
<v Speaker 1>eighties Prince.
<v Speaker 4>This is my favorite song on the album. Yeah, it's
<v Speaker 4>a it's a.
<v Speaker 1>Big hit in early eighty eight.
<v Speaker 4>This was on Dream Factory and then on Crystal Ball,
<v Speaker 4>But this song was written and recorded in nineteen seventy nine.
<v Speaker 3>Fine, whoa that day?
<v Speaker 1>But I could never.
<v Speaker 3>Take Umlass.
<v Speaker 1>Back when he's just stern twenty first album. Yeah, and
<v Speaker 1>I listened to that version of the song.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, it's there, but it's not the pop masterpiece that
<v Speaker 4>this one is.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's not the Polish version that this is. It's
<v Speaker 1>I enjoy this song. I probably like Manic Monday a
<v Speaker 1>little bit better than the song, but I still say
<v Speaker 1>that this is a decent song. Oh my gosh, I
<v Speaker 1>love this song. The guitar sol on this I adore.
<v Speaker 1>He'll play a piece and then he'll mirror it, and
<v Speaker 1>he'll play a piece and then he'll mirror it. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>and it's just it's just I love it. Yeah, it's
<v Speaker 1>a doodling do that, Yes, yeah, yeah, fancy trick, fancy trick.
<v Speaker 4>Check this trick out, Check this trick out. Jordan Knight
<v Speaker 4>has a cover of the song Guy from the New
<v Speaker 4>Kids on the Block.
<v Speaker 1>The Google Dolls have a cover of this song. It's
<v Speaker 1>pretty good.
<v Speaker 4>Love it, love it, love it my favorite song on
<v Speaker 4>the whole album. All right, all right, take the needle off,
<v Speaker 4>flip it over side four, right, and we start off
<v Speaker 4>with a.
<v Speaker 1>Song called The Cross. Okay, I don't want to talk
<v Speaker 1>too much of this, because this is my favorite song
<v Speaker 1>on the album. This song is so moving, so powerful, Black.
<v Speaker 5>Day, stormy Night, No No, No, ho Panside, Don't Cry,
<v Speaker 5>he is Coming, Don't Die with doun knowing the.
<v Speaker 1>Crowd builds in such an epic way. I mean, you're
<v Speaker 1>literally you're starting with a single note playing on the guitar,
<v Speaker 1>which moves into strumming, which moves into strumming with him singing.
<v Speaker 1>And it's such a passionate song. And as it builds,
<v Speaker 1>you have layer that gets added, and it comes in
<v Speaker 1>by the time you get to the end that you
<v Speaker 1>can tell that the tempo has increased in the song.
<v Speaker 1>You've got a crunching guitar, You've got this big crescendo.
<v Speaker 1>And as I'm sitting here and listen to this, you know,
<v Speaker 1>I told you I didn't have this album. I listened
<v Speaker 1>to this first time while we're getting ready for this,
<v Speaker 1>and I'm just I'm in awe. I'm just blown away
<v Speaker 1>at how good this song is. And I'm sitting there
<v Speaker 1>thinking to myself, this is like seven seeing the Future, right,
<v Speaker 1>And I'm thinking to myself, this is so good. This
<v Speaker 1>is so much like that song that I love because
<v Speaker 1>Seven's one of my favorite songs as well. And then
<v Speaker 1>he ends the song and it's got that harmony, that
<v Speaker 1>very specialized harmony that he starts off seven with, and
<v Speaker 1>so it's just I would love to hear how have
<v Speaker 1>this song end and how a transition into seven. I
<v Speaker 1>have to think that he had to do that when
<v Speaker 1>they did their live show, he had to have done
<v Speaker 1>a version of the Cross followed by seven, because it
<v Speaker 1>just fits too perfectly. Okay, Okay, I like it a
<v Speaker 1>little bit. This is a great song.
<v Speaker 4>This is a great I saw a music writer talk
<v Speaker 4>about the song and said that if churches would play
<v Speaker 4>songs like this, they would have more people in the pues.
<v Speaker 3>Bday Coming night, No, He's coming.
<v Speaker 1>Susannah Melbourne.
<v Speaker 4>We talked about how this was a Sunday song all right,
<v Speaker 4>so he was very contemplative on Sundays, and she said
<v Speaker 4>when she heard this one for the first time, She's like, well,
<v Speaker 4>he's feeling guilty about something, right.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that was that was his deal. He would feel
<v Speaker 1>guilty about the second song, go Right to God song.
<v Speaker 4>Also, in regards to this song, depending on when you
<v Speaker 4>hear him play, he either sings it as the Cross
<v Speaker 4>or the Christ.
<v Speaker 1>Oh wow, kind of interesting. Yeah, that's impressive. This was
<v Speaker 1>originally on in Factory. We both love this song absolutely.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, all right, moving on to a song called It's
<v Speaker 4>Gonna Be a Beautiful Night too.
<v Speaker 1>So this song has a very more stay in the
<v Speaker 1>time feel about it. I can totally see them popping
<v Speaker 1>and sliding along and doing their little dance as they
<v Speaker 1>are playing this song. It's got jazz feel to it
<v Speaker 1>and it's so oh, I love the song. This is
<v Speaker 1>this is one where you just you would be excited
<v Speaker 1>to be in the crowd because everybody would be having
<v Speaker 1>fun as the.
<v Speaker 4>Song is going. Totally totally this was a live recording
<v Speaker 4>in Paris, August twenty fifth, nineteen eighty six.
<v Speaker 1>I love that they do the o eio from a
<v Speaker 1>Wizard of Oz. I saw some Oh. Oh, they got
<v Speaker 1>a lot more horns in this song. Uh huh.
<v Speaker 4>Get a little bit of Eric Leans on that taxaphone.
<v Speaker 1>Yep, yep, thank you say whatever? That thing is that
<v Speaker 1>thing with the lung hey, what a hey? So I
<v Speaker 1>love this song a lot of fun.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah like it okay.
<v Speaker 1>Finally, the last song on the album, song called Door.
<v Speaker 1>I think I know you're gonna think I hate this song,
<v Speaker 1>but I actually kind of like a little bit. I
<v Speaker 1>dig it a little bit more. I can't tell you
<v Speaker 1>what is different about the slow love song, because they
<v Speaker 1>both have that same kind of feel, but this one's
<v Speaker 1>just a little bit more catchy to me. I don't
<v Speaker 1>know what to say.
<v Speaker 4>It's got some soul to it, It's got it's very soulful,
<v Speaker 4>for sure.
<v Speaker 1>But I like it a lot. I do okay this song.
<v Speaker 4>In two thousand and nine, Essence magazine listed this as
<v Speaker 4>one of their twenty five best slow jams of all time.
<v Speaker 4>In twenty ten, users of AOL Radio voted Adore the
<v Speaker 4>number two best print song one of us.
<v Speaker 2>Two.
<v Speaker 1>Well, okay, that's going a bit far, I would say, ye,
<v Speaker 1>who said that? Users of AOL radio? So well, like
<v Speaker 1>three guys. I don't know who these guys were. First
<v Speaker 1>of all, this isn't the second best song on his album.
<v Speaker 4>Actually, it's not the second best song sid the album.
<v Speaker 1>There's three songs. It's the third best. Oh my goodness,
<v Speaker 1>it's good though. I like it. Yeah, and it's soulful.
<v Speaker 1>It's not really my thing, but it's good man. I
<v Speaker 1>like it all right. So that's the end of the album.
<v Speaker 1>That's the LP. They released the album, and so we
<v Speaker 1>talked about how the way things were supposed to go
<v Speaker 1>was album to her album to her album tour? Right? Yes?
<v Speaker 1>And so he toured this album afterwards. Yes, he never
<v Speaker 1>toured in the US, never had any of us. It
<v Speaker 1>was strictly pure and he did some specialized show like
<v Speaker 1>he did some shows in Denmark. He felt like the
<v Speaker 1>American audience didn't appreciate where he was going with his music,
<v Speaker 1>and he was probably right right, whereas the European audience did.
<v Speaker 1>So it was all all his tour was in Europe.
<v Speaker 1>How are you the tour manager on this thing? And
<v Speaker 1>Prince comes to you and says, hey, you know how
<v Speaker 1>we were going to go tour all those states in
<v Speaker 1>the United States. Erase that and put all the stuff
<v Speaker 1>we've already done back in again because we're going to
<v Speaker 1>do Europe some more. And that's right, right, I just
<v Speaker 1>want to do Europe.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, And then after that tour, Yeah, in nineteen eighty eight,
<v Speaker 4>he releases Love Sexy Moon right on to the next thing, yep,
<v Speaker 4>nineteen eighty eight Love Sexy, and then of course in
<v Speaker 4>eighty nine we get the Batman soundtrack.
<v Speaker 1>Right. So, my neighbor Gudye, he was in France at
<v Speaker 1>this time, right, huh. He saw the show, He got
<v Speaker 1>to see the Sign of the Times show, and he
<v Speaker 1>loves Prince loves this album. We sat it was one
<v Speaker 1>of my listeners on this as we sat and listened
<v Speaker 1>to this song, and then of course we sat and
<v Speaker 1>listened to Joshua Tree after that, and he was like,
<v Speaker 1>oh my gosh, this is so hard. I don't know
<v Speaker 1>how to decide which of these is better. But I
<v Speaker 1>just wanted to say, what a typical set list, just
<v Speaker 1>so you can kind of paint the picture in your head.
<v Speaker 1>Typical set list for the Sign of the Times tour.
<v Speaker 1>They would start the show Sign of the Times, which
<v Speaker 1>is completely appropriate, great beginning song, Yep. Then they would
<v Speaker 1>play play in the Sunshine, Yes, Little Red Corvette House, Quake,
<v Speaker 1>Girls and Boys. Then they play slow Up, Bring it Down,
<v Speaker 1>Slow Love. Then they do it I Could Never take
<v Speaker 1>the place of your Man. Then they would do hot Thing,
<v Speaker 1>Now's the Time, which just as a drum solo, which
<v Speaker 1>is a Charlie Parker song. Okay, they would do you
<v Speaker 1>Got the Look, then they do if I was your girlfriend,
<v Speaker 1>Let's go Crazy when Doves Cry, and they would in
<v Speaker 1>the middle of that song play the la la la
<v Speaker 1>he he heat thing that would play before Purple Rain
<v Speaker 1>in nineteen ninety nine. Pretty good concert, man, man, I
<v Speaker 1>would have loved. I mean, if only I was in
<v Speaker 1>Europe at the time, that would have been amazing. They're
<v Speaker 1>encore for Encore number one Forever in my life, Kiss
<v Speaker 1>the Cross, dude. I'd be losing my mind at that show.
<v Speaker 1>And on Core two It's going to be a beautiful night.
<v Speaker 1>What a great way to finish out a fantastic set.
<v Speaker 1>What a great show that would have been to see.
<v Speaker 4>Well, that brings us to the end, Sign of the times.
<v Speaker 1>If you were still with us, that means that you
<v Speaker 1>loved what we have to say, and I would like
<v Speaker 1>to ask you. Will you please go to our Patreon
<v Speaker 1>page Patreon dot com, Forward Slash Shirley Podcast all one word,
<v Speaker 1>and you can become an executive producer of one of
<v Speaker 1>our shows. You can also receive high quality Bluetooth waterproof headphones,
<v Speaker 1>and if you keep going up tiers, you can receive
<v Speaker 1>I'm drinking out of it right now there it is,
<v Speaker 1>right there, I'm drinking out of my custom engraved sameless
<v Speaker 1>steel cup. And finally, if you do top Tier, you
<v Speaker 1>get to pick a show that we do. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>that's pretty that's pretty good. Yeah yeah, yeah, but we
<v Speaker 1>really do. We appreciate the support that you guys have
<v Speaker 1>given us all year long. We're excited to be finishing strong,
<v Speaker 1>excited for what next season holds, and we can't wait
<v Speaker 1>to bring you guys part two of this comparison. We're
<v Speaker 1>going to be back with YouTube Josh Tree another amazing,
<v Speaker 1>amazing album from nineteen eighty seven.
<v Speaker 4>I think those two were released within like a month.
<v Speaker 1>Just a few weeks of each other. Yeah yeah, So anyway,
<v Speaker 1>join us here next week.
<v Speaker 4>We'd love a five star review, Hit us up on
<v Speaker 4>Twitter and Facebook, and we'll see you next time.