2. PrinceSign “O” the Times
I think there’s only maybe two songs which have the Revolution on them, and the rest of them is Prince programming a lot of the drums and playing all the parts himself. It’s just such a singular vision, you just hear one creative genius doing everything and I think that leads to a certain style of music-making that… all my production work was kind of based on that idea that you have the arrangement in your head before you start and if there’s one person doing it, then there’s much less chance of each musician trying to get their own ego in edgeways.
When you have a band, the drummer, he’s trying to do his thing and show he’s a good drummer; you have the guitarist trying to get in his little guitar fills, etc, etc – even the bongo player in Santana is like working overtime so you’ll think he’s a great bongo player. When Prince is playing everything himself, he just wants the whole thing to be perfect. From what I understand of how Prince works, he just takes a lot of one take after another and doesn’t even listen back. He plants things when he plays the drum track that he’ll catch later on, so only he knows the secret of what’s going on as he puts the song together and I think that leads to a lot of counterintuitive stuff that you hear on that album – strange drum fills that come in in strange parts of the song. The arrangements are really counterintuitive on that album. He gets really addictive: the choruses don’t come in screaming at you with tons of extra baggage all of a sudden.
