A Re-Inventor of His World and Himself

CHANHASSEN, Minn.— PAISLEY PARK, THE STUDIO COMPLEX Prince built in this Minneapolis suburb, is abuzz. On a 10,000-square-foot sound stage, workmen are rolling white paint onto a huge runway of a set, preparing it for a video shoot later in the day. In a mirrored studio down the hall, two dozen dancers are rehearsing. Upstairs, an Olympic gymnast, Dominique Dawes, is trying on a wispy lavender costume. A sound engineer is editing a promotional CD; a graphics artist is putting the final touches on a logo. Through it all strolls the man in charge, attentive to every detail. A hole in the gymnast’s leotard? A bit of choreography that needs broadening? As songwriter, video director and record-company head, he takes responsibility for everything, makes all the final decisions and couldn’t be happier about it.

The 38-year-old musician who now writes his name as a glyph is gearing up for the release on Tuesday of “Emancipation,” a three-CD, 36-song, three-hour album intended to return him to superstardom. Over a recording career that stretches nearly two decades, the musician who was born Prince Rogers Nelson earned a reputation for unorthodox behavior long before he dropped his name. Just in time for the music-video explosion, he invented himself as a larger-than-life figure: a doe-eyed all-purpose seducer for whom the erotic and the sacred were never far apart. Outlandish clothes, sculptured hair and see-through pants made Prince a vivid presence, but behind the costumes was one of the most influential songwriters of the 1980’s.

He toyed with every duality he could think of: masculine and feminine, black and white, straight and gay. While he made albums virtually by himself, like an introvert, his concerts were in the grand extroverted tradition of rhythm-and-blues showmen like James Brown. His music pulled together rock and funk, gospel and jazz, pop ballads and 12-bar blues. His most distinctive rhythm—a choppy, keyboard-driven funk—has permeated pop, hip-hop and dance music, while his ballad style echoes in hits like TLC’s “Waterfalls.”

His only guide seemed to be a musicianship that drew admiration from many camps. Peter Sellars, the revisionist opera director, once compared Prince to Mozart for his abundant creativity. Yet for much of the 1990’s, the quality of his output has sagged—a result, he says, of his deteriorating relationship with his longtime record company, Warner Brothers.

“He’s one of the greatest ones,” says George Clinton, himself an architect of modern funk. “He’s a hell of a musician; he has really studied everything. And he’s working all the time. Even when he’s jamming he’s recording that. He gets to party; he listens to everything on the radio; he goes out to clubs, and then he goes to the studio and stays up the rest of the night working. He has more stuff recorded than anybody gets to hear.

“Sometimes I think he puts too much effort into trying to take what’s out now and put his own thing on it. To me, ain’t none of the pop stuff happening that’s half as good as what he can do.”

“Emancipation” is a make-or-break album. It will inaugurate a new recording deal with a gambit that may turn out to be bold and innovative or utterly foolhardy; will the 3-CD set be received as an act of generosity or a glut of material? For a major performer in the 1990’s, releasing a three-CD set of new material is unprecedented; even double albums are rare and commercially risky. And “Emancipation” is financed and marketed by the songwriter himself. “All the stakes are higher,” he says as he picks a few berries from a plate of zabaglione in the Paisley Park kitchen. “But I’m in a situation where I can do anything I want.”

His day’s project is to direct the video for the first single from “Emancipation,” a remake of the Stylistics’ 1972 hit “Betcha by Golly, Wow.” At the same time, he’s making last-minute marketing decisions and doing a rare interview. Ever the clotheshorse, he’s wearing a long, nubby gray-and-black sweater and a shirt with lace tights. A chevron is shaved into his hair next to one ear, with glitter applied to it. Clear-eyed and serious, he speaks in a low voice, in a conversation that veers between hard-headed practicality, flashes of eccentricity and professions of faith in God. He is businesslike one moment; the next, he invokes his self-made spirituality, in which musical inspiration and carnality are both links to divine creativity.

For all the music he has put out since the first Prince album in 1978, he has remained private. The songs on “Emancipation” take up his usual topics—sex, salvation, partying all night long—along with new ones like cruising the Internet. But a few have hints of the personal. On Valentine’s Day he married Mayte Garcia, who had been a backup singer and dancer in his band. A few months ago, he announced that she was pregnant and that the child was due in November. Since then he has refused further comment. “I’m never going to release details about children,” he says. “They’ll probably name themselves.”

On the album, he proposes marriage in “The Holy River,” a rolling midtempo song akin to Bruce Springsteen’s quieter side. Later, a sparse, tender piano ballad begs, “Let’s Have a Baby.” Asked about that song, he talks about the couple’s wedding night. “I carried her across the threshold and gave her many presents,” he says. “The last one was a crib. And we both cried. She got down on her knees in that gown, and I did next to her, and we thanked God that we could be alive for this moment.”

Marrying Mayte, he says, seemed inevitable. Her middle name is Jannelle; his father is John L. Her mother’s name was Nell; he was born Prince Rogers Nelson: “Nell’s son,” he says. “Am I going to argue with all these coincidences?” he asks, at least half seriously. Like a man in love, he adds: “She really makes my soul feel complete. I feel powerful with her around. And she makes it easier to talk to God.”

“Emancipation” includes shimmering ballads and fuzz-edged rockers, bump-and-grind bass grooves and a big-band two-beat, Latin-jazz jams, and dissonant electronic dance tracks. “People will say it’s sprawling and it’s all over the place,” he says. “That’s fine. I play a lot of styles. This is not arrogance; this is the truth. Because anything you do all day long, you’re going to master after a while.”

On the new album, keys change and rhythms metamorphose at whim. One tour de force, “Joint 2 Joint,” moves through five different grooves and ends with all its riffs fitting together. The seeming spontaneity is more remarkable because nearly all the instruments are played by the songwriter himself. The toil of constructing songs track by track is worth it, he says, for the unanimity it brings. “Because I do all the instruments, I’m injecting the joy I feel into all those ’players.’ The same exuberant soul speaks through all the instruments.”

“I always wanted to make a three-record set,” he adds. “ ’Sign o’ the Times’ was originally supposed to be a triple album, but it ended up as a double. For this one, I started with the blueprint of three CD’s, one hour each, with peaks and valleys in the right places. I just filled in the blueprint.”

WHILE MOST songwriters are hard-pressed to come up with enough worthwhile material for an album a year, he has never had that problem. He can’t stop writing music; his backlog includes at least a thousand unreleased songs and compositions, and new ones are constantly pouring out, all mapped in his head.

“You hear it done,” he says. “You see the dancing; you hear the singing. When you hear it, you either argue with that voice or you don’t. That’s when you seek God. Sometimes ideas are coming so fast that I have to stop doing one song to get another. But I don’t forget the first one. If it works, it will always be there. It’s like the truth: it will find you and lift you up. And if it ain’t right, it will dissolve like sand on the beach.”

Commercially, “Emancipation” hedges its bets. There are straightforward groove songs and lush slow-dance tunes alongside the more idiosyncratic cuts, and there are remakes of other people’s hits, including “One of Us” from Joan Osborne and “La, La (Means I Love You)” from the Delfonics. An associate producer, Kirk A. Johnson, punched up the rhythm tracks, giving some of them the crunch of hip-hop. The album is priced under $30, like a two-CD set.

“Emancipation,” produced by the performer’s own label, NPG Records, is his first album to be distributed by EMI. The album title is a pointed reference to the end of the reported six-album deal, potentially worth $100 million, that he made in 1992 with Warner Brothers. He had been making albums for the label since 1978 and sold millions of copies in the 1980’s; the soundtrack for his 1984 movie, “Purple Rain,” sold more than 10 million copies. He continued to release No. 1 singles as late as 1991, with “Cream.”

But once Warner Brothers had committed such a large investment, the label wanted to apply proven hit-making strategies: putting out just one album a year, packing it with potential singles, issuing various trendy remixes of songs and following the advice of in-house experts on promotion and marketing. Rationing and editing his work grated on Prince, and he began wrangling with Warner Brothers over control of his career.

“The music, for me, doesn’t come on a schedule,” he says. “I don’t know when it’s going to come, and when it does, I want it out. Music was created to uplift the soul and to help people make the best of a bad situation. When you sit down to write something, there should be no guidelines. The main idea is not supposed to be, ’How many different ways can we sell it?’ That’s so far away from the true spirit of what music is. Music starts free, with just a spark of inspiration. When limits are set by another party that walks into the ball game afterward, that’s fighting inspiration.

THE BIG DEAL WE HAD made together wasn’t working,” he says of Warner Brothers. “They are what they are, and I am what I am, and eventually I realized that those two systems aren’t going to work together. The deeper you get into that well, the darker it becomes.”

In 1993, he adopted an unpronounceable glyph as his name, ignoring warnings that he was jettisoning the equivalent of a well-known trademark. His associates now refer to him as the Artist, a merciful shortening of the Artist Formerly Known as Prince. He knows the name change caused confusion and amusement, and he doesn’t care. “When the lights go down and the microphone goes on,” he says, “it doesn’t matter what your name is.”

As an experiment, Warner Brothers gave him permission in 1994 to release a single, “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” through NPG Records on the independent Bellmark label. It was an international hit, further straining his relations with Warner Brothers. He began performing with the word “slave” written on his cheek.

“We never were angry; we were puzzled,” says Bob Merlis, senior vice president of Warner Brothers Records. “He evinced great unhappiness at being here. He wanted to release more albums than his contract called for; he wanted a different contract, which ran contrary to good business practices. Eventually, we agreed that his vision and ours didn’t coincide on how to release his output.”

People familiar with the Warners contract say that it called for Warner Brothers to pay an advance for each album submitted and that speeding up the schedule and submitting more albums meant more payments in a shorter time. There were rumors of bankruptcy in Paisley Park, that the entertainment empire (which for a short time also included a Minneapolis nightclub, Glam Slam) was too expensive to maintain. Eventually, Warner Brothers agreed to end the contract. Warner Brothers still has rights to one album of previously unreleased material, and it owns the master recordings of the Prince back catalogue, a situation that rankles the performer. “If you don’t own your masters,” he says, “your master owns you.”

Under the new arrangement, he finances all his albums and videos and puts them out when he wishes. He pays EMI to manufacture the albums, and the company provides its distribution system and overseas marketing clout. He describes EMI as “hired hands, like calling a florist to deliver some flowers to my wife.” (Other NPG albums, including his ballet score, “Kamasutra,” and Mayte’s debut album are for sale through a Web site: www.thedawn.com.)

Once he explains his business arrangements, he shows a visitor through Paisley Park, which is the size of a small shopping mall. In the recording studio, a half-dozen guitars are lined up, each with specific qualities: the leopard-patterned one is “good for funk"; the glyph-shaped one is “the most passionate.” Paisley Park was once painted all white, inside and out, but after he got married he decided that the place needed some color. Now there are carpets with inset zodiac signs, a mural of a tropical waterfall behind the water fountain, walls of purple, gold and red and a smiley face in Mayte’s office.

Past a birdcage holding two white doves named Divinity and Majesty is his office. A photograph of Miles Davis and Charlie Parker is by his desk. He shows the visitor an inch-thick worldwide marketing plan, with sales targets and promotion strategies, just like an executive. But as he plays the album, he gets caught up in the music.

“Sometimes I stand in awe of what I do myself,” he says. “I feel like a regular person, but I listen to this and wonder, where did it come from? I believe definitely in the higher power that gave me this talent. If you could go in the studio alone and come out with that, you’d do it every day, wouldn’t you?”

“It’s a curse,” he concludes. “And it’s a blessing.”

• The Observer  (UK, 17 November 1999