Album Review
“Piano & a Microphone 1983” is the first release from Prince’s storied archive of music.
Alone in the Studio in 1983, Prince Is Revealed
By Jon Pareles
Even when he played alone, Prince thought like a full band. That’s clear from the opening notes of “Piano & a Microphone 1983,” the first album released by the Prince estate with material from his immense archive, the Vault.
He starts “17 Days” as a funk-gospel vamp, immediately propulsive, attacking its two chords differently with each repetition and syncopating them against his stamping foot. It’s like a band warming up both itself and the crowd, awaiting the star’s big entrance. Prince takes his time, teasing with some vocal beat-boxing before launching into the verse. When he does, he’s every bit the lonely, forlorn ex-lover of his lyrics, moaning smoothly even as his hands (and foot) keep driving the beat. He’s the frontman, rhythm section and instrumental soloists, all at once.
“Piano & a Microphone 1983” contains nine songs that were recorded on a cassette at his home studio the year before “Purple Rain” would multiply the size of his audience. It’s just Prince on his own (with an engineer) for about 35 minutes, brainstorming while tape ran, segueing from song to song until it was time to turn over the cassette. While the session is informal — he sniffles now and then, and at times something rattles in the piano — the performance is not sloppy for a moment. The one-take, real-time vocals are exquisite.
Prince probably never expected these recordings to be made public. The album feels like eavesdropping, as Prince the songwriter delves into nuances and Prince the pianist cuts loose. He’s exploring and playing around, not constructing taut commercial tracks. Yet the album also turns out to be a compendium, or at least a thumbnail, of Prince’s boundless musicality and of his lifelong themes: romance, solitude, sensuality, salvation, sin, yearning and ecstasy. He shifts musical styles and vocal personae at whim — melancholy, playful, devout, flirtatious — yet it’s all Prince.
The album includes familiar songs (a brief excerpt from “Purple Rain”), B-sides (“17 Days,” which was the B-side of the single “When Doves Cry” in its band version), album tracks (“Strange Relationship,” “International Lover”), covers (Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You,” the gospel standard “Mary Don’t You Weep”), and previously unreleased songs and sketches (“Wednesday,” “Cold Coffee & Cocaine” and “Why the Butterflies.”)
Nearly all of the lyrics are, in some way, about longing. Prince sings about post-breakup loneliness in “17 Days,” offers a slow-motion come-on in “International Lover” and depicts a love-hate seesaw in “Strange Relationship.” He performs “International Lover,” which had already been released on “1999,” as a suspenseful, impulsive constellation of sounds and silences, chords and clusters and single notes answering his falsetto vocal; the lyrics jettison the airplane metaphors of the studio version for single entendres.
Prince plays “Strange Relationship,” which he would rework for eventual release on “Sign ‘o’ the Times” in 1987, as a jazzy rhythm workshop, a two-minute experiment in percussive chords and vocals that devolve into grunts. He even reshapes “Mary Don’t You Weep” — a spiritual that, as he must have known, Aretha Franklin turned into a catharsis on her gospel album “Amazing Grace” — from a profession of faith into a bluesy warning that “Your man ain’t coming home.”
The major new find on “Piano & a Microphone 1983,” though it’s less than two minutes long, is “Wednesday,” a song that at one point was intended for the “Purple Rain” movie and album. Its limpid piano accompaniment points toward Joni Mitchell and jazz ballads as Prince sings, in an utterly guileless falsetto, about being alone and nearly suicidal: “If you’re not back by Wednesday/There’s no telling what I might do.”
“Piano & a Microphone 1983” wasn’t recorded as a finished artistic statement. It was a studio worktape, and its two final tracks may well be songs at the moment of conception. “Cold Coffee & Cocaine” is comedy; Prince puts on a scratchy, tough-guy voice and starts a choppy, bluesy piano vamp. “That’s the last night I spend at your house,” he complains, and without stopping the piano, he asks himself, “What rhymes with house?” He comes up with “mouse”; they can’t all be masterpieces. But the piano part has a life of its own.
“Why the Butterflies” is even more embryonic. Prince sets himself a tempo with finger snaps and foot taps, and he tries stray chords around the keyboard before settling on one dissonant, repeated cluster. At the eeriest edge of his falsetto, he croons an open-ended question — “Mama, what’s this strange dream?” — and pursues it, maintaining that minimal piano pulse as he intoning new questions with new drama: ”Mama, where is father?”
It’s the sound of a search guided by rhythm and instinct, patiently and diligently courting inspiration. For Prince, it was just another night in the studio, an unfinished rough draft he saw no reason to release. Now that he’s gone, it’s a glimpse of a notoriously private artist doing his mysterious work.
