Prince/Trivia
< Prince
- What Could Have Been: "Computer Blue" was originally a 14-minute suite with different parts, additional lyrics, solos, a passage known by fans as the "Hallway Speech", and ending with three full minutes of screechy feedback. It was planned to be included in its complete form on Purple Rain. However, "Take Me With U" was added to the album's tracklist. In order to fit into the album's running time, "Computer Blue" was hacked down to 4 minutes, but still managed to be a very good song. One of the parts of the original, a synth solo, was included in the film during a rehearsal scene. The entire original thing tends to show up on bootlegs every once in a while, with varying sound quality.
- Also, Michael Jackson's "Bad" was originally conceived as a duet with him. Prince declined, saying the song was good enough without him. He was right, but still...
- Also, Sign o' the Times was initially planned to be a triple album. Emancipation kind of proved that the record company had a point in nixing the idea.
- The Love Symbol Album was meant to be a Concept Album with a story told in segues[1], but Prince had to chuck out most of the segues due to space constraints to fit the whole album on a CD after deciding to add the song "I Wanna Melt With U"[2], and only two survived (the ones featuring Kirstie Alley), leaving behind something really confusing.
- In addition, Miles Davis' album Tutu was originally going to be made in collaboration with Prince, but this role ultimately went to Marcus Miller. The closing track "Full Nelson" liberally borrows from Prince's late-80s playbook and really offers a glimpse as to what could've happened there. Prince did try to donate a song, "Can I Play With U?", but pulled it out because he felt it didn't fit with the sound of the album.
- Actually, fuck it, look at all these unreleased projects. Mindboggling. And those are just the ones that we know about...
- ↑ The first segue mentions a terrible recession in... 1997. Off by only ten years, or a creepily accurate prediction of that year's Asian financial crisis?
- ↑ the final, 18-song CD stands at 74:58, so the 24-song configuration with all the segues would have clearly pushed it past a CD's 78 minute limit