I just want to shed a little light on my post about my performance at Paisley Park...but first I want to thank Omarr Baker and PRN Family for inviting me to perform at Paisley Park and for constantly trying to create events that bring artists, family and friends together in the spirit of his brother’s love for music and his fans. It means a lot. Prince’s family was given an impossible task with no preparation. No one could have imagined that we would all be here without Prince, left to figure out what he may have wanted. The truth of the matter is, Prince was an artist and a man who sketched, wrote down and mapped out everything that he wanted to see done so we are in uncharted territory, attempting to come together amidst some glaring missing pieces to honor and uphold what we knew to be important to Prince. When Prince’s family asks me to show up, I’m there because families hope to uphold legacies from a personal place, from the heart while banks may be more inclined to view Prince in dollars and cents. What we need to do is work together to preserve a legacy that will reflect an artist who pushed boundaries, valued musicianship, held fans dear and never stopped breaking new ground. I believe this can be accomplished with love for Prince the man, my friend, my brother and not just Prince the icon and the brand.

Back to New Years Eve at Paisley Park. Omarr saw The Resurrection of Funk show that I did in Los Angeles and he asked me to come to Paisley Park to perform. I was told that I could perform as long as I wanted to. I was going to play my music for the first time in what I always understood to be Prince’s house and therefore wanted to add in some of Prince’s music for him, for myself and for the fans, but rather than play a longer set, I chose to remove some songs from my show in order to add She’s Always In My Hair, Sometimes It Snows in April and When You Were Mine a song that gave me the opportunity to play together with Matt Fink and Bobby Z.

While I understand that this was not “technically” a Paisley Park event, it did take place at Paisley Park and it is my understanding, the people running things are the same people that would be running things at an “official” Paisley Park show which is now definitely a problem for me. It is amazing to me that in my whole career including some pretty contentious situations Prince and I dealt with while we were building our performances from the ground up, I have never experienced such disrespect as I experienced from those working for Paisley Park. Gone are the days when Prince made sure that I was treated with an often over the top level of respect when I came into his world. I will just say that I expect my band members and their guests to be treated with respect at Paisley Park and not have my drummer reprimanded like a child for moving the drums to accommodate how he plays. I expect our stage set up to be conducive to our show and not an afterthought where we have to squeeze and weave through equipment sitting on the stage. I expect to be able to count on the monitor mixes when we perform to be consistent with the monitor mixes that we set at sound check, not some entirely different mix where my band can’t hear any of the cues we set and I can’t hear what I need to. I expect the clock for our 60 minute set to start at 60:00 minutes when we start playing, I do not expect it to start ticking during the speech before our set so that the clock is already at 52:00 minutes with our first note and we are doing math equations with a dark clock for the finale of our show. There should have been time for “Sex Love Experience” to close the show with a Matt Fink keyboard solo, a sax solo from David Eiland and a bass battle for the one song that I was playing bass on. The last time I played with Prince he said, “You should play the bass more.” so it was definitely a nod to him. For all the people who were at the show, you guys were amazing to play for. Your energy was infectious and I will always remember your faces, your smiles, your tears and your dancing to the music. Let’s just say I owe you a song.

At the end of the day it was a great show, I had a blast and the fans had a blast. I want to thank Alan Seiffert for his comments on my posts about my experience. I appreciate his reaching out. I know that Paisley Park is in a moment of starting again and we should look at this as a fresh start to make Paisley Park a place that Prince would be proud of. We should all give them the chance to go from now. ✌🏽💜😎🙏🏽