Obviously the main issue between Prince and WB was/is ownership of his masters.

The other issue that was between them was that WB didn't want Prince to release as much music as he wanted. Apparently, they only wanted one album per year maximum and Prince wanted to "flood the market."

Now I have to ask: Is Prince really releasing a lot more music now than he was when with Warner Bros? Although, he has released some box sets and triple albums it seems like there is more time in between albums now than there used to be.

Anyone else have any thoughts on this?

Warner Bros. wasn't too happy about releasing songs like "The Holy River" or anything with an overt religious content, and so-on. His creative freedom was apparently somewhat restricted as his fame started diminishing after, say, "Batman" or so. Probably after "Graffiti Bridge". They most likely wouldn't have released TRC in 2002, do you think?

Novabreaker said:

I don't believe this being as he always has released songs with religious overtures since the beginning. As I have never read this anywhere else I need to know where you are getting your information from.

Also if anything Prince gained MORE freedom when he signed his new contract in 1992. As far as I know Warner Brothers never once refused to release anything due to content only for overflooding the market.


.
[Edited 10/5/05 8:18am]

lovemachine said:[quote]

Novabreaker said:

From Prince. He stated this in the '97 Musician magazine interview. He could be lying, he could be not. Warners did have an increasing creative control on his output in the 90s, but as Prince was battling them they sort of gave up and released most likely anything he wanted. I'm sure "The Holy River" would have fitted on any of his WB albums, but we just don't know.

He has released less since he left Warner Brothers. He's been skipping years lately. When he was with Warner Brothers, he released an album every year except for 1983.

the only difference is that prince's ego is now free to roam and grow. without anyone putting it in check.

If we counted up all the songs released with Warners and without I think the numbers would be pretty comparable, considering the internet releases and multiple
CD sets

Fewer leaked tracks!

I suppose if he was still at Warners, he'd have heard "not good enough" a lot.

It was all about him wanting too release more stuff although as some have pointed out , he really hasnt

The fact is some of his albums never really got the time they should off & not enough single releases ,the fact that he wanted to release The Gold Experience straight after Come pissed WB's off & who can really blame them.

If he had released them as 1 album with the best of the 2 combined,it would have been a much more commercial success & would have been a superb collection of tunes.

"If he had released them as 1 album with the best of the 2 combined,it would have been a much more commercial success & would have been a superb collection of tunes."


Maybe, that's all very speculative isn't it? Besides, didn't "the Gold Experience" come out more than a year after "come"?

thekidsgirl said:

skywalker said:

It did but P had it ready for release way b4 WB finally released it , the way i heard it was P actually wanted to release it about 4 months after WB had released Come ..... this being my point

I know i was only speculating about the albums combined & i actually love bits both

These articles delve into the WB/Prince estrangement.

Courtesy- http://princetext.tripod.com



FORBES MAGAZINE


The pop singer who used to go by the name of Prince
tells of his plans for life after Warner Bros.
Prince speaks
By Joshua Levine


SITTING ON THE FLOOR of his pastel-colored recording studio near Minneapolis, the pop singer formerly known as Prince -- he now wants to be known simply as The Artist -- spins a newly minted demo track from an upcoming album. It's a thick fog of organ chords, electronic drums, the singer's own moaning falsetto and, recorded in utero, the heartbeat of the baby his new wife will deliver in November.


Love it, ignore it or hate it, the elfin rock star has sold close to 100 million records for the Warner Bros. label in the past 20 years. Come November, his Warner Bros. contract settled, he will be out on his own -- no link-up with any big label. It's something no pop star of his stature has done on this scale.


Late last month the musician-turned-business-mogul outlined for Forbes his recording and marketing plans. They are nothing if not ambitious. He wants to flood the market with his work. That's something Warner would never let him do, and it was this issue that helped trigger the split. The disagreements got pretty bitter. While carrying out his last few remaining obligations to Warner, he always has the word "slave" scrawled on his cheek. Says an ex-Warner executive: "Despite his brilliance, one record after another causes burnout."


If so, then it's burn, baby, burn, the singer retorts. "My music wants to do what it wants to do, and I just want to get out of its way," he says. "I want the biggest shelf in the record store -- the most titles. I know they're not all going to sell, but I know somebody's going to buy at least one of each." With the marketing shackles off, his fans can expect what the poet Shelley called "profuse strains of unpremeditated art."


Already stored in his studio vaults are literally tens of thousands of hours of music, including an unreleased album he made with legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. The first independent release will be a 3-CD, 36-song set called Emancipation. It will probably sell for between $36 and $40. Pretty stiff? He's not modest. "I polled kids on the Internet, and no one said they would pay less than $50 for a new 3-CD set," he says.


When the musician talks about being independent, he means independent. He plays all the instruments -- except horns and tambourine -- on Emancipation. He's also considering pressing his own records and handling his own distribution. With no percentages to pay distributors, he figures he could net as much as $21 on the 3-CD set -- a 45% margin on retail price. Why let the middlemen make so much money?


Londell McMillan is a lawyer with the firm of Gold, Farrell & Marks, who represented the musician in the breakup with Warner Bros. "You see what's going on in the industry," says the New York City-based showbiz attorney, "and you have to ask yourself, is this artist the kind of mercurial crazy some people say, or is he the wise one who understands where he fits at the start of a new century?"


By this time next year the answer may be in. Plans are for a worldwide tour to support Emancipation in 1997, worth as much as $45 million in ticket sales -- and, of course, he'll sell albums at his concerts. "Maybe we could put a sampler on every seat," he says with a sly grin. "Or give them the whole thing, and build it into the ticket price."


Then there's the 1-800-New Funk direct-selling hotline, which gets some 7,000 calls a month, for clothing and related merchandise. Will Emancipation also be sold direct via phone? "You bet," he says.


The go-it-alone strategy got a test-run in 1994 with a single called "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" and an accompanying seven-song sampler released independently. The single sold a million units just in the U.S., but the economics of selling a $1.85 (wholesale) single virtually insured that it couldn't make money. Still, the man who branded himself a slave liked his first taste of freedom. He figured that with a bigger-ticket item he could pull it off. "I was number one in countries like Spain and the U.K. where I never had a number one single before," he says of his earlier marketing effort.


Al Bell, who used to own Stax Records, now owns Bellmark Records, which distributed "The Most Beautiful Girl." But there's a difference. At a full three hours, there's a heaping helping of music. "I don't recall seeing anything like this before, but I would not bet against it," says Bell. "All bets are off on normalcy here."


Big-label insiders naturally take a more skeptical view. "He's got a real strong ego, but if he takes all this on himself, it's going to be difficult," says a former Warner Bros. executive. "Too many hats to wear. Something has to give." They hope.






-----

USA TODAY * November 12, 1996

Album Celebrates A New Freedom

CHANHASSEN, Minn. - As the slamming R&B of "Somebody's Somebody" cranks out of his office CD player, the former Prince cocks his head and smiles.

"This is what freedom sounds like," he says, sinking into a pillow on the floor. The track is one of 36 songs recorded in the past year for the three-disc Emancipation, due Nov. 19. The set heralds a divorce from Warner Bros., his label since 1978. Seeking total control of his career, he negotiated out of a contract that had granted him advances of $10 million per album.

"When I saw light at the end of the tunnel, I made a beeline for it," says The Artist, as he's known to the camp at Paisley Park Enterprises, his studio west of hometown Minneapolis. "This is the most exciting time of my life. There was nothing in the way when I recorded (Emancipation). Nobody looked over my shoulder. Nothing was remixed, censored, chopped down or edited."

He's so proud of Emancipation, issued by his own NPG label, that the famously reclusive star, 38, is promoting his creative rebirth with a high-profile promo blitz, including a Nov. 21 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Tuesday night, he'll perform four songs live during a half-hour global radio, TV and Internet broadcast (midnight ET/9 p.m. PT on VH1, MTV, BET and at http://www.thedawn.com; check local radio schedules). It kicks off with the debut of his self-directed video for "Betcha By Golly Wow!" featuring 50 dancers and the gymnastic feats of Olympic gold medalist Dominique Dawes.

He'll crop up on The Rosie O'Donnell Show, on an episode of Muppets Tonight and in several radio ads. "I'm doing my own commercials, like a used car salesman," he jokes.

The Artist, sporting short hair, a goatee and a bright tangerine suit, hopes his efforts eclipse what he calls the "chaotic and disorderly" promotion of Chaos and Disorder, his last Warner effort. It sank off the charts after five weeks.

Though personal animosities subsided, the funk wizard clearly loathes music industry practices. His relationship with Warner deteriorated after the label balked at releasing a glut of Prince product. He responded by scrawling "slave" on his cheek.

"I was a slave to the process," he says. "I don't think it's their place to talk me into or out of things. Nobody should run our creative flowers out of the business or break their spirit or tell them how to create. "Artists don't like business. We like being successful and sharing an experience with an audience. In Mozart's time, word of mouth built an audience. People found him and heard him play. Then someone came along and said, 'We can sell this experience.' Right there, you got trouble. Music comes from the spirit, but where does the guy selling music come from?"

He's reminded of a scene in Amadeus where Emperor Joseph II complains that a Mozart composition contains "too many notes." The Artist was similarly insulted when a record exec heard the lush, 7-minute The Holy River and asked, "Got a radio version?"

"I thank God every day that I never have to talk to that guy again," he says. "They don't even realize what they're saying. It's all habit now. In the end, I was disappointed to see the things that mattered to Warner. When we got down to the wire, people started saying what they meant. They think of artists as children, not men and women capable of running their own affairs."

"The label wanted him to adhere to his contract," says Warner exec Bob Merlis. "Our dispute was not the content but the quantity. He had artistic control. We didn't want to stifle his creative spirit. "

The Artist insisted on releasing more records than his contract stipulated, each entailing a hefty advance. "He made a habit of it, and we accommodated him to the best of our ability," Merlis says. "It was better for everyone that it ended. . . . He's happier, and we don't have to fuss and fume with him anymore."

After leaving Warner, The Artist struck an alliance with EMI to globally distribute and market his work. He has unrestricted output, keeps his master tapes and is free to market and price his albums. Emancipation will sell for about $25, the cost of a double album. "A lot of bang for your buck," he says, grinning.

"I could have stayed longer and negotiated to get my masters back," he says. "I don't own any Prince masters, but Warner gave me gold records. Ha! What's that worth? Ask a pawn shop. Do the math."

Moments after he describes Warner's function as "putting plastic around a cassette, not brain surgery," the bitterness evaporates and ex-Prince says, "I sat across the table and realized, that's just another dude. All he can do is sue me!"

He laughs loudly. It's water under the Graffiti Bridge. Emancipation marks a new dawn. "This is my debut. My name represents this body of work, not what came before."

His new name, the curlicued male-female glyph, evolved over years of doodling. Unfazed by constant ribbing or the problem it poses to anyone addressing him, he insists it's permanent and proper.

"My name is the eye of me. It doesn't have a sound. It looks beautiful and makes me feel beautiful. Prince had too much baggage."

Such as? "A massive ego," he says. "All that goes away when you commit to someone."

Mayte Garcia, the 23-year-old dancer he married Feb. 14, represents his heart's emancipation. She recently gave birth to their first child. That's all the father will divulge on the topic. No name, gender or birth date. Tabloids claim the couple's baby boy was born prematurely Oct. 16 with severe birth defects.

"Mayte and I decided it's cool to talk about ourselves but not about our children," he says wearily. "There is a rumor out that my baby died. My skin is so thick now. I care much more about my child than about what anyone says or writes."

He gazes at a huge photo of Mayte on his wall. She inhabits his music and conversation and inspired Paisley Park's conversion from corporate austerity to a kaleidoscopic fun house with cloud-mottled blue walls. No wonder he's ditched Prince, the rake whose salty tunes celebrated promiscuity. The Artist is plum bewitched and happily monogamous. "There's always been a dichotomy in my music: I'm searching for a higher plane, but I want the most out of being on earth," he says. "When I met Mayte, I looked at my situation and wondered what I was running from. Am I lonely? Is that why I surround myself with so many friends? "I don't think I knew the answer until I got married and made the commitment: 'I will take care of you forever.' When she walked down the aisle, and I looked into the eyes of this woman-child, I could see our future and the eyes of our child. At moments like that, you are floating. There is no ego."

He was not instantly smitten when Mayte joined his troupe as a teen.

"She was my friend and my sister for years, the one person who never showed any malice toward anyone." Gradually, he recognized their destiny. He rattles off a list of coincidences that rival the JFK-Lincoln parallels: He was christened Prince. Her childhood nickname was Princess. Their fathers are both named John. His mother is Mattie, oddly similar to Mayte. Her mom is Nelle, akin to his surname, Nelson.

Though The Artist rails against the record industry in songs like "White Mansion" and "Slave," most tunes wax romantic. Mayte inspired "Let's Have a Baby," "Sex in the Summer" and "Friend, Lover, Sister, Mother/Wife." On "Saviour," he coos, "We're like two petals from the same flower."

"There's an overall tone of joy and exhilaration," he says. "In the angry songs, I found a sense of closure. I don't mind going into that dark corner (for) answers, but you got to get out before spider webs grow on you." Emancipation may be the last we hear from The Artist for a while ("I emptied the gun on it"), but he's plotting a long future.

"Not to sound cosmic, but I've made plans for the next 3,000 years," he says. "Before, it was only three days at a time."

- Edna Gundersen





-----



NEW YORK TIMES

A Reinventor of His World and Himself
by Jon Pareles
November 17, 1996


CHANHASSEN, Minnesota -- Paisley Park, the studio complex Prince built in this Minneapolis suburb, is abuzz. On a 10,000-square-footsound 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 0{+> 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 1980s.


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 1990s, 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 1990s, 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 1980s; 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 0{+> 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 it's 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: http://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 0{+>-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."

[Edited 10/5/05 15:40pm]

sosgemini said:

Sorry. Thems alotta words. But hecka interesting.

vainandy said:

-----
If he does not put out anything this year it will be the first time he has not put anything out since 1983. He never really slowed down since he left WB and doubt if had stayed with them he would be putting out anything at all.

The difference is discipline. WB provided it.

Prince, as evidenced by his output since, needed it desperately.

ThreadBare said:

Hate to agree with you.....But I do.

If so, then it's burn, baby, burn, the singer retorts. "My music wants to do what it wants to do, and I just want to get out of its way," he says. "I want the biggest shelf in the record store -- the most titles. I know they're not all going to sell, but I know somebody's going to buy at least one of each." With the marketing shackles off, his fans can expect what the poet Shelley called "profuse strains of unpremeditated art."

This is what I thought life after WB was going to be. I expected multiple releases all the time. But, as some have pointed out in another thread, it's now apparently not financially feasible for Prince to do this. But look at that beautiful quote, especially this part: "With the marketing shackles off..." That told me that it wasn't about the money. Too bad he couldn't have kept this frame of mind.