I was giving this CD a fresh listen recently, and to accompany my listening, I dug out the article from Uptown #49, which reports on the listening sessions at Paisley Park Celebration in June, 2001. According to this report (which is very precise about length and number of tracks) the CD had 14 tracks. But there were a few differences between what was played ay Paisley Park, and what was released on CD in November:
At the listening session, "The Rainbow Children" (track #1) was broken up into two tracks, with the four-minute coda at the end listed as a separate track ("Segue").
The last seven seconds of "Everywhere" was also a separate track ("Segue").
"Deconstruction" and "The Wedding Feast" were not separate tracks, but part of "1+1+1 is 3."
And finally, "Mellow" comes before "The Sensual Everafter", not after as on the released CD. This might make for a nicer flow in the narrative, since the following track,"1+1+1 is 3" begins with the line, "as she fell into the sensual everafter..."

I know that Prince had originally talked about releasing this album online only, and the songs are meant to be heard in a continuous sequence, just like the download version. But I have never heard of a CD with different track sequencing, let alone different order of songs.
Anyone else on this?

The joining/breaking up of tracks in the same order wouldn't effect the flow at all (i.e you wouldn't notice if you were listening to the album in sequence). Interesting observation about the track swop though. Why d'thunk he changed it around?





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Reports were largely based on what people recalled hearing or deduced from that and the lyric booklet that was provided (together with information gleaned at listening sessions and from band members).

As the lyric booklet supplied at listening sessions was incorrectly assembled and included no song titles, there were a few assumptions made about tracklisting and titles (based on the words in the booklet) and, for a few months, there was some online debate on such matters e.g. whether the coda at the end of 'The Rainbow Children' was part of the song itself, an instrumental in its own right, or just a segue.

As can be seen from the report in Uptown #49, some assumptions or guesses were still being made at the time of that issue going to print.

The way Prince breaks up some of the tracks on the released CD seems arbitrary at times. Perhaps this early sequence was a Paisley Park in house CD?

langebleu said:

I thought that too, but why is there a seven second segue reported as track # 7 on the CD that was played? That seems hard to account for, unless someone was actually looking at the player as it was playing, which this reporter seems to have been doing. Notice that there is no seven second segue anywhere on the CD. That's what led me to believe it was an in-house CD with different tracking (and song swap).

Your suggestion of this being an early tracking of an in-house promo is quite possible. I'm not so sure about the swap - the final product didn't seem to have a different running order to the one I had heard at the first listening session, but I could be wrong.

I like track 15.

Interesting thread. I didn't make the 2001 Celebration.