Love this song, love this album!

rusty1 said:

I've always really like this ballad from The underrated TRC album..Very heartfelt& Emotional song..

Totally concur.Love this song love this album.Much better song than AOA s version being Way back home.For that matter a much better album than AOA which after a short while of marination is not holding up

Always have trouble remembering the difference between The Last December and The Same December, both great tracks. Seriously so much of TRC is brilliant, and although I don't love it as much as I once did (the kick your pants stuff from 1+1+1=3 is just too lame) it's great that one can just return to it and find wonderful gems like this buried within.

If so many other artists had a song like this one, their whole career would be built around it. For Prince, it's just another deep cut on an album most of the masses never heard.

I still can't decide if that's way-cool or criminally sad.

The whole TRC album is really underappreaciated, in my opinion it ranks up with the very best Prince albums, and The Last December is one of the best songs of Prince's career. It's that good. It's lyrical, heartfelt and the music rocks. Love it.

thisisreece said:

The whole TRC album is really underappreaciated, in my opinion it ranks up with the very best Prince albums, and The Last December is one of the best songs of Prince's career. It's that good. It's lyrical, heartfelt and the music rocks. Love it.

Yes. Don't know why it gets such a bad rap.

It's really the only song I like on that album.

Great song
I love some of the live versions played on the ONA boots

It's OK. The lyrics never spoke to me enough to make them say, part of my prince.org signature or anything...

[Edited 11/20/14 3:40am]

eyewishuheaven said:

If so many other artists had a song like this one, their whole career would be built around it. For Prince, it's just another deep cut on an album most of the masses never heard.

I still can't decide if that's way-cool or criminally sad.

yea, i agree

thisisreece said:

The whole TRC album is really underappreaciated, in my opinion it ranks up with the very best Prince albums, and The Last December is one of the best songs of Prince's career. It's that good. It's lyrical, heartfelt and the music rocks. Love it.

i agree with this too

[Edited 11/20/14 5:26am]

A close cousin to the brilliance that is Purple & Gold.

Pentacle said:

A close cousin to the brilliance that is Purple & Gold.

No, stop it troll!

You need to read Last December's lyrics.

This song came on my ipod the other day. I like the first ten seconds but wow what a hot mess this song it. It's all over the place and goes nowhere in a hurry. Yikes!!

After '1999-The New Master' and 'The Greatest Romance' I pretty much had a total Prince outage. I didn't exactly burn my collection but it had been moved out of reach and I didn't anticipate listening to any Prince anytime soon.
So it was that late in 2001, a guy at work, who I knew liked Prince from a few conversations, suddenly handed me this strange looking CD, The Rainbow Children, about which I knew and had heard nothing.

Being in this Prince-averse mode, all I could do was try to diss it in my mind. 'Hmmm...don't like the artwork' (which was a bit of a lie as I can remember being actually impressed by its total departure from Princely artwork themes) or whatever it was and give it back.
He told me he hadn't listened to it yet but had just come across it in a record shop and grabbed it.

So he was kinda asking me about it.
I came online and saw lots of dissing, so that was that then.
Months later, the guy still hadn't listened to it but then he came in with a CD Walkman and gave me the headphones to have a listen.

'Weird' I said, hearing something that definitely didn't sound like anything offa 'Rave'.
I wanted to borrow it there and then but he said he'd only started listening.

So for the next while it was a case of hearing a track or two from him on his Walkman or at his place and looking to get a copy meanwhile. As others will know, this was the Prince album that was fairly impossible to find stocked anywhere.

I probably didn't get my hands on it until 2004, at which point I'd been flooded with lots of NPGMC stuff that I found much more immediately investigable.
But via live versions of some of the songs as featured on 'One Night Alone....Live' I started to get with it properly.

The upshot of this story is that when I finally heard the album all the way through, I was astonished at how awesome it was. The pause before 'Last December' is breathless as the ferocious energy of the preceding fades away.
And then 'Last December' is just this absolute killer of a joyful, spirital coda.
A very powerful track but only when it is experienced in the context of the full album.
I've listened to it separately but it loses 90%.

But I only REALLY felt the love for this track when I made some new jazz-oriented friends in 2009.
One of them had a seriously expensive system so we'd tend to bring over albums to hear them as never before on some serious kit. It was a nice way of people showing their musical recommendations too and I discovered a lot of great stuff.
When I brought TRC one night, the others were 'Oh no...don't think I want to hear Prince, sorry' but I insisted blatantly that they were gonna have to listen to every second of this album and, with this kind of intro, they sat back to be challenged.

Well, all I can say was that they were totally blown away and I can still see that on their FB pages it's in their 'favourites'.

I can still see everybody getting up from their comfy chairs toward the end of 'Last December' as if from a great movie.
Great albums take you on a journey and you really need to go all the way through TRC to 'Last December' is all I'm sayin'

[Edited 11/23/14 5:26am]