I've become something of an obsessed historian when it comes to Prince's recorded output. Mainly because it's fascinating to hear how his songwriting, production, and performance all change over time.

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I get it that the songs on "Work It 2.0" are probably presented chronologically. I'm wondering if anyone has done the work (see what I did there?) to put actual RECORDING DATES (where known) to all those tracks.

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There's this thread from 2009: http://prince.org/msg/7/320445.

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Am I correct in assuming that these song names correspond to the track names on "Work It 2.0"?

I'm not sure that they do. I think that there were more versions of some tracks in the Updated List than appeared on Work It, and at least sometimes I couldn't immediately figure out which ones matched up. Scififilmnerd (the OP for that thread) hadn't been posting for awhile (a few years, I think), but I know he made a couple of posts in one of the recent outtakes threads, so you might try an orgnote. But whether they matched up initially or not, I'm pretty sure at least some of what's leaked since that list (and since Work It 2.0) would complicate things.

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I'd suggest Princevault as a general guide, then check against others (like scififilmnerd)--but there's gonna be alternate ideas about many dates, and a lot of what any "authority" says is speculation. There are a number of differences between Princevault's ideas and Scififilmnerd's list. Boris Fishpaw had a list somewhere that had a lot of the dates, if I remember right. I think that was on the old Housequake site, though. Not on the org. I saved it, but I have no idea what happened to it.

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Of course there's Per Nilsen, but even for the years he covered there've been some other information and material that's surfaced--and obviously he quit a while back.

Ultimately you're gonna be picking and choosing. I've tried a few times to put my stuff in some sort of chronological order, using a combination of the authoritiies out there, but I've always started bogging down before getting very far at all.

If anyone has any other attempts that people have made at doing this sort of chronology, I'd like to see them.

If exact recording dates are known, and they often are - they will be on PrinceVault.com

NouveauDance said:

If exact recording dates are known, and they often are - they will be on PrinceVault.com

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Oh, I'm definitely aware of Prince Vault - it's the best! - but I was wondering if someone out there has done the "heavy lifting" to put everything (each existing take/version of each song) into chronological order.

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Ah, I'm being insanely anal about this. I should just go listen to everything on shuffle and soak it all up.