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Last Heart ~ Prince 1.12.1986
Oh, baby How many times have you called my number Baby, if you break my heart one more time How many times can you hurt me (hurt me) If you break my heart one more time Baby, don't you break my heart If you break my heart one more time (When you fix your mouth to tell that lie) If you break my heart one more time
Initial tracking took place on 12 January 1986 at Sunset Sound, Hollywood, CA, USA, after the end of the Parade sessions (four days after additional work on Rough, on the same day as Conversation Piece). The Crystal Ball liner notes state that the song is a demo, and that Prince had always intended on re-recording this track, "but never got around 2 it". Although this track was not included on a late April 1986 configuration of the aborted album Dream Factory, it was included as the fifteenth track on the 3 June 1986 configuration and again as the fifteenth track on the 18 July 1986 configuration. | |
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To celebrate the incredibly prolific, influential and diverse body of work left behind by Prince, we will be exploring a different song of his each day for an entire year with the series 365 Prince Songs in a Year. Eric Leeds was there when Prince reached his first collaborative peak, and also there when he threw all of that away in search of his next musical phase. “Last Heart,” a long-unreleased song from Prince’s shelved Dream Factory project with the Revolution, tells that story in microcosm. Initial sessions for “Last Heart” took place in 1986, during the Revolution’s Hit & Run tour in support of Parade, with Leeds on sax and Prince’s one-time girlfriend Susannah Melvoin on backing vocals. Already shifting back to his earliest one-man recording style, Prince is actually featured on every other instrument – including a very prominent bass line. “I had a lot of opportunity to hear him play the other instruments to a degree that others did not, at jam sessions and long sound checks,” Leeds told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Before Paisley Park was built, for the first several years, when I was working with him, we would do most of our recording in L.A. at Sunset Studios. So, it wouldn’t be unusual for [trumpeter] Matt [Blistan] and I to be out in L.A. for weeks at a time. He would block out a studio for maybe a month, and we’d be in there almost every day. … We would just jam and he would float between instruments, and those were the opportunities when you really got to hear Prince play.” Despite that obvious facility across a wide musical spectrum, the funky, jazz-laced “Last Heart” illustrates how Prince always stepped back to let Leeds shine. “I played an instrument that he did not play and, from the beginning, it gave me a much greater opportunity to define and develop my own role in his music than for any of the other people in his band,” Leeds once told the Last Miles. “Prince looks at life as if it’s a movie. He’s the star, he’s the director, he’s the producer, he’s the scriptwriter, he’s the costume designer, he’s the special effects designer. Basically, he likes to put everybody he knows in a role in his movie and if you’re basically willing to allow yourself to be handled like that, fine. It kinda gave me an opportunity to develop my own character within his movie than I think it did for some of the other players in his bands.” “Last Heart” was slated to be part of a new fusion-focused double album follow up to Parade through the summer of 1986, but Prince ultimately scrapped the idea – and then the Revolution itself. A subsequent project called Crystal Ball then morphed into the album Sign O’ the Times, which ended up including eight Dream Factory-era songs. “Last Heart,” however, wasn’t one of them. Instead, it would find a home – along with four other tracks from this time period – on a 1998 set of leftovers also called Crystal Ball.
http://diffuser.fm/prince-last-heart/
‘Last Heart’ Once Again Allowed Eric Leeds to Shine – Eventually: 365 Prince Songs in a Year | |
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Would love to hear a pristine recording of this from the '86 Le New Morning aftershow "I like to watch." | |
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one of my all time favs | |
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if you break my heart 1 more time Great song I will take my place, In the great below | |
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