Anyone else notice the melody of I Wish U Heaven was played in Heaven Must Be Near during Prince's improvised instrumental backing of his and Chavez's session? Since the improvised session was December 87 and initial tracking of I Wish U Heaven was January 88, I'd make a guess that he composed IWUH around that melody from HMBN.

Far fetched?

clay said:

Anyone else notice the melody of I Wish U Heaven was played in Heaven Must Be Near during Prince's improvised instrumental backing of his and Chavez's session? Since the improvised session was December 87 and initial tracking of I Wish U Heaven was January 88, I'd make a guess that he composed IWUH around that melody from HMBN. Far fetched?

Not far fetched at all, it's clearly it, I'd noticed it too. IWUH clearly was born during that Ingrid jam session. So was By Aliens Mean BTW.

“Lovesexy and May 19, 1992 are two records that almost mirror each other,” she says. “We were having some very deep, spiritual conversations during that period. I was writing poems at the same time that he was writing Lovesexy, and we spent a lot of time talking. Because of that, the two records have the same themes. Lovesexy has I Wish U Heaven, and my record has Heaven Must Be Near, and they are very similar because we were talking about the same things, challenging each other, sharing our thoughts and emotions. We talked a lot about God, love, and sex…how we felt about those things. I don’t remember the specifics of the conversations, but the whole process was more like an experience or a journey – a discovery – rather than two people sitting down and writing lyrics.”

A nude Prince on the Lovesexy cover was met with commercial resistance; Wal-Mart refused to carry the record, and there were other chains that carried it but wouldn’t put it out on the floor. By then, Chavez’s run-time with her new friend had run its course.

“The amount of time that we spent with each other was relatively short,” Chavez offers. “It was maybe three months in total, but in those three months we spent a lot of time together, and we wrote two records – he wrote his, and I wrote mine. Mine didn’t come out until a few years later, but they were written at the same time.”

Their recordings finished, Prince turned his attention to touring.

“Our work just took us in different directions,” Chavez says. “That was an intense period of time; it was like being in a winter bunker with him for three months. We were just together for that whole season. A year later, I got a call from him, and he said he’d been working on Heaven Must Be Near, so then we started working on it again.”

How quickly after that night did you start writing poetry for Prince? Did you have any hesitations?
Prince told me to write 21 poems and we would make a poetry album, so I worked endlessly, 24/7, for the next six weeks before bringing them to the studio. I wasn't nervous to show him my work. Prince had this ability to see creative potential in a person before they saw it in themselves. He made me feel better as a writer than I felt about myself.

And you recorded the whole poetry album in one take at Paisley Park. Did you show Prince the poems before you recorded?
No, Prince was hearing my poems for the first time as he played on the synthesizer in the studio. I would say a title like "Heaven Must Be Near," and he improvised as I was reading. It was a moment captured in time. We did the whole thing in one straight recording. I love the part at the end where we're just talking naturally about stuff like getting a bite to eat later. Those were real moments.

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