funkyfine said:

BartVanHemelen said:

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Now scroll up juuuust a bit. Oh, and I had already updated the first post in this thread.

Man, you need an eagle eye to avoid Bart being an arse to you.

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Yeah, I'm an arse because YOU were too lazy to read either the start or the end of this thread.

BartVanHemelen said:

alandail said:

"nothing quite like Piano & A Microphone 1983 exists in his catalogue"

what about One Night Alone: Solo Piano and Voice"

I listened to the full album ONA for the first time recently. I must say, it is one of my favourite albums of his. I think that the music is superb.

TheFreakerFantastic said:

^ Yes but linguistically speaking it is talking about it being the first posthumous actual RELEASE, not posthumous PLANNED release, so to me that is still incorrect.

JonnyBoy is right although i don't really include 4EVER as apart from one bootleg track it was already released material without even a remaster. Despite what they want you to think and some fans incorretly believe, Disc 2 of PR Deluxe was not approved by Prince, it was chosen by WB and his collaborators after his death, making it a 'new' posthumous release in my book. Prince only approved the remaster only not the extra tracks which were added later. This is backed up by interviews by Lisa and Susan Rogers who among others appeared to have had a hand in choosing that disc 2 material.

[Edited 9/10/18 7:19am]

I'm not going to take sides about what is the first posthumous release. However, I don't think anyone will argue with me when I state that Prince (in the 2010s) would never have approved of the release of the PR Deluxe version of "We Can Fuck" due to its sexual content and cursing. Having said that, I think that WCF is an absolute masterpeice and many others here on the org feel the same way.

Just to let everyone KNOW that Prince its pretty safe to say would approve of NOTHING going on right now, and thats not in a bad way, thats just that he would not have done it. He would not be all for NPG at the FIrst avenue doing a PPV and having Mayte on stage, he would not be cool with the Revolution touring but then again would any of this even be happening? My guess is NOT, no tours no new vault releases etc... Prince despite getting free really did not put much out from the vaults at all.

BartVanHemelen said:

BartVanHemelen said:

Ah, found the actual source of that article: https://www.bbc.com/news/...s-45510532

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The journalist posted a section on Twitter that isn't in the article, but which seems to go deeper into the process of how this release (and others) was decided upon:

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https://twitter.com/mrdis...5954137088

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OCR'ed so the text can be found by search engines:

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I mean it's very difficult to say, frankly, what Prince's intentions were on some of these things, although I can tell you that within the very small group of people who are contemplating what might emerge and making decisions about what actually will see the light of day, I'm very, very, very cognisant and respectful of the spirit of the endeavour. Meaning we tried to take what we think Prince would direct us to do with the most seriousness possible. I mean, it's not something that we just quickly put together and say, 'We love this, we're going to put it out.' We think through the process in a very, very methodical way and we use our best judgement a lot of the time because he was a fickle guy and no-one is sure what he would be thinking.

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Well, if nothing else I found it very disrespectful for both Prince and fans to mess around with P's vrsions of Our Destiny/Roadhouse Garden and Nothing Compares 2 U, not to mention the rididulous rehearsal video edit that made him look like a clown.

The posthumous Let's Work edit on 4ever and Crucial edit on the Anthology were also unnecessary even if they were minor offences.

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This being said I think both the Estate and the fans need to move away from this "what would Prince have wanted" thing.

Maybe Prince wouldn't have wanted certain "unfinished" things to be released as were, but I'd rather believe it's better to release them as he left them than to try and finish them for him (same goes with those Deliverance tracks by the way, which wasn't from the Estate).

Prince is gone, we will never know what he'd have thought of this or that. He hasn't been gone for so long, I realize that, but the purple show must go one.

Prince's decisions when it came to releasing this over that and how to release it often left the fans, who also had access to alternate mixes or outtakes thru bootlegs and promo releases, puzzled.

There is no point in trying to be in his head, his decisions were his only, and would often go against the opinion of fans, musicians or engineers.

Prince once said in an interview that he expected what he would left behind him to be released. So let's release it.

He has also been known to delete certain recordings, so we have to assume that whatever is left is OK (the only case where we could have a dilemma would be a situation where a track would have been deleted in the vault but would have survives thanks to bootlegs and traders' tapes).

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I'm glad to hear those decision makers feel a certain pressure and are trying to be respectful, I would too if I was in their shoes. Curating cohesive collections of studio tracks will be the most challenging part of the process.

Let us begin by trying to avoid things like the whole NC2U fiasco from ever happening again, and we'll be good.

I can only say that I'm glad they chose to release this piano tape as such and untouched.

lastdecember said:

Just to let everyone KNOW that Prince its pretty safe to say would approve of NOTHING going on right now, and thats not in a bad way, thats just that he would not have done it. He would not be all for NPG at the FIrst avenue doing a PPV and having Mayte on stage, he would not be cool with the Revolution touring but then again would any of this even be happening? My guess is NOT, no tours no new vault releases etc... Prince despite getting free really did not put much out from the vaults at all.

Prince was only "free" for 2 years before he died when it came to WB era vault material but yeah, he probably wouldn't have released many more archives anyway. It's OK, like I said above let us not be disturbed by this what Prince would have wanted stuff. Prince is gone. His music belongs to the human race now.

Listened to "17 Days" and "Why the Butterflies" and am getting excited for this now. Bart, thanks for all the info!

databank said:

lastdecember said:

databank said:

Prince was only "free" for 2 years before he died when it came to WB era vault material but yeah, he probably wouldn't have released many more archives anyway. It's OK, like I said above let us not be disturbed by this what Prince would have wanted stuff. Prince is gone. His music belongs to the human race now.

No I’m talking more of just not being under contract and that ended in 1996 technically he could have been releasing anything under the NPG label, I think the idea or what we felt would happen would be all this work come flooding through and for the most part it did not.

Yeah in the end that was quite odd indeed: his output remained more or less the same as with WB in quantity, possibly even a little less.

Just noticed that the non-deluxe CD version is down to $9.99 on Amazon. This is in the U.S., I don't know what the price is in other parts of the world.

Not a bad deal. Started at $12.99, went down to $11.99. Now $9.99 for pre-order.

(on a side note, the revised editon of Dwayne Tudahl's Purple Rain era book has had a dramatic price drop down to $16.34 on Amazon as well, it's started at $24.99.)

A review (I suppose, becuse most of it actually just a summation of facts) from French newspaper Libération: https://next.liberation.f...ut_1679119

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PLUS VITE QUE LA MUSIQUE

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PRINCE AU PIANO, CHRIS BOWDEN AU PLUS HAUT

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Olivier Lamm

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16 septembre 2018

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Premier «album» inédit à nous parvenir depuis les tréfonds de sa vault quelques mois après les bonus en or massif de la réédition anniversaire de Purple Rain, Prince & a Microphone 1983 n’est pas forcément l’album que les fans attendaient pour le 60e anniversaire de sa naissance. En lieu et place du tsunami de chefs-d’œuvre d’audace pondus entre 1999 (1982) et Sign O’ the Times (1987) et qu’on désespère d’entendre dans des versions plus audibles que les fameux bootlegs qui circulent dans des formes largement dégradées depuis des années, Warner et le Prince Estate ont choisi de nous gratifier d’une bande enregistrée au piano dans son home studio de Kiowa Trail, dont l’ingénieur du son Don Batts lui-même minore l’importance dans les notes de pochette en précisant qu’il s’agit de documents de travail.

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Au-delà pourtant de la manière dont ces variations semi-improvisées autour de Purple Rain, 17 Days ou Strange Relationships éclairent le processus créatif formidablement précis et entêté d’un artiste capable d’en étaler l’élaboration sur des années, on se régale d’entendre son énergie et son espièglerie capturées de manière si nette et si brute, à l’image de ce Cold Coffee & Cocaine légendaire où il se dédouble en crooner rogue et ricanant, tel Andy Kaufman sublimant sa folie en se grimant en Tony Clifton.

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Only the second paragraph contains an actual appraisal of the record. Google Translate offers this:

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Beyond the way in which these semi-improvised variations around Purple Rain, 17 Days or Strange Relationships illuminate the incredibly precise and stubborn creative process of an artist capable of spreading the work over many years, we enjoy to hear his energy and mischief captured so neatly and so brutally, like this legendary Cold Coffee & Cocaine where he doubles up as a snug and irresistible crooner, like Andy Kaufman sublimating his madness by climbing into Tony Clifton .

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looking forward to it

Hmmm, http://www.princevault.co...phone_1983 claims the session dates to spring 1983. Odd, since there is little evidence for this. It is even contradicted by http://www.princevault.co...26_Cocaine and http://princevault.com/in...utterflies . I find it unlikely that tracks like "Wednesday" and "17 Days" would be teased here and only get a studio recording six months later.

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The page is also woefully incomplete, and has in recent days only been updated to include the "preview singles" that have been released in recent weeks, as well as the upcoming 7" included with the German Rolling Stone. But no word about the liner notes by Lisa Coleman, or Jill Jones, nor anything about how the album came to be released now, as told via the Rolling Stone article from July or the recent BBC article (and the later posted unpublished paragraph).

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PrinceVault should really consider allowing outsiders to add to their wiki, preferably via a vetting process.

Transformed1 said:

Just noticed that the non-deluxe CD version is down to $9.99 on Amazon. This is in the U.S., I don't know what the price is in other parts of the world.

Not a bad deal. Started at $12.99, went down to $11.99. Now $9.99 for pre-order.

(on a side note, the revised editon of Dwayne Tudahl's Purple Rain era book has had a dramatic price drop down to $16.34 on Amazon as well, it's started at $24.99.)

Does the non-deluxe version also have the booklet?

BartVanHemelen said:

Hmmm, http://www.princevault.co...phone_1983 claims the session dates to spring 1983. Odd, since there is little evidence for this. It is even contradicted by http://www.princevault.co...26_Cocaine and http://princevault.com/in...utterflies . I find it unlikely that tracks like "Wednesday" and "17 Days" would be teased here and only get a studio recording six months later.

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The page is also woefully incomplete, and has in recent days only been updated to include the "preview singles" that have been released in recent weeks, as well as the upcoming 7" included with the German Rolling Stone. But no word about the liner notes by Lisa Coleman, or Jill Jones, nor anything about how the album came to be released now, as told via the Rolling Stone article from July or the recent BBC article (and the later posted unpublished paragraph).

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PrinceVault should really consider allowing outsiders to add to their wiki, preferably via a vetting process.

I suspect Princevault are being extra-careful who to add to their team, because they don't want hysterions to start writing nonsense on the page. I realize you propose a vetting process but I guess they don't wanna bother: too many people on this board have harmed this community beyond repair, both within the community itself and with associated artists. Dealing with tantrums is probably not something they wish to add to their already gigantic task. However if you email them to signal errors they will reply and try and correct said errors.

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Regarding the recording date I assume either the liner notes or the update of Duane's book will give us more specific infos quite soon.

Marco81 said:

Transformed1 said:

Just noticed that the non-deluxe CD version is down to $9.99 on Amazon. This is in the U.S., I don't know what the price is in other parts of the world.

Not a bad deal. Started at $12.99, went down to $11.99. Now $9.99 for pre-order.

(on a side note, the revised editon of Dwayne Tudahl's Purple Rain era book has had a dramatic price drop down to $16.34 on Amazon as well, it's started at $24.99.)

Does the non-deluxe version also have the booklet?

I don't think it does.

Marco81 said:

Marco81 said:

So the standard version is just a cardboard with CD inside, and nothing more? Very lame if so...

RODSERLING said:

France 24 mention the album in Music Show, one of their programs: https://www.france24.com/...83-garbage

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We meet Sônge, an up-and-coming French artist with an eclectic alt-RnB sound that blends elements of electro and hip-hop. She’s gearing up to release her debut album showcasing her triple threat talents as a singer-songwriter, beatmaker and DJ.

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In other new music, Chris - AKA Christine and the Queens - returns with a long-awaited sophomore album described as "sweaty and sexy", while the estate of the late, legendary Prince releases the posthumous disc “Piano & a Microphone 1983," a raw, intimate look at the Purple One’s creative genius when he was still on the brink of superstardom.

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And yes, the video is in English. Prince is shortly mentioned at around 9:14.

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RODSERLING said:

Marco81 said:

Does the non-deluxe version also have the booklet?

The stickers "12 page booklet" is only on the deluxe édition. Really lame. 12 pages were already short, but for 20 bucks or So, its à thievery.

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It's a 12" sized booklet, as clearly shown in this video: https://www.facebook.com/...794025499/

BartVanHemelen said:

So, it's finding it's way into peoples hands already? Wonder if it will leak before the release date?

Once again not too excited about this release at all... Not playing down the music or the recordings of these songs, it's just this should NOT be the first real major release from the estate... This should've been a bonus disc at best to maybe a 1999 Deluxe box set...