It was/is a fascinating look into Prince's artistic diversity. So many cool tracks on this, most artist would have been proud to have written just one such song once in their livetimes, and then Prince hides this in his vault only to throw it out on this "bootleg" compilation...

Strange that no-one mentions the awesome 5 disc package here, that included the "The Truth" CD and the last disc, the awesomely titled (but less awesome) "Kamasutra" CD (well, I only listened to it once...). Now, if you listen to all of this together you do need stamina

TheBigBang said:

sexyhotandmorefun said:

I've been a Prince fan for years now, and I've heard 38 of the 39 studio albums he put out in his lifetime. The only one I have not heard is Crystal Ball. I want to hear it, but it's 2 1/2 hours long. 3 hours of Emancipation was enough for me, and I don't listen to albums longer than an hour and a half very often. But what do y'all think of it? And what are the best tracks on the album that I should listen to if I never hear the full album?

Are you asking if you should buy it, or just listen to it? Are you not on any streaming platforms that have music? It's just such a weird question when you have the option to just go on any music streaming platform and just, I dunno, pick a track or two, listen to it and decide for yourself if it's worth listening to as a whole. And then I think, why or earth would anyone here have to actually tell you that?

yeah, but when one downloads from pirate sites, it could be that the data is just one long track (deja vu, multiverse, etc.)

nayroo2002 said:

TheBigBang said:

Are you asking if you should buy it, or just listen to it? Are you not on any streaming platforms that have music? It's just such a weird question when you have the option to just go on any music streaming platform and just, I dunno, pick a track or two, listen to it and decide for yourself if it's worth listening to as a whole. And then I think, why or earth would anyone here have to actually tell you that?

yeah, but when one downloads from pirate sites, it could be that the data is just one long track (deja vu, multiverse, etc.)

Why would anyone bother doing that?

sexyhotandmorefun said:

I've been a Prince fan for years now, and I've heard 38 of the 39 studio albums he put out in his lifetime. The only one I have not heard is Crystal Ball. I want to hear it, but it's 2 1/2 hours long. 3 hours of Emancipation was enough for me, and I don't listen to albums longer than an hour and a half very often. But what do y'all think of it? And what are the best tracks on the album that I should listen to if I never hear the full album?

It's not an album in the truest sense - it's a compiliation of different songs from different eras. There's nothing really cohesive about it other than maybe the sound levels match each other?

Just listen to one disc at a time. I'm guessing you'll know right away if you like it or not.

It was a fun project to follow Emancipation. The 4-disc version included The Truth, and the 5-disc version included Kamasutra by the NPG Orchestra.

leecaldon said:

nayroo2002 said:

yeah, but when one downloads from pirate sites, it could be that the data is just one long track (deja vu, multiverse, etc.)

Why would anyone bother doing that?

it's a "new" member with a joke profile, who cares?

ON TOPIC:

It's a great comp that you can fill some blanks in, re: 'SOTT' 'TGE' +

'The Truth' is the best kept secret, as far as official original Prince albums go.

(happy to have the vinyl now)

'Kamasutra' is still in my possession, only on cassette, though

Se7en said:

sexyhotandmorefun said:

I've been a Prince fan for years now, and I've heard 38 of the 39 studio albums he put out in his lifetime. The only one I have not heard is Crystal Ball. I want to hear it, but it's 2 1/2 hours long. 3 hours of Emancipation was enough for me, and I don't listen to albums longer than an hour and a half very often. But what do y'all think of it? And what are the best tracks on the album that I should listen to if I never hear the full album?

It's not an album in the truest sense - it's a compiliation of different songs from different eras. There's nothing really cohesive about it other than maybe the sound levels match each other?

Just listen to one disc at a time. I'm guessing you'll know right away if you like it or not.

It was a fun project to follow Emancipation. The 4-disc version included The Truth, and the 5-disc version included Kamasutra by the NPG Orchestra.

To me the 5 disc version is the definitive version.

Prince fans always whining about 3 disc this or that, even after he is no longer here to make 1 disc. The excess is the entire point, and our man followed up his triple-LP with a quintuple-disc set, get it right.

[Edited 3/28/24 19:25pm]

Krid said:

It was/is a fascinating look into Prince's artistic diversity. So many cool tracks on this, most artist would have been proud to have written just one such song once in their livetimes, and then Prince hides this in his vault only to throw it out on this "bootleg" compilation...

Strange that no-one mentions the awesome 5 disc package here, that included the "The Truth" CD and the last disc, the awesomely titled (but less awesome) "Kamasutra" CD (well, I only listened to it once...). Now, if you listen to all of this together you do need stamina

.

I mentioned it!

WhisperingDandelions said:

Se7en said:

It's not an album in the truest sense - it's a compiliation of different songs from different eras. There's nothing really cohesive about it other than maybe the sound levels match each other?

Just listen to one disc at a time. I'm guessing you'll know right away if you like it or not.

It was a fun project to follow Emancipation. The 4-disc version included The Truth, and the 5-disc version included Kamasutra by the NPG Orchestra.

To me the 5 disc version is the definitive version.

Prince fans always whining about 3 disc this or that, even after he is no longer here to make 1 disc. The excess is the entire point, and our man followed up his triple-LP with a quintuple-disc set, get it right.

[Edited 3/28/24 19:25pm]

Thank you!

I've been a Prince fan since 1982, and we really were spoiled to get a new Prince album once a year, with side projects coming out at about half that speed. It was a great time! I mean, SOTT and Madhouse in the same year?

A little bit later, The Gold Experience, Chaos And Disorder, and Emancipation were literally released in a 14-month span! Crystal Ball came about 14 months after Emancipation. And that's after 1-800-New-Funk, Come and The Black Album (officially) all came out in 1994 with Purple Medley coming out in early 1995 as well. That's a lot of music in such a short span. We were spoiled.

The OP should be happy the album is streaming. For the longest time, Prince's music was not available on any streaming platform.

WhisperingDandelions said:

sexyhotandmorefun said:

I've been a Prince fan for years now, and I've heard 38 of the 39 studio albums he put out in his lifetime. The only one I have not heard is Crystal Ball. I want to hear it, but it's 2 1/2 hours long. 3 hours of Emancipation was enough for me, and I don't listen to albums longer than an hour and a half very often. But what do y'all think of it? And what are the best tracks on the album that I should listen to if I never hear the full album?

I'm partial to it because it came out at a really happy time in my life, so it's connected to many sweet memories of my early 20s and it was my JAM for the whole year of 1998, but 25 years after the facts it remains one of the Prince albums I like to revisit the most, the whole 2 hours and a half of it.

.

I think it's much more cohesive than people think: once you go past the apparent "jumping from 1986 to 1994 and back" randomness of the tracklist, it's a remarkably sequenced party album to play from beginning to end. I guess we'll never know for sure, but I'm convinced that Prince didn't sequence it randomly at all and put much more care that one would think into the whole album's pacing.

.

I also think it took a lot of heat for somewhat undeserved reasons. Part of it was the whole crowdfunding fiasco (people who preordered it getting it after record stores), which has nothing to do with the album itself. Another part of it being that it was judged for what it wasn't much more than for what it was.

.

Unlike any "regular" album, for which we could never know for sure what was coming at us, we all had very specific expectations regarding what a collection of outtakes should be. Before CB came out, I think most of us assumed that 1/ we'd get a somewhat chronological retrospective of P's outtakes, in the spirit of the Jewel Box bootlegs, 2/ there would be much more material from P's "classic" years (roughly 1982-1988), 3/ most of the material would be unreleased in any shape or form and 4/ we'd get many "classic" and beloved bootleg tracks in their exact original form.

.

What we got instead was 1/ 20 tracks from the mid 90s vs 10 tracks from the 80s, all mixed-up apparently without rhyme nor reason, with a rather unbalanced focus on the SOTT and Come/TGA eras, 2/ several tracks that were more funny experiments than solid songs, 3/ lots of remixes or alternate versions of already released songs and 4/ only a handful of "classic" bootlegged songs, most of which were slightly remixed or edited. Everyone (myself included)'s first reaction was kind of like "where is Moonbeam Levels, where is Electric Intercourse, where is All My Dreams, where is In A Large Room With No Light, where is The Line, where is Dance With The Devil?, why the fuck do we get TGE remixes instead? what an awkward sequencing!", etc.

.

I remember at the time it took me a week or so to get past the initial disappointment of what is was vs. what I expected, but the more I listened to it the more it made sense to me. Besides the fact that I realized it was so perfectly sequenced in terms of pacing (IMHO, at least), I also realized it was an interesting and daring premise for Prince to give us some songs that were obviously just him playing around with ideas rather than 30 "killer" songs. In a way, it was a much more interesting journey into his creative process.

.

It was also interesting how confident Prince specifically seemed to be about the SOTT and Come/TGE sessions, to the point of disregarding every other eras.

.

Finally, it felt a lot as if Prince knew exactly what we expected from him and, so typically of him, decided to challenge us by giving us something entirely different Not to mention that at the same time, long before free Internet leaks, most of us would regularly pay twice the price of an official album to get random collection of shitty sounding outtakes or remixes on bootlegs, gladly giving away our money to people who stole Prince's music, but then we'd make a huge fuss having to give Prince our money for the same thing in much better sounding quality. How odd if you stop and think about it for a minute

.

But at the end of the day, what mattered to me was that I just happened to enjoy everything that was there anyway, some of the material just needed to grow on me a little.

.

Obviously, the intention at the time was to follow with more similar albums made of unreleased material, and then I guess we'd have ended-up getting what we wanted in the first place, but sadly it wasn't to happen, apparently because of contractual restrictions from WB.

.

25 years later, it probably remains one of Prince's most controversial records in terms of the curating decisions he made and how they didn't fulfill expectations, but as far as I'm concerned, it remains a goldmine of cool stuff to delve into and a terrific "good mood" album to play on sunny afternoons.

.

Long time I didn't post here, but I thought I'd take a minute to defend my beloved CB a little today. Of course, I know most fans don't share my feelings about it and it's cool, but I thought it could be interesting for someone who hadn't listened to it yet to discover it with a slightly different perspective in mind

.

[Edited 3/29/24 12:15pm]

Lars said:

WhisperingDandelions said:

It's a compilation. Same as 'The Vault: Old Friends 4 Sale'.

Captain Obvious to the rescue

It's Prince's very own, self released "bootleg", actually.

databank said:

sexyhotandmorefun said:

databank said:

I'm partial to it because it came out at a really happy time in my life, so it's connected to many sweet memories of my early 20s and it was my JAM for the whole year of 1998, but 25 years after the facts it remains one of the Prince albums I like to revisit the most, the whole 2 hours and a half of it.

.

I think it's much more cohesive than people think: once you go past the apparent "jumping from 1986 to 1994 and back" randomness of the tracklist, it's a remarkably sequenced party album to play from beginning to end. I guess we'll never know for sure, but I'm convinced that Prince didn't sequence it randomly at all and put much more care that one would think into the whole album's pacing.

.

I also think it took a lot of heat for somewhat undeserved reasons. Part of it was the whole crowdfunding fiasco (people who preordered it getting it after record stores), which has nothing to do with the album itself. Another part of it being that it was judged for what it wasn't much more than for what it was.

.

Unlike any "regular" album, for which we could never know for sure what was coming at us, we all had very specific expectations regarding what a collection of outtakes should be. Before CB came out, I think most of us assumed that 1/ we'd get a somewhat chronological retrospective of P's outtakes, in the spirit of the Jewel Box bootlegs, 2/ there would be much more material from P's "classic" years (roughly 1982-1988), 3/ most of the material would be unreleased in any shape or form and 4/ we'd get many "classic" and beloved bootleg tracks in their exact original form.

.

What we got instead was 1/ 20 tracks from the mid 90s vs 10 tracks from the 80s, all mixed-up apparently without rhyme nor reason, with a rather unbalanced focus on the SOTT and Come/TGA eras, 2/ several tracks that were more funny experiments than solid songs, 3/ lots of remixes or alternate versions of already released songs and 4/ only a handful of "classic" bootlegged songs, most of which were slightly remixed or edited. Everyone (myself included)'s first reaction was kind of like "where is Moonbeam Levels, where is Electric Intercourse, where is All My Dreams, where is In A Large Room With No Light, where is The Line, where is Dance With The Devil?, why the fuck do we get TGE remixes instead? what an awkward sequencing!", etc.

.

I remember at the time it took me a week or so to get past the initial disappointment of what is was vs. what I expected, but the more I listened to it the more it made sense to me. Besides the fact that I realized it was so perfectly sequenced in terms of pacing (IMHO, at least), I also realized it was an interesting and daring premise for Prince to give us some songs that were obviously just him playing around with ideas rather than 30 "killer" songs. In a way, it was a much more interesting journey into his creative process.

.

It was also interesting how confident Prince specifically seemed to be about the SOTT and Come/TGE sessions, to the point of disregarding every other eras.

.

Finally, it felt a lot as if Prince knew exactly what we expected from him and, so typically of him, decided to challenge us by giving us something entirely different Not to mention that at the same time, long before free Internet leaks, most of us would regularly pay twice the price of an official album to get random collection of shitty sounding outtakes or remixes on bootlegs, gladly giving away our money to people who stole Prince's music, but then we'd make a huge fuss having to give Prince our money for the same thing in much better sounding quality. How odd if you stop and think about it for a minute

.

But at the end of the day, what mattered to me was that I just happened to enjoy everything that was there anyway, some of the material just needed to grow on me a little.

.

Obviously, the intention at the time was to follow with more similar albums made of unreleased material, and then I guess we'd have ended-up getting what we wanted in the first place, but sadly it wasn't to happen, apparently because of contractual restrictions from WB.

.

25 years later, it probably remains one of Prince's most controversial records in terms of the curating decisions he made and how they didn't fulfill expectations, but as far as I'm concerned, it remains a goldmine of cool stuff to delve into and a terrific "good mood" album to play on sunny afternoons.

.

Long time I didn't post here, but I thought I'd take a minute to defend my beloved CB a little today. Of course, I know most fans don't share my feelings about it and it's cool, but I thought it could be interesting for someone who hadn't listened to it yet to discover it with a slightly different perspective in mind

.

[Edited 3/29/24 12:15pm]

Hey well thanks for coming back to post this review! This was the kind of thing I was hoping to see!

My pleasure, I hope you end-up enjoying the album

sexyhotandmorefun said:

databank said:

I'm partial to it because it came out at a really happy time in my life, so it's connected to many sweet memories of my early 20s and it was my JAM for the whole year of 1998, but 25 years after the facts it remains one of the Prince albums I like to revisit the most, the whole 2 hours and a half of it.

.

I think it's much more cohesive than people think: once you go past the apparent "jumping from 1986 to 1994 and back" randomness of the tracklist, it's a remarkably sequenced party album to play from beginning to end. I guess we'll never know for sure, but I'm convinced that Prince didn't sequence it randomly at all and put much more care that one would think into the whole album's pacing.

.

I also think it took a lot of heat for somewhat undeserved reasons. Part of it was the whole crowdfunding fiasco (people who preordered it getting it after record stores), which has nothing to do with the album itself. Another part of it being that it was judged for what it wasn't much more than for what it was.

.

Unlike any "regular" album, for which we could never know for sure what was coming at us, we all had very specific expectations regarding what a collection of outtakes should be. Before CB came out, I think most of us assumed that 1/ we'd get a somewhat chronological retrospective of P's outtakes, in the spirit of the Jewel Box bootlegs, 2/ there would be much more material from P's "classic" years (roughly 1982-1988), 3/ most of the material would be unreleased in any shape or form and 4/ we'd get many "classic" and beloved bootleg tracks in their exact original form.

.

What we got instead was 1/ 20 tracks from the mid 90s vs 10 tracks from the 80s, all mixed-up apparently without rhyme nor reason, with a rather unbalanced focus on the SOTT and Come/TGA eras, 2/ several tracks that were more funny experiments than solid songs, 3/ lots of remixes or alternate versions of already released songs and 4/ only a handful of "classic" bootlegged songs, most of which were slightly remixed or edited. Everyone (myself included)'s first reaction was kind of like "where is Moonbeam Levels, where is Electric Intercourse, where is All My Dreams, where is In A Large Room With No Light, where is The Line, where is Dance With The Devil?, why the fuck do we get TGE remixes instead? what an awkward sequencing!", etc.

.

I remember at the time it took me a week or so to get past the initial disappointment of what is was vs. what I expected, but the more I listened to it the more it made sense to me. Besides the fact that I realized it was so perfectly sequenced in terms of pacing (IMHO, at least), I also realized it was an interesting and daring premise for Prince to give us some songs that were obviously just him playing around with ideas rather than 30 "killer" songs. In a way, it was a much more interesting journey into his creative process.

.

It was also interesting how confident Prince specifically seemed to be about the SOTT and Come/TGE sessions, to the point of disregarding every other eras.

.

Finally, it felt a lot as if Prince knew exactly what we expected from him and, so typically of him, decided to challenge us by giving us something entirely different Not to mention that at the same time, long before free Internet leaks, most of us would regularly pay twice the price of an official album to get random collection of shitty sounding outtakes or remixes on bootlegs, gladly giving away our money to people who stole Prince's music, but then we'd make a huge fuss having to give Prince our money for the same thing in much better sounding quality. How odd if you stop and think about it for a minute

.

But at the end of the day, what mattered to me was that I just happened to enjoy everything that was there anyway, some of the material just needed to grow on me a little.

.

Obviously, the intention at the time was to follow with more similar albums made of unreleased material, and then I guess we'd have ended-up getting what we wanted in the first place, but sadly it wasn't to happen, apparently because of contractual restrictions from WB.

.

25 years later, it probably remains one of Prince's most controversial records in terms of the curating decisions he made and how they didn't fulfill expectations, but as far as I'm concerned, it remains a goldmine of cool stuff to delve into and a terrific "good mood" album to play on sunny afternoons.

.

Long time I didn't post here, but I thought I'd take a minute to defend my beloved CB a little today. Of course, I know most fans don't share my feelings about it and it's cool, but I thought it could be interesting for someone who hadn't listened to it yet to discover it with a slightly different perspective in mind

.

[Edited 3/29/24 12:15pm]

Hey well thanks for coming back to post this review! This was the kind of thing I was hoping to see!

Realizing you may listen to it on a streaming platform, I would also suggest you read Prince's liner notes while or before listening to it. They're sometimes cryptic in a lovely Prince way, but they also shed some light on why he specifically picked some of the tracks for the collection, which I thinks is rather useful in this context. You can find a scan of the booklet on Discogs: https://www.discogs.com/r...ystal-Ball

[Edited 3/29/24 17:46pm]

Absolutely perfect the way it is and I think it needs to be respected as one of the few times he himself explicity compiled vault material for release. Love it forever and always and one of my most listened to P albums.

lustmealways said:

Absolutely perfect the way it is and I think it needs to be respected as one of the few times he himself explicity compiled vault material for release.

I'll give you that with emphasis on the previous posters citing Prince's own liner notes. The curation is one thing but the annotations make the project particularly special.

That being said various Vault material he put on out the NPGMC gets zero.zero respect compared to CB98.

"The Truth" is my favorite part of this release but I liked the project as a whole. I didn't know anything about bootlegged Prince songs at that time so I had no expectations. Like many of us this came out in my early 20's and I associate it with good times in my youth so I will always associate it with good vibes. That said, I rarely go back to this album even though the title song, Movie Star and Calhoun Square are some of my all-time favorites. Songs like Hide the Bone, Acknowledge me, Cloreen Bacon Skin, Crucial and Love Sign are good- to a lesser extent- as well.

I enjoy it every now and then but, honestly, I listen to other bootlegs (some with Crystal Ball on it) much more often. I think it's more a reflection on where I'm at in life right now than the quality of the music itself.

sorry but cool annotations do not make this a great compilation lol.

it WAS cool to read his notes. but i mean, im sure he had a personal reason for recording an album with carmen electra. doesnt mean it makes it a great project. but hey i guess it reveals something about his attitude to his past, or how it should be released. if the estate were really following his attitude to the vault, they would not bother with SDes, and just release compilations of songs ranging from the 70s to the 2010s.

BTW, after 27 years, the original online booklet is still... online:

http://www.crystalballcd.com/

I find this very cool

olb99 said:

BTW, after 27 years, the original online booklet is still... online:

http://www.crystalballcd.com/

I find this very cool

That is indeed, very cool. Never seen that b4. Thanx. T

I sold my 5-disc “pil box” copy a number of years ago when I was broke and only mildly regret it. I didn’t have access to much info about it prior to release (I was young with no home internet access at the time, I think I got an older family member to call the hotline ). I was kind of hoping for something more akin to what we’re getting now with the vault material, something thoughtfully curated by era, but what we got was a fairly disjointed pick-and-mix of varying quality. The 80s stuff is great but I'd heard most of that already. There’s some okay later stuff on there and The Truth is pretty good, but overall I was really disappointed at the time. I still have my copy of The War on cassette though, which if I remember correctly was sent out as a kind of apology for the delays that many people experienced receiving their copy of Crystal Ball. The 3-disc retail version was in the shops for quite a while before my copy finally came, but I just put it down to teething problems. An interesting time in Prince history though.

From what I’ve read, Crystal Ball Vol.II looks like it would have been a much tighter and more focused affair. Shame it didn’t happen.

If this isn't an April Fool's joke, go fucking listen to it now, especially if you didn't listen to The Truth acoustic album, perhaps some of his greatest work of all time.

I love Crystal Ball. I paid an absurd amount of money for a 4 disc set in 2016 and I still listen to it often. Too many favorites to list...except for Cloreen Baconskin.

If nothing else, I used the Crystal Ball set to create the ultimate The Gold Experience playlist, with Interactive, Days Of Wild, Ripopgodazippa and Acknowledge Me. Those for me were worth the price of the whole set, everything else was a bonus.

I am hoping for these tracks to appear on an eventual TGE:SDE, but if SOTT:SDE is any indicator (i.e. Good Love), then appearing on Crystal Ball might prevent their inclusion on an SDE.

Some above have said that Cloreen Baconskin isn't any good . . . it's "fine" as an inclusion - but my main complaint is how much room/time it takes up on the set. You could have fit 3-4 other songs in its place. It has no purpose being 15+ minutes long.

Still love CB after all these years. Worth it alone for the title track. At that point I hadn't heard a lot of the songs and loved the variety even thought I wanted more 80s outtakes. Hoping for a vinyl release one day. Ridiculous that they didn't add the SOTT-era tracks to that SDE though.

SpookyPurple said:

Still love CB after all these years. Worth it alone for the title track. At that point I hadn't heard a lot of the songs and loved the variety even thought I wanted more 80s outtakes. Hoping for a vinyl release one day. Ridiculous that they didn't add the SOTT-era tracks to that SDE though.

the omission of a full version of "crystal ball" on the SOTT SDE was just insanity.

the one with susannah's part could have been on there easily, it's different enough from the one
that prince released on the crystal ball compilation.

really very sad about that still. the set is already great but it could have been even better.

as for Crystal Ball, I love the set a lot. yes, it's a shame that he didn't fill all the discs
to capacity, given that he had so many vault tracks.

I would have loved it if he'd included a whole bunch of instrumentals or such, if he'd
opted not to include anymore vocal songs. But it is what it is.

the outtakes being released was great.

obviously the 80s tunes are amazing but the quality of the 90s stuff is equally great,
at least where it doesn't overlap with stuff that was already released and was only in
a slightly different mix.

that was pretty frustrating. stuff like the lovesign remix or tell me how u wanna b done.

what exactly was the point of that?

most listened to of everything out of the whole set though, is The Truth, for me. Love
that album to bits. It is one of my favorite albums of his.