It's Prince's true first foray into Lennon/McCartney/Martin territories.

That bridge! What a fantastic drummer he was.
Those chords progressions!
The chorus cadenza is pop perfection,
the verses hooks impeccable.

Of course it pales in front of every other song on the album.

But truly, some acoustic, baba-cool ballad, "I'm in Love" ditty was in order

after the nuclear closing "Let's Go Crazy" and the dark,
purple neons lit, guts-on-the-floor, devastating cries to follow "The Beautiful Ones".
It's the calm breeze in between tornadoes. Track sequencing matters.

On the best mastering available out there, the acoustic guitars really shines (a 12 chords?).
A lot of shite going on production-wise, shakers, tamborine, and of course,
Prince doin' some beat box (which I can't get enough of).
If you listen to a poor, small, flat version (or the brickwalled 2019 self-sabotage one),
I understand it would be hard to love.
The mix has a crystalline, delicate quality which tolerates no audio mangling whatsoever.

What truly leaves me speechless about it, is how good it works as a stadium refrain.
"I Would Die 4 U" takes the crown of the most improbable lyrics to want a stadium to chant to,
but the Purple Rain Tour arrangements of "Take Me With U" put the song in the same league (that finale!).

"Take Me With U" totally works as an intimate, sexy serenade, yet it can place a whole audience at the very centre of it, making the song revolving around the crowd yells, without wich it would sound empty (litterally). "Your turn!"

It's the same doubt that creeps in, that moment where you can't tell if it's Prince
singing "I Would Die 4 U" to us, or if it's us singing it to him.
Some kind of platonic Electric Intercourse, if U will.


It's a hippie song.
Take it too seriously and you may lose the innocence of it.

Ooh wee sha sha koo koo yeah.

[Edited 10/19/24 2:54am]

you know i've always considered this one of the weakest 80s songs of them all. i'm a student and appreciator of pop songcraft, but this one to me seems to be almost too lightweight to the point that it's saccharine and hokey?

i'm not saying it's not excellent, cause it is, just that it doesn't have that BITE that he usually adds on what are already perfect pop songs. I think raspberry beret does the vibe much better.

[Edited 10/18/24 17:54pm]

Take Me With U is the one song that has come alive for me the most with the Atmos release. It's like a different track.

funkbabyandthebabysitters said:

Always fun to see where fans decide to take sides with critics lol

Well professional critics know a thing or two about music, unlike most Prince fans especially in 84 and beyond when all the new fans arrived

.

[Edited 10/19/24 5:30am]

JorisE73 said:

funkbabyandthebabysitters said:

JorisE73 said:

Well professional critics know a thing or two about music, unlike most Prince fans especially in 84 and beyond when all the new fans arrived

Take me with you is still not avant garde however. You could make that case for when doves cry, maybe darling nikki, but thats about it. Still a fantastic album.

Which brings us all the way back around to my original point which was "because it's too pop, too conventional, for such an avante-garde collection".

So... agreed, Take Me With You is not avant garde.

funkbabyandthebabysitters said:

JorisE73 said:

Well professional critics know a thing or two about music, unlike most Prince fans especially in 84 and beyond when all the new fans arrived

Take me with you is still not avant garde however. You could make that case for when doves cry, maybe darling nikki, but thats about it. Still a fantastic album.

Define "avant-garde".

"I Would Die 4 U" doesn't sound like anything of the era, and neither does "The Beautiful Ones".

I don't know how old you were in the eighties, if you've experienced the PR phenomenon in real time, but I can assure any Prince production from 1982 to 1989 sounded alien compared to anything airing on FM radios in these times.

You could say "Computer Blue" is a collage between two songs, but then again, now that we all know what the original fifteen minutes version is... Wouldn't you dub the Hallway Speech version "avant-garde"?

Go listen to the full version, CP-70/Strings Section sub-mix of "Purple Rain" (BFTP 3/2, 4th).
I mean, the Colemans and Novog! The whole strings ensemble, and those minutes at the end!

Of course the whole album deserves its avant-garde badge, like The Beatles' Revolver and many others. How about the "Let's Go Crazy" intro? Who has the arrogance of warning the listener what is about to follow is going to be a religious experience?

We're eons away from anything on "Thriller", not to ignite the feud, just to remind you the context,
and how modern and completely revolutionary anything on "Purple Rain" was, even if it borrowed from the three decades of pop music that came before 1984.

Back to "Take Me With You": Now if you know of a pop song that has the same intro/bridge (toms rolls over an incredible four chords progression) and has a verse so ostensibly in Mixolydian even Lennon would have raise an eyebrow, please share.

Oh, and it has to be on a multi-platinum selling album: it's easy acting like a sub-par Yoko Ono and call any overthought shit that sold 200 copies "avant-garde".

[Edited 10/20/24 3:07am]

BonnieC said:

funkbabyandthebabysitters said:

JorisE73 said: Take me with you is still not avant garde however. You could make that case for when doves cry, maybe darling nikki, but thats about it. Still a fantastic album.

Define "avant-garde".

"I Would Die 4 U" doesn't sound like anything of the era, and neither does "The Beautiful Ones".

I don't know how old you were in the eighties, if you've experienced the PR phenomenon in real time, but I can assure any Prince production from 1982 to 1989 sounded alien compared to anything airing on FM radios in these times.

You could say "Computer Blue" is a collage between two songs, but then again, now that we all know what the original fifteen minutes version is... Wouldn't you dub the Hallway Speech version "avant-garde"?

Go listen to the full version, CP-70/Strings Section sub-mix of "Purple Rain" (BFTP 3/2, 4th).
I mean, the Colemans and Novog! The whole strings ensemble, and those minutes at the end!

Of course the whole album deserves its avant-garde badge, like The Beatles' Revolver and many others. How about the "Let's Go Crazy" intro? Who has the arrogance of warning the listener what is about to follow is going to be a religious experience?

We're eons away from anything on "Thriller", not to ignite the feud, just to remind you the context,
and how modern and completely revolutionary anything on "Purple Rain" was, even if it borrowed from the three decades of pop music that came before 1984.

Back to "Take Me With You": Now if you know of a pop song that has the same intro/bridge (toms rolls over an incredible four chords progression) and has a verse so ostensibly in Mixolydian even Lennon would have raise an eyebrow, please share.

Oh, and it has to be on a multi-platinum selling album: it's easy acting like a sub-par Yoko Ono and call any overthought shit that sold 200 copies "avant-garde".

[Edited 10/20/24 3:07am]

SquirrelMeat said:

Take Me With U is the one song that has come alive for me the most with the Atmos release. It's like a different track.

Agree.

And I also agree with BonnieC, a "yeah that" feel for me too.

This simply is a truly great crafted, and well balanced 'very unusual' poppy sounding song.

And the ATMOS release even made me relisten and rediscover this song so much more.

Indeed the accoustic guitar, teh low synth bass, gosh a mix of sounds that we're all so use to, that it's hard to go back and listen to every singel sound that made this whole so unbelievably perfect!

I enjoy Take Me With You; it is such an innocent song with a very sing-along vibe. And every Prince concert that I went to it was indeed sang-along by most of the crowd, even casual fans.

Look, when you construe "avant-garde" elements into a pop paradigm it ceases to be "avant-garde" and becomes pop.

This is like when Radiohead stooges try and act like Kid A is prime Iannis Xenakis or something. Uh, no, they took esoteric elements and made them pop, so it's friggin' pop. They simply turned Aphex Twin into a bouncing-ball singalong.

I pull out some cashews and zucchini, oh, well, look at the unique dish he's concocting here, then I throw it on a pizza, so it becomes pizza. Perhaps a more esoteric and original pizza than the Little Cheezer's Hot & Ready available for $5 a pop down the street, but a pizza nonetheless.

Likewise, the demographic here is mainly a bunch of uber nerd males, so ofc they're gonna denegrade pieces of perfect pop like "Take Me with You" throwing out commentary like it's short-coming is because it lacks "bite", like a friggin' maudlin piece of freewheeling breezy sentimentality is supposed to have "bite". Talk about missing the entire point.

Fact is, you can all have your lame rankings and tastes and opinions for this sorely, sorely, sorely overplayed, and overdefining record that is 'Purple Rain' (and no, I didn't say it was bad or overhyped), for me, personally, "Take Me with You" is the only track from this album that still feels fresh and gets me hype.

It's definitely for the ladies, however, though at a certain point that really shouldn't cause so many of you to recoil like it consistently does.

[Edited 10/29/24 21:33pm]

2freaky said:

No, I listen to Take Me With U

skywalker said:

No, I listen to Take Me With U

Great song on the album but I realy disliked the live rendition when I saw him perform it in the 2000s.

Actually one of my favorite songs from the album. Definitely an underrated gem.

neonrendezvous said:

Actually one of my favorite songs from the album. Definitely an underrated gem.

+1 I absolutley love the drums in this song.