Prince2012/06/23 21:05

Well hello again. I’m surprising myself by writing for 2 consecutive nights. Well I just want to tell you about the documentary I watched last night on Music Air. For those of you who have cable TV ( I have Tokyu cable in Tokyo) it’s on channel 260. The program was about “Prince”. Of course I’ve known this artist ever since he came on the seen over 25 years ago. I never took much notice of him. But, after watching last night’s documentary I found that the man is a musical genius. On some of his albums he plays all the instruments, writes all the music, sings it and engineers it.

He has a knack for finding what artists are capable of and producing them. On one occasion he asked Sheila Escovedo (percussionist) to join one of his tours. She got to the rehearsal and there were no drums or percussion instruments. He said to her “You’re gonna sing.” Of course she never considered herself a singer, but Prince transformed her into a hot looking sexy singer and she was good at it. And after this she named herself Sheila E. He produced lots of other unknown artists as well.

Other musicians would say they would rehearse for a show and then on the performance night Prince would play totally different songs so the musicians had to follow him. They never knew what to expect. He would sometimes yell out chords to them on stage.

They played a lot of clips of his songs on the documentary and I found he had lots of good songs that I didn’t know. And so now that I know more about him and his music, and Prince the producer, I can appreciate him more. Check him out if you get a chance.