Piano & a Microphone 1983 by Prince
Piano and a Microphone 1983 is a posthumously released demo album by Prince, released on CD, vinyl, and digital formats on September 21, 2018. It is the first album released by the Prince estate with material from his archive, the Vault. The album was discovered in Prince's vault at Paisley Park as a single cassette tape. The music was recorded in 1983 in one take at Prince's Kiowa Trail home studio in Chanhassen, Minnesota. The session was about 35 minutes of Prince's vocals while he played piano and segued between songs. The session includes alternate versions of previously released and yet-to-be released songs, cover versions, and sketches of songs. The New York Times called it "a glimpse of a notoriously private artist doing his mysterious work." Four of the album's nine tracks were previously unreleased - "Mary Don't You Weep", "Wednesday", "Cold Coffee & Cocaine", and "Why the Butterflies".
You are forgiven if you feel a little uncomfortable listening to these recordings; you were never meant to. Unearthed from roughly the period between <i>1999</i> and <i>Purple Rain</i>, these raw cassette demos of Prince accompanying himself on piano, as advertised, are less songs than sketches. (The one that grew up to be the most famous, “Purple Rain”, is more like an exquisite doodle at about a minute and a half; ditto his cover of Joni Mitchell's 1971 “A Case of You".) Which is why they are, in some ways, more revelatory and astonishing than so much of his actually finished work: This is what one of the most talented humans ever to live, at the cusp of his creative and commercial peak, sounds like when he's <i>barely even trying</i>. It's no huge surprise that some of these songs never got further than his home tape recorder—“Cold Coffee & Cocaine” sounds like cold coffee and cocaine and not a whole lot else just yet. But the experience of hearing this impossibly careful artist so unguarded, singing and noodling around on a piano and trying to discover in real time whether something may be leading him somewhere special, feels intimate to the point of invasive.
