50 great things about Prince's 'Sign O' The Times'

67. the best use of factory presets on a record ever?

― flappy bird, Friday, May 13, 2016 6:15 AM (4 days ago)

73. Side 3 is prob the best run of songs Prince ever did:

U GOT THE LOOK
IF I WAS UR GIRLFRIEND
STRANGE RELATIONSHIP
I COULD NEVER TAKE THE PLACE OF YOUR MAN

― flappy bird, Monday, May 16, 2016 12:23 AM (Yesterday)

yesssssssss

74. Those finger cymbal things that I want to call castanets but aren't, particularly on Strange Relationship

Crotales iirc? Love the way he uses them. They are all over the atwiad LP.

was anyone else annoyed by this line in the p4k retrospective review of SOTT?

“Housequake” is, perhaps, the most obvious songs on the album, a funk jam that would have been a hit single if he’d allowed it to be released as such. But the care of the track’s construction belies any shallow analysis. It starts with a cartoony voice (maybe a Camille reference), a synthesized drum heavy with echo, then adds bass, keyboard stabs, and rhythm guitar. The synth drum and snare drum merge while there’s a double-beat on the kick. Live horns come it and the bass line moves as there’s both a synth bass keyboard and a live bass doing playing different lines. Various backing vocals float in and out with Prince doing his James Brown impersonation as singer/MC. Compared to the simple loops of your average club banger, “Housequake” is a symphony of syncopation. The beat moves even as it grooves.

wtf the drum machine couldn't be any more dry

none more dry

Perhaps we should have Camille step back from the drum machine so s/he doesn't trod on it.

I already got into one stupid argument about Prince productions earlier this week but until I just replayed this, I had thought it was the bass drum w the gated reverb too. I guess it's a detuned tom?

The sleeve art on the double LP was such a shock - we had "slick Prince" as the mental image, black and white crop top, 30s chic in Cherry Moon, and then suddenly SotT drops and we have neopsychedelic Prince, Cat (who?), peach'n'black, ashram robes, flokati vests and Haight-Ashbury glasses. That plus Camille knocked me for a loop. And Sheena "My Baby Takes the Morning Train" Easton? Where's the Revolution? WTF?

― MatthewK, Sunday, May 15, 2016

you hadn't heard "Strut" or "Sugar Walls"? Those were massive hits.

p4k retrospective review

these were so terrible, especially the ATWIAD one discussing his politics

er Controversy one

I meant to say

yeah over here she was Sheena 'From BBC TVs The Big Time' Easton to me too. in the UK she hadn't been heard of since forever. Sugar Walls? in with a bullet at 95 in the UK charts, while Strut didn't even get that far! her last hit had been For Your Eyes Only 6 years earlier.

73. Side 3 is prob the best run of songs Prince ever did:

U GOT THE LOOK
IF I WAS UR GIRLFRIEND
STRANGE RELATIONSHIP
I COULD NEVER TAKE THE PLACE OF YOUR MAN

I say this very thing enthusiastically and quite often!

that SOTT review was absent minded

like nelon george wrote it with 50 tabs open

75. such a great cover

http://img.cdandlp.com/2015/10/imgL/117728616.jpg

That one took a while!

76. "Reefer." So quaint.

77. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlBxxOPEVsg

76. "Reefer." So quaint.

― dinner boat, Friday, May 20, 2016 10:33 AM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

even more so, who calls it "horse"??

I thought horse is a fairly common slang word for heroin, or at least it was back when Prince wrote the tune?

Both jazz terms, yeah?

When I think of the magic of this record it makes me sadder than all others, that this guy is not with us any more.

My guitar teacher thought it would be interesting to help me figure out the chords to "Dorothy Parker," and yeah, it was! We realized one reason Prince played everything himself is that it would take a lot less time to do that than to explain to someone else how to contribute to a totally out there sui generis song like that one. In fact, there are a couple of tracks on "Sign" that similarly transcend genre in really fascinating and less than obvious ways.

Also, I decided the opening drum sequence of the title track makes a really cool ringtone.

Which tracks are you thinking of?

Well, Dorothy Parker, for one. It's funky, and jazzy, and just - weird. The bridge-thing where he quotes Joni Mitchell, wtf is that? Or Forever In My Life, what is that? Strange Relationship, that's another one that's funky but not really funk. It's like looser influences like jazz or folk have altered more immutable forms, like funk or dance pop or whatever. I mean, Play In the Sunshine is essentially ... rockabilly? Something like that. But then it's got that crazy fusion-y coda.

forever in my life is quite gospelly in its arrangement i think.

the melody i mean.

xps what are the chords to Dorothy Parker?

And does it feature the famous Prince "sus 2" chord?

Dorothy Parker doesn't have that sus2 chord. That's the weird chord in the third line of the chorus in "Sometimes it Snows in April." It does have plenty of weird quirks and changes.

The main progression in TBDP is a descending progression from Am7 (iv) to Em7(i), making every stop in the descending bassline before a quick trip to the V to build tension before the final line (before "Dorothy was fast," etc). Looks like this:

Am7
Dorothy was a waitress
Ab(flat 5)
On the promenade
Em7/G in bass F#m7
She worked the night shift
Fmaj7 B
Dishwater blonde, tall and fine
Em
She got a lot of tips

The bridge, as it were, changes from E minor to G. The second bridge modulates from A minor to A major on the "should have done it sooooneeeer" part. The ballad of dorothy parker line looks something like this:

A Bm Am Bm B+
This is the ballad of Dorothy Parker

Then it goes back to the main progression. This tab (and the rest of the tabs on this website) seems pretty good: http://princetabs.50webs.com/dorothy.txt

Sorry, click the link for better spacing, I haven't been able to figure out how to space text on ILX

xxxps to StillAdvance --- To me, Forever In My Life seems to be a minimalist version of a Sly Stone song. The melody reminds me a lot of Everyday People, weirdly.

I'm not good enough at this stuff to recognize if it's right or wrong, Only chord in our own little chart not up there is Cmaj7, maybe in the very early intro? Before the singing starts. There's a brief measure or two at maybe the end of the bridge where we just wrote a big "?," because it just goes wacky.

xpost It's totally Sly-y, but the muted-ness of the vocals and rhythm are even weirder, kind of like sing in the shower demo-esque.

It could be a Cmaj7 with a G in the bass in the verse progression (instead of the Em7 with the G in the bass)

Whatever the chords, what a weird little masterpiece

Dorothy Parker doesn't have that sus2 chord. That's the weird chord in the third line of the chorus in "Sometimes it Snows in April."
No, that chord on the third line of the chorus is really unusual. I think in that song he actually uses the sus2 as the third chord on the verse and then as the first chord on the chorus. He also uses it in "Purple Rain" and a number of other songs.

Anyway, the weird, weirdest? most interesting? most surprising? chord of "Sometimes It Snows," which appears in the third line of the chorus, seems to be a G#7 with an open B and E on the top. Which I guess you could call a G#7#9#5, which is a strong enough chord in itself, but is particularly surprising in the context of the song, since a) the prior two times in the chorus he just played a G#m7 and b) the chord introduces a new note, the B#(=C), which your ear will not be expecting given what the harmony was doing up until then and c) if you voice the chord so that the B and B# (=C) are right next to each other, a half-step away, instead of using a more open voicing, it packs even more of a punch.

Re: "Now he's doing horse" — wow, I've misheard that lyric all these years. Embarrassed to admit I thought it was "now he's doing whores."

Reefer was totally a hooker gateway drug back in the day, don't worry about it :)

78. He rhymes "moon" with "June" in the title track.

79. "Her favorite number was 20"

https://theshibeparkvaults.bandcamp.com/album/sign-o-the-times-rehearsals-disc-1

https://theshibeparkvaults.bandcamp.com/album/sign-o-the-times-rehearsals-disc-2

cool but who gets the 7 bucks if you actually pay for those things?

80. The way "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" takes a curve from 80s New Wave pop into an early 70s "Can't You Hear Me Knocking"/Traffic blues rock jam, from which it only returns for a very brief instrumental reprise of the first part of the song, then out.

78/79/80 all v great things

Those Sign O The Times rehearsals are currently free to download btw

still looks like they're $7 to me. weird to see bootlegs posted so brazenly on Bandcamp.

wtf I'm not paying some asshole for these

i've just been streaming, it's free to stream in full

maybe just free in Europe then?

interesting recreationg of "Dream Factory" the album that was scrapped then combined with the Camille album to become Sign O the Times

http://albumsthatneverwere.blogspot.com/2016/05/prince-and-revolution-dream-factory.html