User:JennKR/sign

Recording

In November 1985, Prince purchased a highly-secluded, thirty-acre estate in Galpin Boulevard, Chanhassen, south-west of Minneapolis. Although a fairly modest property, Prince insisted a studio be built in its basement and left Rogers to oversee the construction of several isolation rooms suitable for housing group performances. In March 1986, while Rogers was still resolving the studio's technical issues, Prince informed her without forewarning that the Revolution would commence recording at the facility. By now, the Revolution had expanded to include a great number of performers, including several non-musicians, to the discontent of Wendy and Lisa who were its predominant members and thus preferred a more intimate grouping. Nevertheless, they were pleased that Prince was allowing them more creative input; sessions for Parade had been highly collaborative and their next project, The Dream Factory, seemed founded on a similar ethos.

By spring 1986, sessions had begun in earnest, and commenced with recording "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker". Beginning with its drum programming, Prince was intent on making it sound like it was recorded live and thus incorporated rolls and pauses to give it a spontaneous feel. His vocals would also mimic this atmosphere by changing pitch from high to low throughout. Musicologist Alex Hahn notes that the song gets its "mid-range dominated sound" due to a technical glitch. Recorded during a snowstorm that caused a power outage at the studio, Prince had been immersed in a creative state and failed to notice the absence of the song's high-end; Rogers, however, had realized that the studio's soundboard was running on half of its usual wattage. When Prince learned of the problem when mixing the song that evening, he felt that it had aided the track's subdued feel and did not re-record it. The Dream Factory's centrepiece—"Power Fantastic"—followed, a jazz excursion that drew inspiration from Miles Davis' 1959 album Kind of Blue and incorporated a composition by Lisa called "Carousel". It was born from many "sweaty jam sessions" that took place during the album's early stages, with Eric Leeds remembering "Power Fantastic" as "one of the greastest things [they] ever did". Other completed tracks that emerged between late-March and mid-April were "Starfish and Coffee", lullaby "A Place in Heaven", experimental "It's A Wonderful Day" and Lisa-penned piano solo "Visions", which Prince, to everyone's surprise, made the album opener.

The first configuration of The Dream Factory was completed on cassette in late April 1986. Included in the sequencing were two tracks recorded in 1982, including "Strange Relationship" and "Teacher Teacher". Despite its completion, Prince held a nine-day session at Sunset Sound. There, he produced "It", using a Fairlight CMI synthesizer to sample a tough drumbeat that went without hi hat. He added several other instruments; primarily a minimalist keyboard riff, replete with horns and complicated guitar work. Sessions continued through to summer 1986 when Prince recorded ballad "Slow Love", a song written during his relationship with Carole Davis who is credited as a co-writer. He would also return to Sunset Sound to work on "The Cross", "Sign o' the Times" and reworked the 1982 track "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man". "The Cross" was a lyric that had persisted with Prince and he expanded on it to write a song that described Christ's second coming; keen to create an atmosphere that reflected that song's statement, he sung the title lyric against harsh chords before removing them, leaving only his voice aided with echo. The song was followed by a track linked thematically, "Sign o' the Times", a social commentary on AIDS, drug use and gang violence—events which would precipitate the return of Christ—completed within a ten-hour session. This recording period culminated with Prince revamping "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man", adding cymbals and keyboard, as well as extending its middle eight to include a slow groove.

The third and final configuration of The Dream Factory was completed on 18 July 1986, however, by this time the collaborative atmosphere forged in earlier sessions had disintegrated. Wendy and Lisa had become infuriated with Prince. Their discontent initially stemmed from Prince's failure to properly credit their musical contributions on the recently-released Parade, but worsened when the pair realized he was unable to offer Susannah a stable, monogamous relationship. These issues were exacerbated by Prince's removal of several collaborative efforts such as "Power Fantastic" and "It's A Wonderful Day" from the final configuration of the album; studio sessions soon became disrupted by verbal confrontations, which according to Rogers, were a "weekly if not daily occurrence". At the end of July 1986, Wendy and Lisa announced their desire to leave the Revolution, but were convinced by Alan Leeds to stay on exclusively for the Parade tour. Prince, as a consequence, abandoned The Dream Factory, but days before the Parade tour in August 1986, recorded "Hot Thing" and "Forever In My Life" at his home studio. "Hot Thing" was a product of Prince's astute programming of the LM-1 drum machine; Rogers recalled finding it "funkier than most people's finished tracks" and commended Prince for assembling its funky beat with just four tracks: the drumbeat, a kick, a snare and a hi hat. The other track from these sessions, "Forever In My Life", would undergo an accident during vocal arrangement. Prince had asked Rogers to mute his background vocal so he could record his lead vocal on top of it, only to discover on playback that the lead vocal lagged behind the background vocal throughout. To her surprise, Rogers found that "it sounded great and he was very happy with it, so we kept it".

Following the conclusion of the Parade tour, Prince increasingly felt that he had to return to making music alone. On October 7 1986, Prince contacted several members of the Revolution to inform them that he had disbanded them; although Bobby Z and Wendy and Lisa were fired, he gave Doctor Fink the option to remain, which he accepted. Prince told a reporter, "I felt we all needed to grow... [They all] needed to play a wide range of music with different types of people". By mid-October, Rogers had taken her first vacation in three years and Bill "Coke" Johnson stepped in as engineer. Along with instrument musicians, Prince and Coke began "Housequake" a song with a "party-like" atmosphere bolstered with saxophone and trumpet inflections. When producing its vocals, Prince used the varispeed to pitch his voice up, an effect he had previously used on "Erotic City" to give it a higher, feminine quality. Pleased with the result, Prince embarked on Camille, a side-project where all songs were linked by the pitched vocal and released under the pseudonym of the same name. Over a ten-day period, Prince completed four new tracks, including "Rebirth of the Flesh", "Rockhard in a Funky Place", "Good Love" and "If I Was Your Girlfriend". He also revamped the Wendy and Lisa composed "Strange Relationship" and removed their additions. The album was sequenced on 5 November 1986 and sent for a test pressing with a prospective January 1987 release date.

As Warner Bros. prepared to release Camille, Prince found himself changing its sequence and adding tracks from The Dream Factory. He began favoring the release of a triple album called Crystal Ball that incorporated songs from both albums, although possibly still released under the guise of Camille. He spent two further intense weeks at Sunset Sound, recording "Adore" and "Play in the Sunshine", while updating "It's Gonna Be A Beautiful Night" which had been recorded live on the Parade tour in Le Zénith, Paris, France. On 30 November, the triple-album Crystal Ball was completed. Shortly before Christmas, Prince recorded "U Got the Look", although found composing it frustrating and tested several instruments to no avail. He settled on centering the song on a grating synthesizer and shredding guitars, but then asked Sheena Easton if she could contribute when she turned up to a session at his home studio unannounced. At first Easton was asked if she could play banjo, but when it became obvious she had never played one, she sung and provided percussion despite having reservations with its sexual nature. As expected, Warner Bros. "balked" at the expense of manufacturing a three-LP set and, realizing the possibility of low return, requested that Prince remove songs to make it a double LP. Weeks of bickering followed until Prince reluctantly agreed and removed seven tracks from Crystal Ball and re-titled the album Sign o' the Times after one of the songs. The album was completed on 15 January 1987 with the insertion of an "instrumental cross fade piece" between the title track and "Play in the Sunshine".

Critical reception

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Robert Christgau	A+
Entertainment Weekly	A
Rolling Stone
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Slant Magazine

Sign o' the Times received universal acclaim from music critics. The New York Times' lead pop critic Jon Pareles observed Prince "[dispense] ambitious music, commercial know-how, calculated eccentricities and wacky obsessions, all thoroughly entangled". He found antithesis to be a recurring feature of the singer's work, noting that on this album, it is particularly prominent as the juxtaposition of sex and religion, and more broadly as Prince varies between "black and white, male and female, juvenile and grown-up, sweet and nasty, communal and private". Robert Christgau said the album was "merely the most gifted pop musician of his generation proving what a motherfucker he is for two discs start to finish". He particularly praised Prince's "one-man band tricks" and multi-tracked vocals, which he said "make Stevie Wonder sound like a struggling ventriloquist". AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine found that "while the music overflows with generous spirit, these are among the most cryptic, insular songs he's ever written", concluding that the singer appeared more liberated on Sign o' the Times compared to its predecessors Around the World in a Day (1985) and Parade (1986). Bart Bull of Spin described the album as "a throwaway, a toss-off, a relaxed run-back of last month's bedroom tapes. From anybody else it'd be indulgent; from Prince, it's just more genius". He expressed delight at the album's looseness despite the fact its songs are an amalgamation of three separate projects, concluding "it doesn't sound like he was trying to do the finest thing he's ever done, it just sounds fine". Kurt Loder, writing for Rolling Stone, called the record "dazzling" saying "the best music here is tough and inventive and exuberantly experimental". He declared that Prince displays "the beauty of true style and unconstrained personality, the complexity of the interplay among love and God and sexuality and—most important—the essentially multiracial nature of rock & roll music".

Daryl Easlea's review published for the BBC said "it was the moment artistic, critical and commercial collide, capturing the quixotic essence of the man – rock here, some folk, hip hop, jazz and, of course, out-and-out funk". Clash said the album was characterised by its eclecticism. They found that "the record flits expertly between full-blown excess and austere minimalism", comparing it to the work of James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone. Tom Breihan of Stereogum said Sign o' the Times "crystallized all the artistic experimentation of those previous two albums into something huge and tangible, displaying Prince as a musical adventurer without equal". He further praised the singer for moving left-field into "Beatles-informed smooth-rock psychedelia", consequently avoiding "muscular new-wave funk-pop" that typified previous releases, particularly in a period where he was relatively commercially less succesful. The Quietus' John Freeman concluded the album was Prince's magnum opus, finding "sixteen scintillating tracks which neatly encapsulated his outrageous, chameleonic flair for funk, rock, soul, gospel, rap and downright oddness". Eric Henderson of Slant Magazine said its songs were "as tight and focused as anything Prince has released" believing he had "managed to whittle his mountains of material into something like a statement", while Entertainment Weekly felt the album was the first time Prince had found his form since Purple Rain (1984).

References

Notes

Citations

Sources

• Hahn, Alex (2003). Possessed: The Rise and Fall of Prince (1st ed.). Billboard Books. ISBN 978-0823077489.
• Nilsen, Per (2004). The Vault: The Definitive Guide to the Musical World of Prince. Uptown. ISBN 9789163154829.
• Ro, Ronin (2011). Prince: Inside the Music and the Masks (1st ed.). St Martin's Press. ISBN 978-0312383008.