Prince
Sign O’ The Times (Super Deluxe Edition)
Warner Bros.
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This newest posthumous release from the Prince estate is, frankly, monumental. As a physical release, it is a musical monolith of epic proportions, but even a scroll down the streaming list requires a hand free from fatigue—it is enormous.

Yet it is also a fitting monument to an artist at the very top of his game. It marks a huge moment in his life and artistic development when upheavals came at him left, right and center, and he produced an album that reflected those challenges and his audacious musicality.

The journey to Sign O’ The Times was far from plain sailing and was the result of much chopping and changing, coming as it did after the aborted release of several other projects including Crystal Ball and the Camille album. At various points Prince had presented triple and double album configurations to Warner Brothers that contained much of the material included in what would eventually become SOTT, alongside the tracks that make up the expanded version contained in this release.

The reason for this unprecedented burst of creativity (even for the already prolific artist) was simple. Pain. Pain and heartache born of the breakdown of his relationship with Susannah Melvoin, the dissolution of his band The Revolution and the flop that was his Under The Cherry Moon movie. Drowning himself in his home studio, ideas poured out from him like water from a tap (as Susan Rogers remembers with extreme clarity and exceptional warmth on the official Prince Estate podcast that accompanies the release).

It is inconceivable to try to categorize the tracks here, given they are wildly diverse. But the one thing that is clear—both from the original album and the abundance of extras here—is that he had been stung by criticism that he had lost his funkiness (as Susan Rogers puts it in the extensive notes she contributes here). Funk oozes throughout the vault tracks—nasty, grimy funk too but, Prince being Prince, there is also a smorgasbord of other delights.

These are the dozen or so moments that have reinforced the genius of Prince to a fan who already adored the album beyond compare:

[1] “La, La, La, He, He, Hee (Highly Explosive)”

I’m not saying Prince invented the remix (I mean, I wouldn’t put it past him), but his ability to write something as throwaway as this and then extend and augment it into an epic funk jam that drips with cartoon humor and scratchy chicken grease guitar really underlines his exceptional imagination.

[2] “I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man” (1979 Version)

The fact that this song sounds just as fresh in this new wave sound from 1979 as it does in the barnstorming version that sits on the original album, is testament to two things: firstly, the quality of songcraft endures no matter what style it is performed in and, secondly, that he knew himself well enough to identify the right time to unveil long-held ideas.

[3] “All My Dreams”

Many years ago, I picked up a bootleg CD entitled Possessed. Alongside the titular James Brown inspired funk track and others lurked this absolute gem—I longed for the day when I owned a pristine copy as opposed to the, frankly, terrible sounding CD. Part Broadway show tune, part mid-tempo funk track, it fuses things that have no damn right to be sitting together and turns them into a wholly unique vision—the kind of thing he would revel in at various points throughout his career.

[4] “Strange Relationship” (Original Version)

I never imagined being able to listen to an alternate version of a SOTT track and imagine it in the original version’s place. This muddier, swampier version with the sitar sound and funky guitar swirling around at various points is a fascinating glimpse into the editing process that ensured the album version was a notably sunnier proposition.

[5] “The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker” (With Horns)

Again, I would think it sacrilegious to replace the version of a song from SOTT with an alternate, but this again pushes me to the edge of that conviction. The beautifully muted and understated horns add a little elegance to the song’s perfectly told, strange tale.

[6] “Power Fantastic” (Live In Studio)

In the same way that the posthumous Piano And A Microphone gave a less veiled window into the world of Prince, so here the instructions issued at the beginning of what is already a magnificent song offer up a chance to hear Prince, the inspirational bandleader. The delicacy and beauty of the song are heavenly.

[7] “In A Large Room With No Light”

Based on a jam by Wendy and Lisa, the sheer unbridled exuberance of the music is a stark contrast with the hopelessness of the chorus. As one of the vault tracks most often mentioned by fans, it lives up to expectations and the swirling climax is a sheer delight.

[8] “Eggplant”

Starting with an industrial beat and some deeply satisfying squelchy keys, it soon gives way to a sweet-natured warning to avoid a certain type of mate. The zephyr light melody floats by effortlessly before some funk guitar and some typically brilliant horn work from Eric Leeds and Matt Blistan turn it, once more, into an entirely different beast. His ability to blend ideas together over the course of a song is almost unparalleled.

[9] “Blanche”

There’s more than an echo of his guitar playing from 1995’s “Shy.” but this is funkier and nastier than that could ever be. Recorded on the same day as “Sign O’ The Times,” it couldn’t be much more different—it is impossible not to be blown away by the range of material throughout this expanded reissue.

[10] “Adonis and Bathsheba”

Swooning romance has always played its role in Prince’s music and Sign O’ The Times was no different—alongside the greatest ballad of all time (“Adore”) sat “Slow Love” after all. This song, alongside fellow vaulted beauty “Crucial,” shows that the seam of impeccable, stunning ballads ran deep at this time in particular.

[11] “Rebirth Of The Flesh” (Original Outro)

This dark, nasty dose of funk foreshadows his work on The Black Album (recorded 1986-1987, released 1994) and Lovesexy (1988) with snatches of both music and lyrics popping up in those later works. This is a prime example of his ability to program drum machines to extract as much soul and humanity while issuing a call-to-arms for true funk soldiers.

[12] “Forever In My Life” (Live In Utrecht)

Hearing “Forever In My Life” live during this period is to hear it transformed into an epic gospeldelic wonder. The portentous drumbeat allied to Prince’s funky acoustic guitar and Boni Boyer’s sanctified vocal shredding make a spine-tingling concoction fit for praise of the most high (or the boy/girl of your dreams).

To say that every track here is indispensable would plainly be wrong. Some offerings long coveted don’t live up to the mystique conferred by years of wanting (in my case, “Big Tall Wall”) and some stray into generic funk workouts (the type he leant on later in his career). But the overall quality is quite astonishing. It seems inconceivable that some of these tracks sat in a vault unused when others would kill for songs with one tenth of the magic they possessed.

Prince famously said after being beaten to Album Of The Year at the 1988 GRAMMY Awards by U2’s The Joshua Tree that “you’ll be sitting there at the GRAMMYs, and U2 will beat you. And you say to yourself ‘wait a minute. I can play that kind of music too, I played La Crosse (Wisconsin) growing up. I know how do to that, you dig? But you will not do ‘Housequake.’”

This collection proves that he could do everything as well as anyone else in their own field—he was no “jack of all trades” though. No, he was a master of all trades—in fact the master and all by the time he was just 29 years old. A towering achievement to match any other.

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