My Purple Year
Ask me a question and I’ll probably have to think a while before giving you an answer. Ask me who my favorite musician is and I’ll tell you right away: it’s Prince. His music hits all the right notes for me, across a wide range of moods. As a performer, he was charismatic, mysterious, and supremely comfortable with himself. It’s said that he made a mean omelet and his turn signaling was impeccable.
Prince’s work is easy to like, but tougher to truly love; the latter requires familiarity not just with the hits, but with the wider body of work. And with Prince, who released 39 studio albums in his 57 earthly years, this is a tall order. His discography can be overwhelming, even to fans.
I’ve been a Prince fan since college and he’s been my favorite musician for more than a decade, but I’d never bothered to explore the back half of his catalog. To be specific, I’d never ventured beyond his 1995 album The Gold Experience, his first release as the unpronounceable “Love Symbol” and as good a point as any to mark his leap into releasing whatever he wanted, however and whenever he wanted. What followed was two decades of largely inconsequential music, indifferently received.
The more I grew to love the first half of his career, the more my ignorance of the second half gnawed at me. I felt like a fair-weather fan. So in early 2022, I resolved to listen to and privately review every studio album he released, starting with his first (1979’s For You) and continuing in chronological order to his last (2016’s HiTnRUN Phase Two). It would be my “Purple Year.”
As with most personal projects, starting was easy and following through was hard. My pace suffered through the back half, and especially the back third, but I finished his last album 367 days after starting his first.
As a journey through unfamiliar music, it was a slog. Prince’s last two decades feature many enjoyable songs, and even some enjoyable albums, but it’s inessential listening for all but the most devoted Paisleyheads.
As a window into Prince’s creative energy and outlook, listening to his later work was just as inspiring as listening to his early stuff—not because the output was as good (it wasn’t), but because Prince kept doing his thing, seemingly without regard for commercial success and without trying to grasp at relevance. “I don’t need to be on the radio,” Prince told the Star-Tribune in 2014. “I’ve been on the radio all my life.” When asked that same year which of his songs was his favorite, he said “the next one.”
As my Purple Year comes to a close, I hope to take a bit of Prince’s mindset with me: I want to leave more room for creativity; I want to be a little less daunted by what creative expression demands and a little less concerned about how it’ll be received; I want to continually show up, adding texture (however small) to my life and those I share it with.
If I could get better at basketball and late-night breakfast parties, that’d be pretty cool, too.