It’s a gorgeous document of the chemistry the Revolution had at their peak, even as they were beginning to fall apart. Out of that quiet, Lisa plays the melancholy piano figure that begins the real song, the bones of which she wrote with Wendy, and Prince starts singing his vocal from the corner of the control room, only pausing to guide the band through the changes by saying “bridge” or “chorus,” the musicians pouring into each new part like water.
This is the fun track.” The instruments drift into each other in slow motion, gradually building to a free interplay between horns and piano and brushed drums that’s like waves crashing and foaming on rocks, before receding back into silence. “Just trip,” he says, “There are no mistakes this track. “Power Fantastic,” recorded live with the Revolution playing in Prince’s house, opens with Prince giving studio direction to the rest of the band from the control room. So many of Sign o’ the Times pleasures lie in Prince’s incorporation of horns-they blink like new sequins in the fabric of his music-but it’s mostly uncanny to hear the blear of “Dorothy Parker” suddenly studded with in-focus saxophone harmonies. After finishing it, he asked one of the horn players in his band, Eric Leeds, to paste a horn arrangement on top of it.
The song ended up sounding half-asleep as he was, a trip through the unconscious world before waking. Engineer Susan Rogers panicked, but Prince continued recording, impatient to get the idea down. A flaw in the installation of the studio console made the drum machine sound watery and distant, like a thumping beneath the hull of a ship, and the synths echoed like they were being bounced off sheet metal. It’s the platonic ideal of a lost Revolution track, a beguiling long-form experiment that is also undeniably pop, the strange, unbound invention of three true genre agnostics.Īlso slated for Dream Factory was “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker,” the first song Prince recorded in his freshly-built home studio just a few hours after waking from a dream. “All of My Dreams” exemplifies this from its first choral blossomings to its sophistipop chorus to Prince’s pitched-down vocal moving through the song like a lowered cloud we hear him recount a sex dream where, for the umpteenth time in his work, the sensual grows indistinguishable from the surreal. Wendy and Lisa added such lightness and complexity to Prince’s music, they made the ground disappear beneath its heels. The Dream Factory songs unearthed from the vault are staggering.
His burgeoning creative relationship with Revolution bandmates Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman produced complete gardens of songs, such that he could hardly keep them confined to one album he sequenced both single and double-LP versions of a project called Dream Factory, a living archive of all the songs they made together that didn’t work on more focused album projects like the just-released Parade. (There’s even a song called “Love and Sex” on the new set that’s completely distinct from the other Prince song called “Love and Sex” on the 2017 Purple Rain reissue.) Throughout 1986 and leading up to the release of Sign o’ the Times, concepts bloomed in Prince’s vision, only to shrink away when his attention drifted elsewhere.
Entire new floors and wings have been unlocked in the structure, revealing songs removed from the album’s original sequence, as well as tracks he intended for his forebears Joni Mitchell and Miles Davis, free-flowing studio jams, and the tentative beginnings of a stage musical about roving gangs of musicians. And with the release of the new eight-disc, Super Deluxe edition of Sign o’ the Times, one can finally zoom out and glimpse the totality of its scale. No wonder listening to it has always sort of felt like walking through the rooms of a house inside of Prince’s dream. Which is why it might be helpful to think of the original 1987 release of Sign o’ the Times as more of a network than an album-a small reservoir of music filled from many disparate sources.