“A new foundation”: Prince’s favourite song of all time
“Music is real. It affects people; it’s real.” – Prince
Prince was a one-of-a-kind artist. He said he could play “a thousand” instruments, and you’d have a hard time doubting that assertion, given that he even invented a few of his own. As such, fanboying is the last thing that you’d expect from him. Of course, he had his influences and heroes, citing the likes of Stevie Nicks and Sly Stone as inspirations, but he was a musician in a rarefied realm whereby penning fan mail seems an action out of the question, such was his unique brilliance it would seem like an ostrich asking for Usain Bolt’s autograph.
Even his attitude to songwriting seemed to rid him of direct influence. As a perfectionist, he would knuckle down in the studio alone, effectively shutting himself off and trying to create something new. “Art is about building a new foundation,” he once said, “not just laying on top of what’s already there.”
To this end, he wound up discarding anything that didn’t strike him as his pioneering. In fact, he did this to such a litigious degree that he even confined nearly 8000 songs to a vault that he forgot the combination of—eventually hiring safecrackers once his curiosity got the better of him. In short, not just any old song would do for the Purple One.
Nevertheless, his adoration of folk phenom Joni Mitchell knew no bounds and continued throughout his career. In his view, she was able to pair passion with innovation in a manner only matched by the Karma Sutra’s first-ever draft.
Perhaps this is an understandable attraction. For many people, Mitchell is an avenue to escapism and reflection. If you were scurrying away in the studio all day and then waging war against the industry, she’s the calming, honest presence that you might want to cosy up with.
That is something Prince indulged in frequently. As Joni recalled to New York Magazine, “Prince attended one of my concerts in Minnesota. I remember seeing him sitting in the front row when he was very young. He must have been about 15.” By this stage, he was already known in the music industry for refusing his first record offer because they wouldn’t let him produce it himself – quite a statement from a school kid.
Mitchell explained, “He was in an aisle seat and he had unusually big eyes. He watched the whole show with his collar up, looking side to side. You couldn’t miss him—he was a little Prince-ling.” He was blown away by her graceful performance.
Thereafter, Prince’s love remained and never abated over the years. Even when he was chart-topping himself, he continued to send Mitchell odes of devotion. “Prince used to write me fan mail with all of the U’s and hearts that way that he writes,” Mitchell added. “And the office took it as mail from the lunatic fringe and just tossed it!”
Even in 1985, Prince told Rolling Stone that he had not fallen in love with a record for ten years since he found Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns from 1975, which he described as being “the last album I loved all the way through.”
But what was Prince’s favourite Joni Mitchell song?
However, there was one Mitchell song, in particular, that captured Prince’s heart. ‘A Case of You’ towers above its imitators by means of sheer sincerity. As Mitchell once told Mojo: “I think men write very dishonestly about breakups.”
She earnestly continued: “I wanted to be capable of being responsible for my own errors. If there was friction between me and another person, I wanted to be able to see my participation in it so I could see what could be changed and what could not. That is part of the pursuit of happiness.”
With this in mind, she reflected on love with an honest distance in the song. In a novelistic manner, she looked at life with a sense of stepping aside from an unfurling story and taking stock of the signposts that suggested where it might be headed with the song. As she added, “You have to pull the weeds in your soul when you are young, when they are sprouting, otherwise they will choke you.”
This abating of stiff-upper-lip masculinity in favour of a candid poetic outpouring of emotion was Prince’s modus operandi throughout his career. As Frank Ocean said in praise of Prince, “He made me feel comfortable with how I identify sexually simply by his display of freedom from and irreverence for the archaic idea of gender conformity.”
In part, that illuminating self of individualism and defiance was inspired by ‘A Case of You’ and its gentle yet firm message to be honest with yourself. That is something Prince would always try to abide by, and much like Mitchell, that also involved refusing to be part of the ‘industry’.
So, throughout his life, he would turn to his favourite track whenever he needed some sweet reassurance. He even went on to cover it in his stylised ‘A Case of U’ on his 2002 album One Nite Alone, and a great many times live from 1983 all the way up until his penultimate concert in 2016.
It is a song of profound beauty that illustrates the need to take dominion over life’s unfurling circumstances and their effects on us as people, which clearly resonated with Prince on both an artistic and personal level. In fact, you could even argue it held too much sway over him as he struggled to yield any dominion on even the slightest thing, often rendering him exhausted. Alas, he would argue that’s a price you have to pay to achieve beauty akin to Mitchell’s measured opus. Werner Herzog once said, “I would travel down to Hell and wrestle a film away from the devil if it was necessary.” It would seem that Prince would do the same. Mitchell, on the other hand, might simply coax him into handing over a masterpiece without any need for wrestling, like a mythical siren of old.
