The band that lulled Prince into a “dreamlike” state
There are plenty of words you could use to describe the body of work that Prince produced in his lifetime, but the only thing that seemingly sums it up in its entirety is ‘eclectic’.
Mercurial, genius and daring also do a decent job of summing up his catalogue, but such is the vastness of his oeuvre that it spans so many different moods and styles that the musical polymath was always prone to dipping in and out of on a whim. You don’t get to be as successful and revered by such a broad range of people by playing things safe, and there’s absolutely no denying that Prince, when at his best, was taking every risk imaginable in order to create his masterful works.
Prince wasn’t just diverting his attention towards pre-existing genres either; he was constantly innovating and pushing boundaries so that new sounds could be developed and come forth into the spotlight. Without his consistent dedication to invention, neo-soul probably wouldn’t sound the same, and it would have taken someone of equally exceptional talent to want to find ways to merge rap, funk, R&B and rock in ways that felt artistically interesting rather than desperately slapped together.
His commitment to his work was always staggering, which is underlined by the fact that he released 39 studio albums in his lifetime, spanning across just 37 years. On top of this, there are allegedly countless recordings and demos that haven’t been released to a general audience, which, knowing Prince, probably contains some of the most adventurous work that he likely deemed too extravagant for human consumption.
To put it in the simplest terms, there haven’t been many others like Prince, and his diverse palette and knowledge of the inner machinations of how pop music works were the driving force behind his ceaseless creative energy.
Given that, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he was an avid consumer of different music as well, and while it’s somewhat remarkable that he managed to find the time to listen to what other contemporary artists were creating given his near-constant work schedule, he was drawing inspiration from a veritable assortment of different projects.
During a 2014 interview with Mojo, where he invited the publication out to a private studio in the Caribbean thousands of miles away from his Paisley Park headquarters, he treated the interviewer to some demos that possessed a hazy and ethereal quality to them, which he went on to reveal came from a deep listening session of one of dream pop’s pioneering groups.
“We recorded [that] in Bryan Ferry’s studio in London,” he recalled, “after a night of partying for which the Cocteau Twins was the soundtrack. You can’t understand the words of Cocteau Twins songs but their harmonies put you in a dreamlike state.”
While Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser deliberately made it so that her gibberish lyrics were indecipherable, it pushed the phantasmagorical elements to the forefront of the band’s sound and identity. Prince evidently understood this, much like he innately understood most things he was exposed to, and it’s hardly surprising that he was so enamoured with the Scottish group’s work and its ability to completely defy all conventions, mirroring the exact approach that he had so frequently adopted himself.
