PRINCE - Piano and Microphone

Im not sure where I found this review but I wanted to document it somewhere to read years from now: Prince was introduced to the world in 1978 as a one-man band with a giant Afro on the album “For You.” On Thursday night, Prince finally made his debut as a live one-man band with a sizable Afro at Paisley Park in Chanhassen. It was the most revealing, intimate and personal show he’s ever given. Well, the first of two performances was. The second one was more relaxed, emotional and hits-filled. But first things first. The man in mauve emerged enveloped in stage fog from behind giant doors (covered with his glyph) that parted in the middle. He climbed the stairs to a new small stage and sat at a purple baby-grand piano. He hit one chord on the keyboard and walked away. The faux false start was intentional because Prince, at 5'7, was about to present a conceptual musical autobiography. He was a 3-year-old who wanted to play the piano but his dad, a musician, wouldn’t let him touch the instrument. So little Prince watched TV, which he indicated by jumping atop the purple piano and miming like he was munching chips while transfixed by the tube. His parents divorced when he was 7, he said, and thereafter he could play piano anytime he wanted. So he offered a passage and then proclaimed, “I can’t play piano like my dad. How does Dad do that?” Then he whipped off a blues-jazz boogie segment and announced: “I wish I could sing.” The audience of 1,200 laughed. Fans react to Prince's solo concerts at Paisley Park Thus began Prince’s story, a tale during which he was playful, philosophical and uncharacteristically open. He talked about listening to the radio — naming his favorite Twin Cities DJs — and eventually wanting to write his own songs. He demonstrated how he would vamp on the piano, attempting to craft a tune, and even showed some wrong notes he tried in the composing process. After that illuminating prelude, he finally launched into something of a chronological tour of his career. He delivered his first hit, “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” and confessed that he was trying to figure out who he was and created the Rabelaisian “Dirty Mind” and the provocative “Do Me Baby,” but in these solo piano renditions they sounded merely like love letters to make her melt. Unlike similar shows in which big-name stars expound on what sparked certain songs, Prince was more interested in discussing his motivations and inspirations in general, not in specific. In the middle of “Free,” he stopped and gave a shout out to David Bowie, saying what a nice guy Bowie was when they met once. Then Prince resumed the song. He also sang the praises of Joni Mitchell and played an intoxicating version of her “A Case of You,” which included an aside that showed how the space between notes makes a difference. Prince aimed to be instructive as well as insightful and entertaining. And he was in terrific voice all evening, with masterful command of the piano. Maybe the best story was the introduction to “Raspberry Beret,” one of the few hits heard in the 90-minute first concert. He talked about how a teenage Lisa Coleman almost flunked her audition to be his keyboardist and eventually became so essential, contributing, among other things, a musical line around which “Raspberry Beret” was built. Prince didn’t talk about church or religion but there was an abundance of gospel and spirituality in his singing and playing. Not only is it natural for him but it seemed fitting in this format because this stripped-down music exposed his inner soul more than anything he’s done before. “This is a first,” he said at show’s end. “You were here and so was I.” And then he disappeared amid stage fog. Despite the dearth of hits, the show has to rank as one of the extraordinary oddities of Prince’s concert career, along with his one-off bar-band evening at the defunct Rupert’s Nightclub in 1990 and his three nights, with a different band each night, at the Dakota Jazz Club in 2013. Thursday’s second show lasted only 78 minutes but featured less talking and more hits, including “Nothing Compares 2 U” and “Purple Rain” (during which he almost cried). The highlight was “Kiss” (he goofily ad-libbed about not having to watch “Duck Dynasty”), which was the perfect foreplay for the ensuing “Black Sweat,” the funkiest foray of the entire romantic evening. The second concert was probably what fans — who came from Japan, Switzerland, England and all over the United States — might have expected from a solo piano gig by Prince. Last fall, he announced his Piano and a Microphone Tour of Europe but it was canceled after the terrorist attacks in Paris. If Thursday was a preview of a possible solo tour of the States or Europe, hardcore fans will be delighted to discover a new side of Prince.

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Prince was phenomenal tonight! He took us on a journey from a broken heart to a party. I haven't seen someone playing piano with such emotion in a long time. It was beautiful. His voice was vulnerable in the best possible way. The instrumental version of Question Of U gave me goosebumps all over. One of the sad songs took over his emotions for a minute, he teared up, went to wipe his eyes, came back and goes: "alright, one more sad song, then I'll have her out of my system". That was cute. And he was ready to party. It's pretty incredible how one person with one mic and one piano can take a big room of people on such a ride. Had everyone's full attention from beginning to end. This was a very special night and I feel so incredibly lucky to have witnessed this. Thank you Prince.

Midway through his first of two solo piano performances Thursday night at Paisley Park, Prince told the crowd: "This is usually what I do around this time of night." And, actually, it's easy to imagine the Purple One spending cold winter evenings sitting at the piano in the hangar-like soundstage of his remote Chanhassen recording studio. The popular image of Prince is that he's a reclusive, weirdo genius and he more than lived up to that billing Thursday. He spent 90 minutes strolling through the deeper corners of his back catalog in a passionate, impressionistic manner that felt like he was playing for a dozen close friends rather than a room packed with hundreds of fans. Because this is Prince we're talking about, the needlessly complicated process involved, for most fans, parking off site and waiting outside for 40 minutes or more to board buses bound for Paisley Park. The $100 ticket price felt a little more justified given the amount of staff on hand as well as the cost of that transportation. The folks who dropped $250 for VIP treatment got a free copy of Prince's latest CD and some other merchandise as well as access to raised platform seating that made it easy to see the 57-year-old and his afro, purple tunic and platform tennis shoes with LED lights in the heels. After about five minutes of a fog machine belching clouds into the eager crowd, Prince emerged and started whispering lines into the microphone, which looped them into a murky sonic sludge. After a few puzzling minutes of that, Prince settled into the format he followed for the rest of the show. He started playing the piano and pretty much didn't stop, crooning out a verse and chorus of such classics as "I Wanna Be Your Lover," "Dirty Mind" and "Do Me, Baby" between long instrumental passages and stories about his father. The result felt like the intersection of a cabaret performance, new age concert and film soundtrack, all broadcast through a decidedly purple filter. Any casual fan who hoped to sing along to "Purple Rain" was likely more bewildered than disappointed. Most of the show was focused on the first decade of his career, with a series of mostly album tracks played in roughly chronological order, including "Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)," "The Beautiful Ones," "Paisley Park," "Sometimes It Snows in April," "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker" and "Anna Stesia." Near the end, he worked in a few recent numbers, including "Baltimore." He also gave a few shout-outs from the stage, to David Bowie (who was very nice, Prince said) to his Revolution bandmates Wendy and Lisa to Joni Mitchell. "This was the first one," he said at the end of the performance, suggesting that the second show later Thursday was likely to lead to more of these unusual, memorable solo gigs. Prince will keep the party going at Paisley Park with a Friday night concert featuring funk bands Graham Central Station and Pho. Keep an eye on his Twitter account, @Prince3EG, as he's likely to announce an event for Saturday night as well.

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With just a piano and a microphone, Prince embraces a new kind of freedom by Andrea Swensson · January 22, 2016 PRINCE REVIEW 12 A snow angel outside Paisley Park on Thursday night (Photo by Andrea Swensson/MPR) It wasn’t the wrenching version “Nothing Compares 2 U.” It wasn’t the gleeful sing-along to “Raspberry Beret,” or the Joni Mitchell cover, or the sheer thrill of hearing “Black Sweat” sung over swirling piano. No, the most surprising part of Prince’s “Piano and a Microphone” performance at Paisley Park wasn’t even a song at all — it was the revelation that in all these years of performing, he’s somehow never gotten around to playing quite this way before. “This is the first time I’ve done a concert alone, ever. And you’re here the first night,” Prince said, smirking and bouncing a little in his seat. “Congrats to both of us.” For a musician who has made a career out of outshining everyone else in the room, there was an unexpected novelty to watching him command a stage alone, and I couldn’t help but wonder how have we made it this far into Prince’s career without ever seeing him play unaccompanied. One of the most well-worn tropes in rock music is when artists trot out solo acoustic renditions of their biggest hits. Did it ever even occur to us to crave the MTV Unplugged experience from such a revered performer? The “Piano and a Microphone” set-up is pretty much a complete 180 from Prince’s recent work; the loud, sludgy blues-rock of his 3RDEYEGIRL project was a mostly physical endeavor, and the songs Prince wrote for that group were either metaphorically or literally about sex. Alone at the piano, he was able to reveal a more delicate, sensitive side, and many of his lyrics turned inward and focused on matters of the heart. One of 3RDEYEGIRL’s more hard-driving songs, “The Unexpected,” was completely unraveled and turned into a compelling ballad, and the Musicology cut “Call My Name” became a spare, aching tribute to lovelorn vulnerability. After a particularly devastating rendition of “Purple Rain,” even Prince was overcome by the song’s unmistakable power; with the agony of his guttural screams and pleading falsetto still ringing in our ears, he leapt to his feet and ran off stage, then sheepishly climbed back up a few moments later. “I forget that music sometimes is emotional. I may have picked the wrong line-up of songs,” he confessed, clearly shaken. “I’ll do my best to get through it.” The performance space at Paisley Park was completely rearranged for this affair, with the giant glyph-decorated double doors that separate the main room from the smaller sound stage serving as the backdrop for Prince’s purple grand piano, and a kaleidoscope-like projection created a trippy, mesmerizing focal point. Not that we needed much direction on where to look; once Prince sashayed up to his piano bench and took a seat, our collective gaze was so intense that he commented, “I can feel your eyes, staring, looking like you wanna go somewhere.” Turning to the audience, he coyly asked, “You wanna go somewhere?” The entire performance felt like one long journey, with many of the songs flowing together in beautiful cascades of arpeggios, and it was hard not to get lost in the flutters and tones. Dressed head-to-toe in pink silk, Prince never once stopped moving, and one got the sense that he would be happy exploring the instrument and examining the insides of his songs in this stripped-down setting whether there was a room full of people watching him or not. Sometimes, when he would reach the end of a song he would jump up from his bench and pace around like a boxer. At another point, after the politically charged “Dear Mr. Man,” he stood up and pumped the edge of his piano with his fist, clearly buzzing from the energy he’d untapped. While Prince is obviously an arena-sized performer, there is something so enticing about the thought of this “Piano and a Microphone” show taking place in theaters or other small spaces where it can be absorbed in quiet reverie. As Prince himself said on Thursday night, these shows are all about freedom — and it was downright awe-inspiring to witness a master of his craft cut loose and start anew. Set list: The Unexpected The Love We Make Look at Me, Look at U 1000 X’s and O’s Call My Name Purple Rain The Dance Te Amo Corazon / A Million Days Nothing Compares 2 U How Come You Don’t Call Me Anymore? The Ladder I Wanna Be Your Lover Raspberry Beret Starfish and Coffee Sometimes it Snows in April Dear Mr. Man A Case of You (Joni Mitchell) Encore Kiss / Black Sweat Free Urself

I don't have the exact line up for the first show but from my memory it was mostly chronological. It was a story of his musical life starting at three years old. At seven sneaking on dad's piano playing the Batman theme and then played the music he heard on the radio growing up and did a couple Joni Mitchell songs including A Case of U Almost in this exact order but not quite, he played his own music after saying "l should write my own music" Here's what I remember. '79 Baby '80 I Wanna Be Your Lover '81 Dirty Mind '82 Do Me Baby '83 Something in the Water '83 Free 'How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore? '84 the Beautiful Ones '85 Raspberry Beret '85 Paisley Park '86 Venus de Milo '86 Sometimes it Snow in April '87 the Ballad of Dorothy Parker '87 Starfish and Coffee '88 Ana Stesia A couple songs from New album Baltimore Rock and Roll Love Affair A few more songs that I can't remember It was freaking Awsome! I couldn't have asked for anything to be different. But now that I hear the review for the second show, I wish I saw that one too.