463: Heaven

Unreleased (1985)
“Heaven will be here on earth” Prince sings on the opening line of this unreleased track and as the drum machine trudges along, gazing downwards, you don’t expect it to arrive any day soon. It’s curiously non-celestial sounding even if the whole message of the song is of a telluric paradise – Belinda Carlisle’s heaven was on earth and it didn’t shy away from an uplifting key change. Prince’s monosyllabic vocal delivery spirals downward and if it were to soundtrack any afterlife it would be the Inuit’s perpetual summer of Adlivun, deep in the bowels of the earth, caribou boiling on a permanent flame, sanctuary from the ravens and endless void of the sky. That’s not to say Heaven isn’t a great track though and the instrumental second half does justice to the subject matter with synths gamboling and darting over the temporal beat, playing at being harps and organs. Without the sobering vocals weighing the song down cherubs are free to jay-walk through towns and crash through cornfields, creating crop circles with choreographed games of kiss chase. Whippets set loose in a pastoral happy hunting ground.