For You (1978)
Prince’s debut album followed a template he used throughout his career, with clearly defined ballads, a rock track, and a sex song. While he needed little encouragement for the first two genres, the raunchy stuff had to be coaxed out by early producer, Chris Moon. This pre-For You collaborator had struck a deal with Prince, gifting him free studio-time in exchange for setting some of Moon’s lyrics to music. Moon worked in advertising and thought in terms of product (Prince) and audience (teenage girls). Packaging the product up with enough sexual suggestion to keep it on the right side of the radio censors became his marketing strategy, pinned on what he called his anchor song, Soft and Wet. Here he introduced the youngster to the double entendre, although somewhere along the way Moon’s lyrics referencing Angora fur and the Aegean Sea became “hey, lover, I got a sugarcane that I want to lose in you”. The Padawan was yet to master the art of innuendo. The music is less (soft and) wet behind its ears though and easily the album highlight. It became Prince’s first single, released on his 20th birthday – or his 18th birthday if you swallowed the record label propaganda – and is a funky, panting puppy eager to have its belly scratched. On the next album, he’ll push the envelope further, with the bolder, stripped-back Sexy Dancer out-heavy-breathing Soft and Wet in a similar way to how Bambi out-rocks I’m Yours. His technique may get better with age but there’ll always be something special about the first time.
Tag: For You
175: I’m Yours
For You (1978)
Prince’s first album-closing track is a belter. Until this point on For You he’s been prevented from releasing his inner rock demon but the shackles come off for the finale. If the guitar solo on My Love is Forever was a warning shot, then I’m Yours is Prince’s Butch Cassidy moment. From the off he comes out guns blazing, razing the neat Stevie Wonder-shaped box the marketing department were crafting, with a scream that Robert Plants his flag in the ashes declaring a new king has been born.
300: Just As Long As We’re Together
For You (1978)
Just As Long As We’re Together is the Bayeux tapestry of early Prince history. An illuminating trip through his initial studio excursions. The song started life in 1976 as an instrumental called Jelly Jam and ended up as his second single and (running time-wise) a sixth of his debut album. For two years it was constantly rerecorded, increasing in size and complexity with each iteration, and was used as a showreel of the youngster’s virtuoso chaos magick to secure a record deal. He even rerecorded it live in front of record executives to prove his one-teen-band status. As his foot-in-the-door, it may be the most important song in his entire canon and although it was soon eclipsed by more natural and mature displays of his talent, Prince greedily piles his plate with enough disco chops and funky licks to feed Earth, Wind and Fire for a lifetime.
336: In Love
For You (1978)
After the rarefied air of the opening track, the next three songs on For You turn aquatic. In Love is a flooded basement of sequins and mirrorballs, squelching along like Soft and Wet with water-wings. Prince sings about drowning in your love and inaugurates the highly suggestive “river” metaphor that gets a lot of purple mileage over the years (often in other ‘love’-titled songs of his: My Love is Forever; When 2 R in Love; Love 2 the 9s). The deep, synthy waters flow smoothly into the aforementioned Soft and Wet and by the time we get to track five, Crazy You, the floods subside and the percussion is left to drip dry in the sun.
351: Crazy You
For You (1978)
This short breath of a song could fill albums, oceans, lifetimes, but when you’ve said all you need in the first ninety seconds, why spin it out? Keep the listener wanting more, or at least craving silence after the fade out so they can internally loop the acoustic guitar and water-drums, eyes shut, as hours pass, seasons cycle and civilisations fall. That laser you hear? It could be your ringtone or a collapsing galaxy. Nothing matters within the cosmic egg of Crazy You.
417: My Love is Forever
For You (1978)
A song steeped in seventies sheen and Stevie panache, with tantalising glimpses of the future artist peeking through the mirrorball bokeh. There’s the multi-tracked vocals and a synth solo signalling the Minneapolis Sound he would later pioneer, but it’s the electric guitar that really imprints – imprince – his mark. An unconventional addition for the genre but more candidly emotive than anything the lyrics could muster. The words were not even Prince’s. Borrowed largely from a song a former producer had written, they later resulted in litigation and an out of court settlement. But they’re the weakest element of My Love is Forever and as meaningful as the “doo doo doo”s in the refrain. Aural texture. So play the song over the sound of running taps as you pour yourself a bubble bath and write ‘DEVOTION’ in reverse writing in the bathroom mirror. It’s music to soundtrack pampering and puppy love and the feeling there’s actually nothing conceivably terrible in this world. Innocent fun. Can you believe only two years separate this release from the wedding-gown-ruining Head?
437: For You
For You (1978)
In the year of my birth, on this debut track, Prince gifts us the words “all of this and more is for you, with love, sincerity and deepest care, my life with you I share” and so begins a cyclonic 38 year solo career that ends with the resolute parting words “that’s it!” on Big City. Sung with the tongues of men and of angels it sounds like a million demos played at once, revealing a platonic solid of pure devotion. An ascending salutation to the heavens heralding the birth of a new god (Prince, not me). A twee-less Free Design harmonising with innocent Sirens. For You (too early for princebonics to be called 4 U) is the perfect opener. Light to Had U‘s shade. An embarkation point into his mountainous discography and beyond the fixed stars. It would also become a popular live intro of his, particularly during 1990’s Nude and 2015’s HitnRun tours, with the latter intro even being released in the form of the track Million $ Show causing both his first and penultimate albums to start with this Elysian acapella. Part of me would be happy for them all to.
464: Baby
For You (1978)
The song that made (he would say enslaved) Prince as it was one of the two demo tracks that secured his first Warner Bros record deal. He was very precious about this track, refusing to sell the rights to it to Tiffany Entertainment while still unsigned and he carried it around for so long that it became an impenetrable polished pebble. A sheer glass cliff-face that is difficult to get a toehold into. The lyrics offer a way in and are surprisingly sophisticated for a For You track, describing how, despite being careful, Prince has gotten his lover pregnant and is worrying about how he can financially support his family but will stand by them regardless. Not your average teen R&B fare then. In fact Prince was advised to stop singing about pregnancy if he wanted to appeal to his core market of young girls and the next time he was to explore this subject (Sign O’ the Times’ proposed baby Nate notwithstanding) was two decades later when he actually was an expectant father.
485: So Blue
For You (1978)
An innocent and naive soul-purge hailing from a time before Prince was marketed as a sexual peacock. So Blue is both timid and self assured. It’s the first b-side of Prince’s career, being the flip to Soft & Wet, and the lyrics can basically be summed up with a colon, an open parenthesis and a sun emoji (if he had called it Sad & Sunny and made it an instrumental you would lose nothing of the lyrical meaning). However, the music is a delicate lacewing. A fluttering reminder of the heart wrenching melodrama of gauche self absorption played by a teenage prodigy. The Shangri Las without the dark drama and free of any studio svengali shadow tainting it with their nostalgias and olds. Teen self-pity has never sounded so pure and beautiful.