With the release of a new Prince demos collection, collaborators look back on the hits he passed along
was like nobody I had ever worked with before,” says one of his longtime recording engineers, Peggy McCreary. “He never explainedMcCreary, whose credits also include monolithic albums like Van Halen’s self-titled debut and Toto’s, worked with the artist from 1982 to 1987, the peak of his fame. You would think she would have known him well, but she says getting close to him was an impossible task.
Now a recently released compilation album reveals some of the secrets of how he operated during that pivotal time.contains demo recordings he cut for his protégées and friends — Vanity 6, Apollonia 6, the Time, Sheila E. — songs he offered up to unexpected stars like Kenny Rogers and the odd rough masterpiece .
But regardless of whether he was writing songs for other people for financial gain, this was also a period where Prince was especially creative. McCreary remembers that Prince would often finish recording a song, top to bottom, in a day or two max. “We’d just do it straight through,” she says. “That’s just the way he worked. Totally different than anybody I’d worked with before. He was so prolific. He just had so much music coming out of him at all times.
“I wasn’t starstruck,” she says. “When I first met him, I told him I was mad because our stage was too small.” She was already a model and an actress when she entered Prince’s orbit as a replacement for the overtly provocative singer Vanity in. She discovered her character fully formed in the pages of the movie script, and she embraced it.
“I was friends with Susanna Hoffs, so I gave Prince the tape of the Bangles’ ‘Hero Takes a Fall,'” she says. “I said, ‘These girls, they’re amazing. They sound like the Beatles. You’ve got to do something with them.’ He says, ‘What about “Manic Monday”?’ I said, ‘Let them take it. They’re amazing.'”
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