TIME Prince, An Artist's Life 1958-2016


Book Description

In a career that spanned nearly four decades, Prince captivated generations of audiences with not only his talent for songwriting and lyricism but his outré style and electrifying performances. His albums—a category-defying blend of rock, R&B, soul, funk, jazz, hip-hop, disco and pop—have inspired countless artists and influenced the sound and trajectory of music for years to come. His hits have been the soundtrack for so many touchpoints across the lives of millions of fans, including “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” “Kiss,” “Little Red Corvette,” “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Raspberry Beret,” “1999” and the landmark song “Purple Rain,” from the soundtrack of his semi-autobiographical movie. Now, in a tribute to the late Grammy- and Oscar-winning legend, TIME presents a lavishly illustrated special edition tracing Prince’s life story and career. This commemorative edition combines classic and rarely seen photographs and text from the Time Inc. archives, as well as the story behind the movie Purple Rain; a look inside Prince’s famed home and studio, Paisley Park; his unprecedented approach to the “business of Prince”; exclusive tributes from Sheila E., Seal and Lenny Kravitz; and a rundown of 25 essential Prince songs plus a handful of lesser-known gems. Comprehensive and visually compelling, Prince: An Artist’s Life honors the life, legend and musical legacy of a creative icon and performer.







The Most Beautiful


Book Description

At the one-year anniversary of his death, legendary musician Prince's first wife shares a uniquely intimate, candid, and revelatory look inside the personal and professional life of one of the world's most beloved icons. In The Most Beautiful, a title inspired by the hit song Prince wrote about their legendary love story, Mayte Garcia for the first time shares the deeply personal story of their relationship and offers a singular perspective on the music icon and their world together: from their unconventional meeting backstage at a concert (and the long-distance romance that followed), to their fairy-tale wedding (and their groundbreaking artistic partnership), to the devastating losses that ultimately dissolved their romantic relationship for good. Throughout it all, they shared a bond more intimate than any other in Prince's life. No one else can tell this story or can provide a deeper, more nuanced portrait of Prince -- both the famously private man and the pioneering, beloved artist -- than Mayte, his partner during some of the most pivotal personal and professional years of his career. The Most Beautiful is a book that will be returned to for decades, as Prince's music lives on with generations to come.




Prince


Book Description

Featuring a foreword by Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. When Prince wanted to document his One Nite Alone tour in 2002, he turned to Afshin Shahidi. Again in 2004, he went along on Prince’s record breaking Musicology Tour. Afshin met Prince in 1989 and became his cinematographer and later his photographer. He was the photographer closest to Prince for the last fifteen years of Prince’s life. Afshin is the only photographer to shoot the legendary 3121 private parties in Los Angeles that became the most sought after invitations in Hollywood. Prince: A Private View compiles his work into a journey through Prince's extraordinary life. With many never-before-seen photos, this is the ultimate collection of – some intimate, some candid, some in concert – shots of Prince, but all are carefully directed in the artist-as-art style that we associate with him. Deep photo captions are brief, but complete stories about Prince's life at that moment - some are incisive, others are personal and even funny.




PEOPLE Prince


Book Description

The editors of PEOPLE Magazine present Prince for PEOPLE Prince.




Prince


Book Description

Prince Rogers Nelson wrote his first song at age seven, and soon taught himself to play the piano, drums, and guitar. In the early 1980s, Prince wondered how to make his music—a mix of pop, funk, soul, and R&B—more appealing to an audience that loved more mainstream rock shows. He ended up making Purple Rain, the hit movie and soundtrack that turned him into a megastar. Experimenting with style, genre, and society's expectations of him as an African-American performer, Prince defied labels. Follow Prince's journey to superstardom, and learn how this wildly talented, prolific, and often-controversial performer touched the hearts of fans around the world.




The Beautiful Ones


Book Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The brilliant coming-of-age-and-into-superstardom story of one of the greatest artists of all time, in his own words—featuring never-before-seen photos, original scrapbooks and lyric sheets, and the exquisite memoir he began writing before his tragic death NAMED ONE OF THE BEST MUSIC BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND THE GUARDIAN • NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD Prince was a musical genius, one of the most beloved, accomplished, and acclaimed musicians of our time. He was a startlingly original visionary with an imagination deep enough to whip up whole worlds, from the sexy, gritty funk paradise of “Uptown” to the mythical landscape of Purple Rain to the psychedelia of “Paisley Park.” But his most ambitious creative act was turning Prince Rogers Nelson, born in Minnesota, into Prince, one of the greatest pop stars of any era. The Beautiful Ones is the story of how Prince became Prince—a first-person account of a kid absorbing the world around him and then creating a persona, an artistic vision, and a life, before the hits and fame that would come to define him. The book is told in four parts. The first is the memoir Prince was writing before his tragic death, pages that bring us into his childhood world through his own lyrical prose. The second part takes us through Prince’s early years as a musician, before his first album was released, via an evocative scrapbook of writing and photos. The third section shows us Prince’s evolution through candid images that go up to the cusp of his greatest achievement, which we see in the book’s fourth section: his original handwritten treatment for Purple Rain—the final stage in Prince’s self-creation, where he retells the autobiography of the first three parts as a heroic journey. The book is framed by editor Dan Piepenbring’s riveting and moving introduction about his profound collaboration with Prince in his final months—a time when Prince was thinking deeply about how to reveal more of himself and his ideas to the world, while retaining the mystery and mystique he’d so carefully cultivated—and annotations that provide context to the book’s images. This work is not just a tribute to an icon, but an original and energizing literary work in its own right, full of Prince’s ideas and vision, his voice and image—his undying gift to the world.




The Rise of Prince: 1958-1988


Book Description

The Rise of Prince: 1958-1988 gives you a front-row seat to the dramatic events of iconic artist Prince Rogers Nelson's dazzling rise to fame. The book opens with the gripping tale of Prince's final months in 2016, and then transports you to the Minneapolis of his childhood to tell a story that is by turns tragic and triumphant. This book's gripping, 50-page prologue provides a nearly day-to-day account of the events that unfolded between November 2015 and April 21, 2016, when Prince tragically died at Paisley Park. The great distance traveled by Prince during his final months - tours of Australia and New Zealand, a funeral in the Bay Area for former muse and lover Denise Matthews, a tour of Canada, and a final return home - in some ways mirrored on a grand scale Prince's nomadic childhood, to which the book returns after detailing the events of 2016.Thanks to the many close friends and associates who shared their stories with the authors, The Rise of Prince will both enlighten and deeply move Prince's legions of fans. What is ultimately revealed is the very human story of how a young man from a small Midwestern city overcame adversity to achieve one of the greatest runs of creativity in pop history, along the way creating an unparalleled universe of side projects, alter egos, and a musical legacy for the ages.Alex Hahn, writing with co-author Laura Tiebert, brings his extraordinary experience to this book, which includes fully updated and expanded elements of his controversial 2003 biography Possessed, a sought-after collector's item that remains a classic of Prince literature.The book is enhanced by exclusive photos from rock photographer Paul Natkin, one of the most renowned photographers of Prince.




This Thing Called Life


Book Description

A warm and surprisingly real-life biography, featuring never-before-seen photos, of one of rock’s greatest talents: Prince. Neal Karlen was the only journalist Prince granted in-depth press interviews to for over a dozen years, from before Purple Rain to when the artist changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph. Karlen interviewed Prince for three Rolling Stone cover stories, wrote “3 Chains o’ Gold,” Prince’s “rock video opera,” as well as the star’s last testament, which may be buried with Prince’s will underneath Prince’s vast and private compound, Paisley Park. According to Prince's former fiancée Susannah Melvoin, Karlen was “the only reporter who made Prince sound like what he really sounded like.” Karlen quit writing about Prince a quarter-century before the mega-star died, but he never quit Prince, and the two remained friends for the last thirty-one years of the superstar’s life. Well before they met as writer and subject, Prince and Karlen knew each other as two of the gang of kids who biked around Minneapolis’s mostly-segregated Northside. (They played basketball at the Dairy Queen next door to Karlen’s grandparents, two blocks from the budding musician.) He asserts that Prince can’t be understood without first understanding ‘70s Minneapolis, and that even Prince’s best friends knew only 15 percent of him: that was all he was willing and able to give, no matter how much he cared for them. Going back to Prince Rogers Nelson's roots, especially his contradictory, often tortured, and sometimes violent relationship with his father, This Thing Called Life profoundly changes what we know about Prince, and explains him as no biography has: a superstar who calls in the middle of the night to talk, who loved The Wire and could quote from every episode of The Office, who frequented libraries and jammed spontaneously for local crowds (and fed everyone pancakes afterward), who was lonely but craved being alone. Readers will drive around Minneapolis with Prince in a convertible, talk about movies and music and life, and watch as he tries not to curse, instead dishing a healthy dose of “mamma jammas.”




Gold Experience


Book Description

Throughout the 1990s, Prince feuded with his record label, Warner Bros., over his rights as an independent recording artist—and made some of the most brilliant music of his career. During that time, Jim Walsh covered Prince for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and wrote about him passionately, thoughtfully, exhaustively. Here, in real time, is that coverage: a clip-by-clip look back at Prince in the ‘90s. Walsh’s newly unearthed interviews, essays, columns, and reviews make Gold Experience an essential slice of history for fans, scholars, and latecomers to the Minneapolis-born musical genius Prince Rogers Nelson (June 7, 1958–April 21, 2016). Join Walsh at the 1994 NBA All-Star game after party and release bash for the single “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.” Accompany him to the after-hours clubs Erotic City, Glam Slam, and, of course, Paisley Park. Meet Prince’s wife and bandmate Mayte (and while you’re at it, take in the wedding and reception). Enjoy a two-hour sit-down interview with Prince. Explore Prince’s veganism, talk to fans in line for a Target Center show, preview the “Jam of the Year” concert and check in at the after party. The passions and influences, from Mozart to funk godfather Larry Graham; the gigs and the Paisley Park garage sale; Walsh’s open letter to the artist and his reflections on religion and spirituality. This is Prince as few have seen him, reported as only Jim Walsh can: a portrait of the artist from a dizzying array of angles, captured in living color for all time.