Some thoughts on 5 of my favorite Prince songs

Confession: I was never that big of a Prince fan at his peak of popularity in the ‘80s. I watched MTV incessantly, so I had plenty of exposure to most of his big hits. But I was a repressed small-town midwestern Protestant white kid. I thought it was cool when I learned he was from Minneapolis, but I didn’t see that connection as an opportunity to liberate myself from my fear of everything; I was still freaked out by his uninhibited, guiltless sexuality. That’s probably the biggest reason I didn’t pay very much attention to him, if I’m honest with myself about who I was as a 10-year-old.

But even though I didn’t consider myself a fan, and never owned any of his music until I was much (much) older, I still heard his music all the time. Because once MTV realized it was not only OK but necessary for them to play black artists, Prince was on there a lot. Videos like “1999” and “When Doves Cry” are burned into my memory. And honestly, even if I was a little sheepish about it, I liked them. As time went on, my appreciation grew. And so, as my small tribute to the Artist whose music touched so many people, here’s my list of 5 Prince songs. Not necessarily my “top 5” Prince songs, but 5 that have made a big impression on me, in the order that they did.

“1999” from 1999 (1982)

This song was my introduction to Prince. It was probably 1983 when I first saw it, so I would have been 9. I was fascinated by this song and the video. As a kid, I was always interested in the future. I wanted to get there, fast, whether it was a paradise or (as this song suggested) something more ominous. I’ve never paid as much attention to lyrics as to music, but the lyrics of this song definitely got my attention even back then. It was my first exposure to the idea of an apocalypse. And it made a huge impression on me that Prince would sing about confidently, defiantly celebrating in the face of doom. The other thing that impressed me about the video was that it showed Prince’s band performing, and he had women in the band. The music industry is still far too male-dominated today, but back then I didn’t even think to question things like that. So to see a band with both men and women, playing music together, struck me as something unique.

“When Doves Cry” from Purple Rain (1984)

Whoa. This video. The Rorschach-like mirror image effect had me transfixed from the first moment I saw it, but what really struck me was the sound of this song. It was sparse and futuristic and weird. I’d never heard anything like it, and probably still haven’t. As a kid, this was definitely my favorite Prince song. And it was made even better for me as a nerdy college student in the early ‘90s when it was referenced in a Simpsons episode where Milhouse meets his Shelbyville doppelganger.

[Much time passes…]

“Let’s Work” from Controversy (1981)

I spent most of my adult life not really thinking all that much about Prince. As I became more of an accomplished musician myself, my appreciation of his immense skills grew considerably, but I still was not really that engaged with his music. Then, one day in 2010 I was listening to The Current on the radio, and this incredibly funky song came on. I wasn’t really familiar with any of Prince’s pre-1999 work, so I had no idea what it was but I thought, “Oh, that sounds like Prince. I wonder if this is something new.” (Yeah, I’m not proud of that… but I do think it shows how we’ve come full circle that the dry, immediate sound of Prince’s early ‘80s recordings sounds contemporary again today.) I fired up Soundhound on my iPhone to identify the track, and before the song had even finished playing, I’d purchased and downloaded the entire Controversy album. Thus began my exploration of Prince’s early work. I bought all of his first four albums and listened to them — especially Dirty Mind and Controversy — incessantly for the next several weeks. Finally, at the age of 36, I really “got it”. Prince was a visionary genius, virtuoso multi-instrumentalist, and all-around legend. And he was from Minneapolis and stayed here.

“Uptown” from Dirty Mind (1980)

As I delved into the early work of Prince following my “Let’s Work” epiphany, I realized that Dirty Mind was really the album that defined Prince, the Minneapolis sound, 1980s pop music, everything. “Uptown” quickly became one of my favorite tracks on the album. I loved the upbeat funk groove, and the fact that it was a song about a neighborhood I used to live in. In 2011 I decided to record an album as a tribute to Minneapolis, the city where I was born and have spent most of my adult life. I had to include a song about Uptown, and I took inspiration from this Prince track.

“When You Were Mine” from Dirty Mind (1980)

The more I’ve listened to Dirty Mind (which has become my favorite Prince album), the more I’ve grown to love this song. It’s really kind of a weird song. It’s very poppy, with catchy hooks, but it is driven by strummed chords on an electric bass. And the lyrics seem, at first, like a typical pop song about a lost love, but as you listen closely you realize there’s a bizarre undercurrent to the story they tell that can only come from Prince.

I never was the kind to make a fuss
When he was there
Sleeping in between the two of us

Wait, what?

I figured my appreciation of this song was a bit unusual; it wasn’t a single, it was from before he really hit big. But in the days following his death, I discovered on Twitter that a lot of his fans cite it as their favorite Prince song. To me, it kind of symbolizes what Prince was all about: showing us that we’re all a little weird, that’s OK, and we’re not alone.

Star Wars: The Farce of Waiting

I did not see Star Wars last night.

That was not how it was supposed to be. I was supposed to see Star Wars last night.

Never tell me the odds.

Oh, sure, it was kind of a last-minute thing. Although I had seen The Phantom Menace on opening day, and even went to a midnight screening of Attack of the Clones when it was released, I just did not expect to see The Force Awakens for at least a week.

I didn’t even really give it much thought. A midnight screening would be impossible for my kids (ages 9 and 12) on a school night, and besides, they’re both already going to see it next Tuesday on a group outing with their swim team. So I just figured SLP and I would see it, eventually, sometime over the holiday break.

But then yesterday morning I found out screenings were actually going to start at 7 PM, and I realized we all could go to see it on opening night… if I could find tickets.

We live in the city. There’s a movie theater two blocks from our house. It’s a 1950s single-screen, restored to its original midcentury appearance. But it’s a second-run theater, so Star Wars will maybe be there in, like, February. No, for a premiere like this, the proper experience is at a suburban megaplex. But which one?

I fired up Fandango on my iPhone. AMC Southdale? Sold out. St. Louis Park, Roseville, Eagan… sold out. Finally I found some tickets available for an 8:30 showing in Inver Grove Heights. Purchased!

Oh, wait… crap! I bought tickets for a 3D showing. I hate 3D! Whew. You can get a refund. OK, now just to find another 2D screening… yes! The Paragon Odyssey 15 IMAX in Burnsville, Minnesota. (You’ll see why I am calling them out so specifically in a bit. They deserve it.)

The Paragon in Burnsville had several tickets still available for the 8:05 screening. Purchased!

You do have your moments. Not many, but you do have them.

With tickets acquired, I hatched a master plan to surprise the kids. We would be leaving for the movie directly from their swim practice. When the car turned the wrong way to go home, and one of the kids asked where we were going, I would, right on cue, turn on the car stereo, where the opening trumpet blast of the Star Wars Main Theme would be playing.

In my experience, there’s no such thing as luck.

Things started to unravel early. Mid-afternoon, our 9-year-old daughter called from school, sobbing. She had eaten too much for lunch, and was immediately thereafter hit in the stomach with a football on the playground. After some hesitation, I resorted to revealing the surprise as a way to comfort her. Which it did. But now the surprise was 50% blown. Oh well, at least we could still surprise our 12-year-old son…

…who came home from school brooding. He didn’t want to go to swim team, for whatever reason. Turns out he had not really eaten anything all day because the school lunch was “soooo disgusting!!!!” So in an effort to lighten his mood, we told him the surprise too.

If you’re saying that coming here was a bad idea, I’m starting to agree with you.

Burnsville is an outer suburb, about 30 minutes’ drive from our house. We arrived at the Paragon at 7:10. Plenty of time to settle in, get some food, and wait for the show to start. No stress, because the Paragon has assigned seating.

We entered the lobby of the theater. It was quiet. Too quiet. Oh, there were people around, but not the endless queues of plastic lightsaber wielding Jedi knights and cloaked Sith lords I expected. We walked directly to a self-service ticket machine, punched in our confirmation code, got our tickets and entered the theater.

I had never been to the Paragon before. Nor, in fact, to any of the new-style contemporary megaplexes with opulent lobbies, beer and wine, and decadent reclining seats. I had been alarmed when I picked our seats from the online seating chart that we appeared to be seeing the movie in a tiny theater with only five rows of seats. But it turned out to be an average-sized megaplex screen. It was the seats that were out of scale.

So, you’d think this would be an amazing experience, right?

Our troubles started almost immediately. Though the lobby of the theater is huge and ornate, once you’ve handed over your ticket stub you’re thrust into a cramped and poorly laid-out concession area. One that was littered with dropped popcorn kernels and straw wrappers, sticky self-service soda fountains and empty napkin dispensers.

We ordered buttered popcorn for the kids, and two cheese pizzas for us. We were told it would be a few minutes for the pizzas, so we all headed to the door of screen 14.

How you get so big eating food of this kind?

A few minutes later I went back for the pizzas. At least, I think they were pizzas. I saw two small, doughy discs sitting on the end of the conveyor belt of the pizza oven and pointed them out to the cashier. I actually said, “Those are my pizzas… at least I think they’re pizzas. Or are they pretzels?” I really couldn’t tell.

I expressed that sentiment while eating a Papa John’s single-serving pizza at a Twins game this past summer. Last night the Paragon in Burnsville proved me wrong. It’s hard to explain what was wrong with the pizza. I’ve never had anything like it. It was, nominally, a pizza. Crust on the bottom, tomato-based sauce in the middle, a vaguely cheese-like substance on top. Except… the cheese wasn’t melted. At all. It’s not that it was cold. It wasn’t mozzarella, or any other kind of cheese that melts. If it was actually cheese. It might have been parmesan. Nonetheless, that was our dinner, so we ate it.

I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

While we were waiting outside screen 14 for the crew to finish cleaning it, SLP and the kids overheard the manager on a walkie-talkie saying something about the 8:00 screening being canceled. [Foreshadowing.]

Passably sated, and more than comfortably seated, we waited out the remaining half hour to showtime, enduring the usual barrage of annoying, blurry, up-scaled TV commercials and mix of hideous versions of Christmas songs. My favorite love-to-hate-it recording was Darius Rucker’s rendition of “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.”

None of that mattered though, because we were going to see STAR WARS. I passed the time on social media, posting photos on Instagram, clever quips on Twitter, and exchanging eager comments with friends on Facebook.

8:05 came. And went. At around 8:12, the manager came in and made an announcement. For reasons she only vaguely alluded to, something about the movie being very popular and them having added more showings, our 8:05 screening was actually not going to be able to start until around 10 PM. “It might be 5 minutes to 10, it might be 5 after 10. But it will be around 10:00,” she said. She offered full refunds of our concessions, free passes to future IMAX screenings, and the option to stick around until 10:00 or get our tickets refunded.

People were… mildly perturbed. This is Minnesota, after all.

We discussed it briefly, and decided to wait it out. By this point it was almost 8:30, so I figured another hour and a half would go by quickly. Besides, there was beer.

Did I mention there was beer?

I headed back to the concession stand, and returned with a Fat Tire in each hand. By this point, only one other person besides us was still waiting in the theater. Most of them, not living a half hour away, had decided to go home and come back later, or perhaps hang out in the mezzanine-level bar. (What kind of movie theater is this, anyway? Are we in Amsterdam? Am I Vincent Vega? Sorry… wrong movie.)

After maybe another half hour passed, we decided to check out the arcade. I’m not talking about the typical, pathetic movie theater arcade of the ’90s or early 2000s… two dilapidated arcade cabinets, one of which is unplugged. This was a real arcade, with a claw machine, skee-ball, air hockey, all of your modern video game cabinets and, first thing you see, a combo Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga machine. We had an air hockey tournament and I set a new personal high score in Ms. Pac-Man, and before we knew it, it was 9:30. We headed back to our seats.

It’s a trap!

9:55. 10:00. 10:05. At 10:10, an usher started walking the aisles with a small bucket, and handed each of us a packet of Care Bears-branded fruit snacks. (Really? You make us wait 2 hours and the best you can do is give us the crap even 3-year-olds won’t touch?) Then the manager returned, to inform us that the movie was “here” and would be starting soon. 10:20. 10:30.

At 10:40 I went to the bathroom. Fruit snack boy was now stationed at the entrance with a giant plastic tub full of popcorn and a stack of bags. “I’ve never had to do anything like this,” he said. When I got to the men’s room, I noticed someone had spit chewing tobacco into the urinal. Nice. (And not really relevant to the story at all. I’m just trying to add some local color.)

When I got back, the manager had returned. She informed us that the copy they were setting up on our screen was “at 92%” — whatever that meant — and would be a little while longer. She added, disconcertingly, that there were several seats available for the showing on screen 9 that was going to start at 10:55. Several people left. SLP and the kids stayed behind while I went to screen 9 to see what was available. The only open seats, together, were… the entire front row. With good reason. I sat in one of the seats to test it out, and even in the reclined position it would require craning your neck. I decided we should stay put. I went back to deliver the bad news.

They told me they fixed it! I trusted them. It’s not my fault!

At 11:00, the realization set in that, even if the movie started reasonably soon, it wouldn’t be done until nearly 1:30 in the morning, which meant we wouldn’t get home until at least 2:00, and the kids had school in the morning. It was a split decision, but we finally resigned ourselves that this just wasn’t happening.

I scarcely spoke a word on the long drive home. I was fuming. I hatched a plan. Once I was settled into bed, I would erase every tweet, every Facebook post, every Instagram photo I had posted pertaining to Star Wars. I would forget that this night had happened. I even deleted all of the photos I took at the theater from my phone. They’re gone. Erased… from existence. (Sorry… wrong movie. Again.)

It was partly my fury over how we had been treated. Partly my frustration at having gotten so pumped up to see this movie, spending five hours in total in that effort, and leaving with nothing. But the last straw was a reply to my tweet about my phone being down to 9%. Someone I only know through Twitter replied, in effect, that it was what I deserved for keeping my phone on during the movie, to which I had replied in fuming all-caps that the movie hadn’t even started and I had been sitting in the theater for three hours. I blocked her. And some rando who follows her who liked her tweet.

But still, I woke up this morning almost as frustrated as I felt last night.

The 92%.

It was the 92% that stuck with me. What the hell was that about? I don’t know much about how digital projection in movie theaters works. I do know that movies are distributed on hard drives now, with encryption, but I really had no idea what the process was. I had to find out, so I could make sense of what exactly was happening that took so long last night, and hopefully find some closure to the whole experience. To Wikipedia!

This is some rescue.

Movies are delivered to theaters on what is known as a Digital Cinema Package (DCP). This is often a physical hard drive, which can contain as much as 300 GB of data. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to copy 300 GB of data from an external hard drive over USB, but… it takes a while. Further explanation from Wikipedia:

Regardless of how the DCP arrives it first needs to be copied onto the internal hard-drives of the server, usually via a USB port, a process known as “ingesting”. DCPs can be, and in the case of feature films almost always are, encrypted. The necessary decryption keys are supplied separately, usually as email attachments and then “ingested” via USB. Keys are time limited and will expire after the end of the period for which the title has been booked. They are also locked to the hardware (server and projector) that is to screen the film, so if the theatre wishes to move the title to another screen or extend the run a new key must be obtained from the distributor.

Italics mine. That is the key to the whole thing. I’m not sure if the scheduled 8:05 showing on screen 14 ever actually took place last night. I don’t know if the management knew it wasn’t going to happen, and were just stringing us along, or if they really believed they were going to work out a solution. But the level of incompetence I witnessed may well have carried over into the projection room.

The “92%” referred, I am assuming, to the progress in copying the movie from the external hard drive to the server’s internal drive, a necessary step to screen it. However, they also needed a new decryption key for this specific projector, and who knows if they actually had that or not? They had added these extra screenings at the last minute. Whether they were just hoping they’d get the keys from the distributor in time, or they had no clue that they’d even need new ones… I don’t know.

All I know is, I did not see Star Wars last night.

Tips on saving vector images from Adobe Illustrator for SVG web use

With Internet Explorer 8 end of life coming on January 12, all kinds of new possibilities are opening up to us web developers who can finally start making use of technologies that have had wide support in modern browsers for years, but that we were reluctant to embrace because of the need for IE8-friendly workarounds.

For me, one of those things is SVG images. In recent years, especially since Responsive Web Design (and high-resolution displays) took off, I’ve been receiving web designs more and more in Illustrator format, rather than Photoshop. It’s great to get these assets as vectors that I can scale and size as I need in my build-out of high-res, responsive websites. But until now I had still been pulling vector assets over into Photoshop and producing multiple carefully-sized versions of things like logos and custom icons.

Now, however, SVG is a viable — in fact, preferable, given its flexibility and smaller file size (plus the ability to hack the XML code right in the image files themselves) — alternative to multiple PNGs of every image.

The thing is, while I have been using Photoshop extensively for over 20 years, I’ve never really gotten the hang of Illustrator. I know just enough to go into an Illustrator file, pull out the assets I need, and try not to screw anything else up in the process. That’s what this article is for.

Over the past week I have pulled a number of vector assets out of Illustrator designs as SVGs for a couple of projects, and I’m starting to get the process down. Here’s what you need to know.

The Steps

1. Select the object you want to make into an SVG. Most of the time designers will have grouped the pieces of the object together, so just a single click on the object will select it. Make careful note of the blue outlines to be sure everything you want is selected (and maybe even more importantly, that nothing else you don’t want is). You can also click and drag to select all objects within an area, or use the Layers palette to select the elements. This can be tedious, but be sure you’ve got what you need — and only what you need — highlighted. Once it’s selected, copy it to your clipboard.

2. Create a new document in Illustrator. Default settings are fine. Once the blank document appears, paste in the copied object. It should appear centered in the document. There should be a ton of space around it. That’s good. Since we’re dealing with vector art, scale is irrelevant. You just want to make sure everything fits within the boundaries of the document. (The “artboard” if you’re familiar with Illustrator speak.) Keep the object selected (blue outline). If you deselected it, just Select All.

3. Shrink the artboard to fit the object. If you don’t do this, you’ll end up with a bunch of blank space within the defined dimensions of the image and it will be impossible to work with. Good thing it’s super easy. With the entire object selected, go to Object > Artboards > Fit to Selected Art and you’ll get a perfect container.

4. IMPORTANT! If there are transparency effects within the object, you need to flatten it now. A lot of the time you can skip this step. But if you do, you may find that parts of the design are missing in the resulting SVG. I found it’s easy to forget this; I don’t find it intuitive that this would get lost in the SVG conversion. So go to Object > Flatten Transparency… Review the settings here to ensure you’re happy with them (sorry, I don’t have a lot of guidance here), and click OK Your image should not look different. If it does, undo, and repeat with different settings in the Flatten Transparency dialog.

5. Save. There’s no “Save for Web” option for SVG. Just regular ol’ “Save As”. Be sure to set the Format menu to SVG (svg). You could try compressed, but really SVGs are pretty small anyway, and I like to keep the code editable so I can tinker with it if needed. (Changing the color fill, for instance.) Once again there are a ton of settings presented in the SVG Options dialog, but I’ve found the default settings seem to work fine. (One change I have made is to set CSS Properties to Presentation Attributes but I’m not entirely sure yet what difference it makes.)

That’s it! You should now have an SVG ready for placement using an <img> tag, or as background-image in CSS. Just note that CSS treats SVG images a bit differently than regular JPEGs and PNGs, so you may need to add a few extra properties to keep the SVGs within their container elements in your page.

Covering Kraftwerk: the process (part 2)

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the first steps in my process of recording an EP of Kraftwerk covers using solely the Pocket Operator series of micro synthesizers.

This weekend I returned to the project. I am not yet recording anything with the Pocket Operators themselves, but I am continuing the process of recording rough versions of these covers using software instruments in Logic Pro X. There are three reasons behind doing this:

1. Learning the basic structure of each instrumental part in the songs.

2. Building my overall arrangement of each piece, so I have a framework to work from as I record the Pocket Operator parts.

3. Determining which keys to transpose the songs into (since the Pocket Operators only have a 2-octave diatonic scale and can’t play chromatic notes), and having recorded versions of the parts in the new key to work from on the Pocket Operators.

As of today I have the rough mixes from Logic Pro X of all 4 tracks, so my next step is to actually get the Pocket Operators going and start recording the real parts.

The links below are rough MP3 versions of these Logic Pro X arrangements. None of the sounds you hear will be on the final versions; these are simply guide tracks for me to use in recording the real parts. Also, there are a few “open” sections in the middle of the songs (especially “Ruckzuck” and “Tour de France”) where I’ve left room for additional improvisations or manipulations.

I did not try to perfectly reproduce every part, or exactly follow the structure of each song. These are my interpretations and I’ve taken some liberties — especially with “Ruckzuck”, since I’ve never been a huge fan of the aimless noodling of the improv section in it, nor of its ever-increasing tempo.

1. Ruckzuck

2. The Man-Machine

3. Pocket Calculator

4. Tour de France, Étape 1



I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to try to record any vocals. But I think if there’s anyone whose singing I can handle imitating, it’s Ralf Hütter’s.

Top 5 Albums of 2015: The Contenders

Yes… it’s that time again. Time for me to reveal how limited my (financial, at least) exposure to this year’s new music is by publishing my list of the contenders in my top albums of year list.

It has felt like this year, more than most, I have really not paid much attention to what’s going on in the world of current music. My biggest musical obsession of the year has been listening to and collecting vinyl, even. How out of touch!

Anyway… here are the albums and EPs released in 2015 that I have purchased, and that are therefore contenders for this year’s list.

Adele • 25
Ariel Pocock • Touchstone
The Bird and the Bee • Recreational Love
Bjork • Vulnicura
Joe Satriani • Shockwave Supernova
King Crimson • Live at The Orpheum (Los Angeles 2014)
Magma • Slag tanz
Maria Schneider • The Thompson Fields
Mark Ronson • Uptown Special
Monolake • Icarus Alto and D E C (EPs)
Room 34 • Half Life (yeah, that’s me)
Steven Wilson • Hand. Cannot. Erase.
Sufjan Stevens • Carrie & Lowell
The Decemberists • What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World
Toro Y Moi • What For?

Seriously, that’s it? Apparently. And what’s even more ludicrous, there are at least three albums in the list I haven’t listened to at all (Bjork, Magma, Sufjan Stevens, The Decemberists), and a couple more that I’ve only listened to once or twice (Adele, Ariel Pocock, Maria Schneider, Mark Ronson). With the Adele album I have an excuse — it’s only been out for 5 days. And Mark Ronson… well, I’ve only listened to the full album twice, I believe (back to back on the day I got it), but I’ve had second-hand exposure to “Uptown Funk” on an almost daily basis since early summer.

As usual I’ve highlighted in bold the five most likely to make the final, sad list.

Update, January 12, 2016: Well, 2015 came and went and I never actually created my final “top 5” list. At this point I don’t think I will bother, because: a) I’m not very enthusiastic about this list; b) no one reads this stuff anyway; and c) 2016 has already obliterated 2015 musically: