On Parade

Parade was the soundtrack album to Prince‘s royally slated vanity project Under The Cherry Moon, an artily-filmed flop that aimed to evoke the golden era of 40s Hollywood; Art Deco, the French Riviera, silvery black and white tint ‘n all, but landed somewhat short of the mark. Over the course of what is a solid 8/10 album (insert the incoming sound of a million outraged Prince fans here) that flits between Mountains‘ on-the-one shuffling groove and the wonky jazz-inflected pop of Girls & Boys, the electro-funk of Kiss and the more standard perv-pop of New Position (he just about gets away with rhyming spunk with funk in the second verse) Prince runs the whole gamut of his flashy never-ending talent. He saves the very best til last though.

It’s the piano that does it. That and the sympathetically arpeggiated acoustic guitar. And the voice. The voices, actually. Three musicians, three voices, one great song. Coming at the end of Prince‘s eight album in as many years, Sometimes It Snows In April arrives quite unexpectedly, sent down from heaven to land as softly and prettily as a snowfall in April itself.

Prince – Sometimes It Snows In April

Sometimes It Snows In April is sparse, downbeat and fragile, the very opposite of the machine-powered dirty funk that precedes it. It’s just Prince with Wendy & Lisa, making what would turn out to be their last appearance on a Prince album. It’s the perfect way to bow out too; tinkle some high up the board keys, breathe some airy vocals across the top and allow the boss to take the song where it needs to go.

It sounds almost played and recorded on-the-hoof. Unsurprisingly, Prince’s vocal is spectacular, flitting effortlessly through the octaves from whispered restraint to skyscraping falsetto, his phrasing floating around the melody with relaxed, close-miked ease.

The guitar is sparse because the player (Prince? Wendy?) isn’t yet exactly sure of what to play. The piano (Prince? Lisa?) is similarly bare-boned. There are no drums, no electric keys, little in the way of bass. It’s Prince in the wee small hours, his musical sidekicks at his beck and call, just out of bed and jamming it all out beside him in their nightwear, adding their reverb-drenched backing vocals at the crucial moments. By the third chorus, just as the three have found their sweet spot, they bring it all to a close. “All good things, they say, never last.” Given the girls’ tenure in Prince’s backing band it’s the perfect refrain.

At one point the song was given a full-blown, power ballad orchestral make-over, but that version remains, alongside gazillions of other delights, locked tightly in the Prince vault. Someone should dial in 1999 and I reckon the door’ll swing wide open.

Anyway. The lyric of Sometimes It Snows… relates to Christopher Tracy, the lead character in the movie – played by Prince, of course – a flamboyant, flapper-era gigolo – of course! – who gads about the south of France swindling outrageously wealthy French women. Of course. In the movie – spoiler alert – Prince’s character dies and the song soundtracks the moment in the film when his former friends and lovers are reminiscing on how great he was. If you can see past the ego and the massive heid (and who wouldn’t have a massive heid if they too were as groovy and talented and attractive as Prince?) you can’t help but think it’s just about the most perfect song Prince wrote. A bold claim, but I’ll fight you for it. Or fight U 4 it, as the man himself wouldn’t have said.

There’s been no snow this April. Just splitting sunshine, shorts on and barbecues roaring. Another indicator of the unusual times we’re living through, as unpredictable as Prince at the end of Parade but nowhere near as pretty.