52 Weeks Of Prince: Week 38

2002 Part 2/ 2003: Part 1: Xpectation

New Directions In Music

One of the great joys of the Music Club years is that Prince was releasing music the way fans like me always wished he would: frequently, and with a diversity that represented the breadth of his ability and interests. The great frustration of these years is that these projects came together so quickly and were released with so little fanfare to such small audiences no one seems to know about them regardless of their quality, their innovation, or their place in Prince’s discography. They are routinely relegated to the low-to-middle ranks in online “all albums rated” clickbait articles – but I would argue that has more to do with their obscurity than their quality. I'm going to talk about one such obscure work this week; an odd album that probably wouldn’t have ever been released if not for the NPG Music Club.

Since the early 80’s Prince spoke of fantasies of being able to get his music to people as fast as he could create it. The NPG Music Club finally made that a reality. Everything was basically self-contained at Paisley Park: recording, distribution and even art direction, all under one roof and able to be sent to the audience as soon as it was ready. “The audience” in this case being Prince’s most die hard listeners, the people who would want to hear him go out on limbs artistically. So on January 1, 2003 Prince crawled out on on a limb by dropping a fully instrumental digital album called Xpectation to the Club.

It is completely unlike anything else in his discography, but because it was a Club exclusive release, there was no public attention paid to it. No critics took any notice, and nobody investigated the process of recording the album or asked the questions that would normally be asked when a major artist suddenly decided to release such a radical left turn. Questions like: What motivated him to create an album of abstract instrumentals? Would he have bothered to release this music at all without the outlet of the Music Club? What kind of music is this supposed to be anyway?  No, really. I would love an answer to that last one, because at times It feels like a collaboration between Brian Eno and Yanni. That makes it sound terrible, but whatever odd permutation of atmospheric muzak this is, it scratches an itch for me. It is an eccentric and unique atmospheric album that has a permanent place on my collection of albums I play while writing.

What Do We Know?

There isn’t much to tell about the recording of Xpectation. Some time in the Fall of 2001, I assume around the time rehearsals for the “One Nite Alone” tour started to ramp up, Prince decided to record some instrumentals. Why? Who knows.

There was a reduced lineup of personnel for the album. Prince played keys and guitars, John Blackwell played drums on all but the “Xhalation,” the first track on the album, ditto Rhonda Smith on bass and Candy Dulfer on Sax.

On seven of the nine tracks (including “Xhalation”) there are additional violin parts by British-Singaporean violinist Vanessa-Mae. She was something of a prodigy, having begun playing piano and violin at age four and by age twelve she had released a recording of Tchaikovsky. Weirdly, she’s also an Olympian…technically.

She seems to have gone to great lengths (possibly even rigging the qualifying events) to get to the Olympics. The reasons for this seems to have roots in her mother's overbearing upbringing and refusal to allow her to pursue her own interests as a child (such as skiing). Her mom may have been such a monster she cheated to qualify for the Olympics just to get back at her. I've read up on her mom. She deserves it. Image: Sky News Service

Some bizarre, convoluted stuff may or may not have gone down to qualify her to compete for Thailand (not the UK, even though she’s lived there since age 4 and has rarely been to Thailand, where her biological father was born) and so she competed as Thailand’s first female downhill skier. She did horribly.

The image her mother insisted adorn her 15-year-old daughter's breakthrough single. Image: EMI Records

As a violinist, she’s had an amazingly successful career. She’s sold millions of albums, worked with the biggest names in the music business, and made a tremendous amount of money doing it. She successfully crossed over from classical into pop territory at age 15 (using some dubious sexualizing imagery suggested by her mother, who seems to be a real piece of work) and since then has had an active, if niche, career as a pop / classical violinist.

It’s uncertain how Prince became aware of her, but she seems to have had an uncomfortable recording process with him. In spite of her pop music success, Vanessa-Mae had been tutored in music in Beijing and London and still relied on classical methodology. In other words, she thought she would be receiving scores. Prince, who was virtually the opposite of classically trained, did not (and really could not) provide that for her.

Ultimately, without a score, Vanessa-Mae was lost. She simply could not improvise, so she could not really jam with other musicians on the fly. As a result, all of her parts were added last, when the rest of the album was complete, and Prince could play the backing tracks and tell her which notes to play in which order out loud or with a piano.

What Even Is This?

It should come as no surprise that Xpectation is not for everyone. If someone listened to this album and told me they hated it because it was elevator music, I’m not sure I could convincingly argue against that point. It sounds like Prince was trying to reach toward some kind of middle ground between new age and jazz, or perhaps classical and jazz, or a point in the center of the three. I have no idea if he reached it because I’m not entirely sure what those genres are. Also I’m unsure that’s what he was going for. It’s impossible to say. The album is inscrutable to me.

Sometimes the tracks seem to be structured and composed highly meditative works. Others, like the title track, appear to be raucus jam sessions that were built up into full compositions in post production. More than anything, the album seems to merely be the group of instrumental tracks Prince recorded with a certain group of musicians in the Autumn of 2001. Maybe that’s the best that can be said in terms of a unifying theme.

In spite of this, the album does manage an adequate amount of sonic cohesion. Prince’s keys, Candy Dulfer’s sax and Vanessa-Mae’s violin are all distinctive enough and play off each other in specific enough ways to hold the album together. This and the obvious fun that everyone is having playing this music creates an atmosphere that makes the music special and unique and somehow compelling instead of merely cheesy.

What More Can Be Said?

Xpectation leaves the average Prince listener with more questions than answers. There aren’t many signposts to guide our way in terms of what Prince was trying to say with this music. From a certain point of view it’s “good” and “satisfying” as a group of compositions. Personally, it scratches a lot of musical itches – but on the other hand, this is maybe the least commercial album Prince ever released.

There seems to be no point in going through the album track by track, but there is one track worth mentioning because it was removed at some point. Originally this album was to be called "Xenophobia" and would have had that song as the title track. Instead a live version appears on One Nite Alone…Live, which was released less than a month before this album dropped. Which may account for it being removed from Xpectation, and that is the conventional wisdom.

However. I have nothing to go on here other than my own personal feelings, but I would not be surprised to learn that’s not the whole story. If you listen to the version on ONA, you will hear the stark stylistic difference between “Xenophobia” and anything you might hear on Xpectation. There is simply no comparison. It just doesn’t fit in. As much as I would love to hear the studio version that no doubt exists, I don’t think shoehorning it into Xpectation would do either the song or the album any favors.

Should You Listen To This?

I’m going to go ahead and recommend this one to the reader, if only for its weirdness and its potential as a gateway to Brian Eno’s superior ambient records. I know that is next door to damning it with faint praise, and I suppose that is exactly what I mean to do to it. It’s one of Prince’s experiments that almost worked. I personally happen to like it in spite of its flaws, but the truth is Vanessa-Mae was simply not a good collaborator for Prince. Their techniques just didn’t quite gel well enough to create the something that was greater than the sum of its parts. That said, there’s really nothing wrong with it, and it is a lovely example of the freewheeling, mad-scientist feeling the Club could provoke in Prince’s creativity. The other good reason to give it a listen is its surprising availability. After years in limbo, it's now widely available to stream on many platforms. Check it out, you can probably do so for free. It also bears mentioning that Prince didn’t really give up on this concept and gave it another swing with next week’s album, the far more satisfying NEWS.

NEXT WEEK: The instrumental phase continues with NEWS