Dirty Mind (1980)
Lyrically and musically this guileless ballad about a deserted love is much more in keeping with his first brace of albums. The country-blues guitar and gentle electric piano theoretically shouldn’t sit well with Dirty Mind‘s synthy, trenchcoat funk but due to the minimal beat and short duration this less sexually-charged song is able to freely walk amongst its wilder brethren like a pigeon at a zoo. There’s also an underlying sturdiness that wasn’t always present before. The spirit of rock bleeding in. A steel-capped falsetto lament which ends, along with side A of the album, with the sound of an amplified guitar being discarded, leaving you wanting more. Track highlight: the pause and slight vocal exhalation after the word “stop”, an affectation that Michael Jackson went to town with on the previous year’s Working Day and Night. All in all Gotta Broken Heart Again is a great slow jam, his first of the 80s, but there’s bigger and better ones on the way. One comment about the title though – doesn’t conventional slang usage suggest that Prince is singing he’s got to broken heart again? I feel the pedant’s pettifog rise within me.
