The Vault… Old Friends 4 Sale (1999)
It stretches the definition of the term ’song’ but like Tom Wait’s What’s He Building? or a Dr. Octagon skit it’s a fantastic, passing glimpse into a fully formed universe. Written for the I’ll Do Anything comedy film but ending up on his Warner Bros contractual sign-off comp instead, My Little Pill is a strange, somewhat frightening concoction. It’s a short tale of a single mother taking a pill to escape her troubles and I’ll skip over the unwelcome poignancy later events would shroud this with. I love all 69 bizarre seconds of this psychotropic amuse-bouche but fear I may be in a minority amongst Prince fans. It’s certainly one of the strangest things he’s recorded and the music twists and warps around the half spoken / half sung lyrics like the unravelling fabric of reality. It sounds like one of Frank Zappa’s stress dreams or (and I’m going esoteric here) the animated cupcake scene in 1985’s Young Sherlock Holmes (just YouTube it) but I would lap up a whole album of these hallucinogenic oddities.