If you only heard The Weeknd on the radio, then the song you heard was from this album.

I remember being in a store somewhere when "Feel My Face" came on, and thinking "Are they playing The Weeknd? Are they playing a song by The Weeknd about doing blow until your face goes numb? They ARE."  That song was also nominated for a Nickeloden Kids Choice Award because we live in a strange world. 

This is also the first time in a reimagined discography that I haven't done anything except change the order of the tracks. I didn't cut anything. I didn't add anything. It's the laziest work I've done, but it's mainly because I think this is a solid album.

I enjoy an album that builds up from nothing before the music and / or the lyrics kick in, which is why I moved Shameless to the beginning of the album. I also imagined it was a single for some reason. While it still has the I Am Awesome And You're A Fool For Not Letting Me Fuck You All The Time, You Suck atmosphere of the previous two albums, but it's more radio friendly, which is in, in some ways, worse. While the refrain is about how he has no shame, he is mainly dragging her for not loving him unconditionally, and, dude, The Weeknd had a lot of work to do before he was capable of non-toxic love. Musically, there's an uncharacteristically great guitar riff out of nowhere near the end of the song.

Real Life is the opening track on the original album, and it serves as a better thesis for the album, as it acknowledges that he is the problem in most of his relationships, which, NO SHIT. Every woman that loved me / oh yea / I seemed to push them away. If the first two albums are to be believed, yuppers.

We echo into Tell Your Friends, which is the bragaddocio My Life As A Rock Star Track, which features, appropriately, Kanye MAGA West. Except it's not in my version. I don't remember if I edited it out, or if this is a glorious accident, but I was waiting for the Kanye bridge, and it ain't there. It's instrumental. Sweet.

The Hills was The Weeknd's first #1 hit, and it's easy to see why it was #1. From the crunchy beginning to the bouncing back and forth between his spoken tenor and falsetto singing. I'm not too amped about having a song with the term "friendzoned" on the album, but people do feel that way. The first time I heard it, I assumed he was coming out as bisexual, Frank Ocean Style. But it's just that he's cheating on people with people who are cheating on people and he's worried that people will find out. Ugh. It's a really catchy and haunting somng about how terrible The Weeknd is.

Speaking of terrible, Earned It (which is not terrible, or I could have cut it) is frome the movie Fifty Shades Of Grey, which is terrible. Oh, but it's about an abusive relationship poorly disguised as BDSM, so putting The Weeknd on that soundtrack makes perfect sense. 

In The Night continues the abused love theme, but in this one The Weeknd is  telling a third person story. Despite its upbeat tempo and vocals, it reminds me of living at The actual Crooked Treehouse. The downstairs neighbor had a partner with major sexual trauma, who used to scream on a regular basis. I knew there was mental illness involved, but it was several years before I encountered the person who did the screaming while they were doing the screaming. They immediately modulated their volume and profanity usage, and explained why they were always screaming and how it wasn't my neighbor's fault. I don't think you'd understand is something they actually said to me.

I love the hand clapping and spoken vocal quality of the beginning of  Losers before the actual beat and effects kick in. As someone with a lifelong distrust of the American Education System, and a fan of lines like Because stupid's next to 'I Love You', this is my favorite set of lyrics on the album. And Labrinth's verse and version of the chorus is fantastic. This is tied for my favorite all-together track with "Can't Feel My Face".

"Losers" drizzles right into Prisoner, which has a perfect Lana Del Ray feature, and a perfect sing-along chorus for people sitting at home, worried about what they're doing with their lives.

Angel is the final track on the original track listing, but it's not heavy enough of a closer for my liking. It's a perfectly good song about hoping his lover can move on, and it's much less toxic than his early stuff. I like it as part of his evolution as a songwriter, but I don't feel like it's an honest ending to this album. I do love Maty Noise on echo background vocals, though.

Acquaintance brings back The Weeknd we know and are critical of. We're back to a woman done him wrong, and him deflecting any blame with his penis. 

The piano outro of "Acquaintance" bleeds into the synth waves of  Can't Feel My Face, the best #1 dance hit about doing coke I've ever heard (there's way more than you're currently thinking of). The beat is, and I know this is a cliche, but, infectious. And the rising vocals into the shoulder shaking chorus is amazing every time. Of course kids love this song. 

I'm not an Ed Sheeran fan. I'm not NOT an Ed Sheeran fan, I just haven't been exposed to him that much. His pop vocals with country guitar pluck combined with The Weeknd's background effects on Dark Times is a perfect haunting album track, and makes me consider checking out his discography, past the hits that have managed to break into my world. The background effects are fairly Zooropa-ish in quality, which I quite enjoy.

As You Are is this albums's Saving A Stripper With Your Dick song. There's no actual stripper, just a "broken" woman, who he's going to fix by taking her as she is. Uh-huh. But will she also accept him as he is? So they can sex all night. Oooof.

Often is a dark closer. Not just because it's a Weeknd slow jam, which is not a love ballad, but a fucking on drugs song, but because it doesn't give him the redemption that he'd have if the album ended on "Angel". He's back in his pattern here. I think, based on the next album, that that's a more honest truth. 

The narrative around rock music in the nineties was one of competition. MTV started the decade a brash consumer paradise, shaping the music people would buy by having Carson Daley and screaming teens cheer for the most radio friendly hit while Matt Pinfield whispered of Underground Music that would soon end up on Daley's show, and Kurt Loder would feed us a stream of future Trivial Pursuit info about all the bands inbetween.

I can't say it was a great or glorious time for music, as I'm hugely biased as having been a massive ball of hormones and spending money at the time. It seemed like an exciting time for music. Rock and roll had gone from summertime screaming hair metal of Guns N Roses to the wintry grunge of Nirvana. It was natural music evolution. And hip hop had gone from an autumnal symphony of samples twisted into new sounds to a One Sample Per Song streamlined spring pop fest. Not through natural music evolution, but through lawyers and copyright law. It was during the cultural awareness doldrums between Civil Rights Support and Wokeness, so while I'm sure there must have been a proliferation of articles (many probably rejected by Spin, Rolling Stone, and MTV News) about the racism behind the abrupt change of how artists sampled, due to financial restricitions, I never read them. So I thought the evolution was natural.

By the end of the 90s, MTV was declaring the death of Rock & Roll by pushing boy band pop, and the pop rock of 1970s influenced bands like Smashing Pumpkins. The hip-hop narrative they set was all 1980s (and therefore, also the 1950s) pop flavored nostalgia tracks as Lauryn Hill and The Fugees focused on reliving their adolescence through a more adult lens, and Sean Coombs and Faith Evans crooned about their recently killed peers.

By the time we reached the early 2000s, the joke about "Remember when MTV used to play music videos?" to "Remember when MTV 2 used to play music videos." Everything seemed to revolve around the nascent reality TV revolution that MTV had helped birth. Rock was sullen, and ready to be made fun and poppy again. But that's not really what happened. Instead, Radiohead's Kid A hit, and rock was still sullen and heavy but it sounded slicker. It was a natural less-poppy follow-up to their previous album, OK Computer. But with less narrative, and a focus on the sonic possibilities of rock and roll. It was a necessary shot in the arm to rock music. Not a lot of bands followed suit, but production techniques shifted, and a wider variety of rock started charting again.

What late 90s Radiohead did for rock, the early work of The Weeknd did for hip-hop.

It's not a perfect parallel. Radiohead was allowed to be experimental because they'd already been successful sounding like their peers. They were in their mid-30s and mid-career. The Weeknd was a 21 year old who came out of nowhere (Toronto, or Youtube, depending on your point of view), and he was experimenting with his voice because he hadn't settled into his own yet. And while his lyrics were as problematic towards women as most 21 year old males' are, his production was next level, and his Michael Jacksonesque vocals, occasionally shifted down or slightly up in a more Prince-like fashion than Cher or T-Pain.

The title, and opening track, Odd Look, is actually a remix of a Kavinsky song with The Weeknd rapping over it. Imagine the "Stranger Things Theme" with lyrics about how great he is with women. All you girls tryin to be saints / I'll make you roll with a sinner. It's the same rock and roll lifestyle lyrics from the previous album but with a retro pop hook.

It drops out into the percussive Tears In The Rain, which, surprise, is about how his ex is better off without him. Which, yea. Did you hear what he said about his exes on that last album? Run. The dude has a problem seeing partners as anything more than future song lyrics, and this is coming from a writer who once dated ten guys and referred to them, to their faces, not by their names, but by the order in which he met them. They all feel the same / adjust to the fame indeed.

The Professional sunrises out of "Tears In The Rain" and eventually hits its thesis in the breakdown. I love /You love / This love / We're professional / I know /You know /We're sophisticated /At lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin' / Lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin' / Lovin', lovin', lovin', / We're professional at lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin' / Lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin' / Lovin', lovin', lovin'.

We go back to an 80s computer sound for Gone, with the drums and bass knocking at the door throughout the whole song. Lyrically, we're still partying and making questionable decisions with women, but in this narrative, The Weeknd is the one fucked up, not the woman he's trying to go home with. Pr...og...ress? The music gets really spare in the middle, and stays that way for a deliberately uncomfortable amount of time.

Birds (Part 1) marches through the sparsity. With The Weeknd resuming his "don't fall in love with me" narrative. He's a really bad boyfriend, ladies. Really. Really bad. Probably worse than Prince. Probably worse than Freddy Mercury.

Ugh. It bothers me how much I like The Weeknd's music, given how utterly hedonistic and destructive his lyrics are, particularly towards women. Life Of The Party is another drugs rule my life, but let's fuck anyway, song. I like it as the middle of the Birds sandwich. It's still part of his warning, this way. Not just a red flag, but a red flag with a picture of a skull and crossbones roofying your drink.

It's actually surprising that Birds (Part 2) isn't already on a Quentin Tarantino soundtrack. It has the echoey surf guitar foundation, unnecessary violence, and liberal use of the N word. Really, all it needs to do is smack a paparazzo and give a self-righteous interview about it, and it could be Tarantino's personal theme song.

The screeching birds lead us into the Drake drenched part of the album as The Weeknd tells us what he Lives For. He got sober for an entire day to write this song about kissing bitches in the club. Sigh. Good to see that sobriety has him branching out of his comfort zone. Hey, this is the shit that  he lives for. And what Drake lives for, too, I guess.

While the guitar plucks its way to the end of "Live For", the drums and The Weeknds haunting wails being us into The Zone. Drake says Whoa, all these broken hearts on that pole / Man, if pole dancing's an art, you know how many fuckin' artists I know?   Yea, we get it Degrassi TNG. You're hard now. You've been hard the whole time.

There comes a time in a man's life /Where he must take responsibility / For the choices he has made / And there are certain things that he must do / Things that he must say / Like I love you / And I need you / I only want you / And nobody's going to know if it's true, ooh. Is this the bridge to a future, less objectifying Weeknd? We'll probably have to wait until the next album to see.

We opened up with a "Stranger Things" vibe. And that's how Pretty begins but it then becomes more like a track from the Natural Born Killers soundtrack. The closing verse (which is in French) gives the impression that this album is not about current issues, but The Weeknd looking back at their adolescence, which is slightly better. We were all terrible in high school.

I wasn't sure which discography I was going to do after Queen. I kind of wanted to do Gomez, but that felt too similar. I debated tossing up a couple of Best Of albums of artists that only have about one disc worth of material that I like. Then, I realized I had a pretty great Michael Jackson discography. But I was missing the Jackson 5 era, and wanted to take some time listening through that material before I decided how to divvy it up. But while listening to Jackson, I realized I did have a discography at the ready, The Weeknd!

One of my exes in 2011 was super into the Thursday mixtape so we listened to it quite a bit. But, unlike some of his other obsessions, I really liked The Weeknd, and have bought their albums whenever I hear a new one is released.

This past January, I was out buying a new cell phone when the sales person pointed out that the shoes I was wearing are the same pattern The Weeknd's orange camouflage outfit. We went out for drinks after.

I don't have any bad associations with The Weeknd, the way that there is a major mental hoop one has to jump through to listen to Michael Jackson's music. So I decided to do The Weeknd first!

If you're not familiar with their work, or have only heard their singles, cool. Welcome. This is going to be a mellow, slow journey. If you currently do, or once did any downers, you're probably going to be nostalgic for them in a non-toxic way. If you've been Straight Edge forever, that's cool, there's a bunch of intense, slow love songs in your future. You may get paranoid that you can see The Weeknd gazing through your window at you, Sure, it's a little creepy, but they're not going to hurt you, they're just sad, and staring at you reminds them of something they loved once. It's cool.

A lone bass riff evokes a bit of The White Stripes before the atmosphere drops us in the middle of The Weeknd's sadness. Where were you when I needed you eight months ago? is pretty much a great first line to introduce you to the experience of this album. For real, where were you? The Weeknd is sad, and it's your fault. It's The Same Old Song, which is, thankfully, not some heavily sampled Four Tops remix, but it's just a guy who thinks you've been fucking around on him. But he's not going to judge you too harshly because he has Definitely been fucking around on you. He does want you to rue the day he got famous, though. He's got that Lady Gaga Revenge Fever running through his veins.

There's a lot of Michael Jacksonesque crooning around this (and every other) song, and it quickly gives way to the drumbeat of Montreal. Here, The Weeknd is going to go all Carly Simon on you and let you know that this song is totally not about you, even though it totally could be. He also spends quite a bit of the song singing in French because he's bilingualer than you, and really thinks you should learn another language. His language. Learn to understand him. Though, Happiness exists when you don't know a thing.

Forgive me a little bit of laziness on this section of the album. You know I love to let songs flow into each other. Well, so does The Weeknd. They did a lot of work for me. So, just like on the original album, "Montreal" gives way to The Outside. There's a touch of Seinfeld here, as The Weeknd wants you to show him your ex's moves. Not just any ex. The one you really loved, and the one you lusted for. The Weeknd is going to take that move, work you like a pro, and improve it until you can't live without him. He is going to fuck you all night, baby. Partly because he really loves both you and sex, and partly because the drugs have made it so that he has trouble climaxing. And baby when (he's) finished with you / you won't wanna go outside. Probably because he came on your clothes. He's a mess.

I'm still riding his tracklist, as we segue into XO, where The Weeknd wants you to play The Blame Game about all of your life's problems, as long as the finger doesn't end up pointed his way. Tonight was not his fault. You were both fucked up. He didn't mean to jizz on your favorite shirt. (He) wanna catch you at your best, oh / When your hair's a mess / You look so depressed / And you're filled with regret / And you feel like you gotta go home, oh / 'Cause these nights pass, so much quicker than the days did. He totally loves you at your messiest. Because he's sloppy, too. But he loves you, you great big mess.

If you go to a party and The Weeknd is The Host, maybe bring a friend, and establish some some safe words. He is Super Creeper right now. He's trying to get you to ride it out with his many boys. Um, I don't want to make too many assumptions, but I'm pretty sure his boys got a bunch of rashes that can't be ridden out.

You've been going hard baby, and maybe you should go home. NO, NOT WITH THE WEEKND, no matter what he promises you, it's going to be sketch city. The Initiation has him shifting his voice through some deepening effects. You must be super high if that sounds sexy to you. You're definitely not at a level of consent where you and The Weeknd should still be talking. He definitely shouldn't STILL be telling you to ride it out.

The Fall is just The Weeknd letting you know he's going to blow money on you irresponsibly. Like, his 401K is NONexistent. You're going to get positively wrecked if you go out with him tonight, but he's not going to have enough left over to take a Lyft home tomorrow, so plan accordingly. He does a really good of reconfirming the album feel here, referencing previous songs, and hinting at songs to come. He has set up a whole vernacular for this rapey party scene.

Next does not come with an Aria Grande Thank You. Don't let the sultry piano and the moaning fool you, he's going to do you dirtier than Bieber ever did Grande. He's going to write songs about you where you are nothing but a person who done him wrong. And, again, it's almost definitely not your fault. When you sing this many songs about people who Done You Wrong, then You are the problem, not them. He's only 21 in this song, though, so trust he will get less creepier as he gets older. Prince did. I mean, he never got fully uncreepy, but he got significantly less creepier in his 30s and 40s. Oh, and he's definitely going to tell everyone you're a stripper and he met you in the club. He's Very 21. Yes, I know yes, I know yes, I know yes, I know.

Your honor, in the case of The Weeknd vs. All The Girls He Writes About On This Album, we'd like to present you with the lyrics to his song, Echoes Of Silence. Talk to me baby / Tell me what you're feeling / You say you don't need to go / Don't you pretend you didn't know / How all of this would end up / Girl, I saw it in your eyes / And baby I can read your mind / And expectations were not in sight / You knew that talking dirty to me / On the phone would get me here / 'Cause we both wanted to do this / But I could tell that you were scared / 'Cause you thought there was more to us / But you knew how this would end / It's gonna end how you expected girl / You're such a masochist and I ask why / And you reply/ I like the thrill / Nothing's gonna make me feel this real / So baby don't go home / I don't wanna spend tonight alone / Baby please / Would you end your night with me / Don't you leave me all behind / Don't you leave my little life / Don't you leave my little life. The Defense rests, Your Honor.

The song that propelled me from thinking of doing a reimagined discography of Michael Jackson to this one of The Weeknd is The Weeknd's cover of Jackson's Dirty Diana. It's pretty safe. It has the dark, atmospheric instrumentation of the rest of The Weeknd's album, but the vocals are almost precisely MJ. Usually, I like my covers to do a bit more, but this works out really well. It also lets me put this on work mixes. One of my coworkers like's Michael Jackson's songs, but can't listen to more than one of them, so having well done covers available is super helpful. And, yea, this is another song where a woman is blamed for being promiscuous, even though the singer is clearly a hornball / borderline sex offender. So, right in The Weeknd's wheelhouse.

Climbing out of the end of "Dirty Diana" is What You Need. Don't believe his nonsense about how your ex is what you want but how The Weeknd is what you need. He's clearly delusional. Unless you don't have a ride home from his house (an actual ride, not the kind he sings about), then you don't need a thing from him.

We get a little bit of bright, sunshiney guitar at the beginning of The Morning before THe Weeknd announces that he's fucken gone right now. All that money, the money is the motive, he sings over and over. See? You're just a prop in his song. Get out of there!

Are you ready for the pace to pick up, and everything to really rock out? Well, The Weeknd is too High For This, so don't hold your breath. This is another slow grind song about love. Only this time, he's letting you know that you want to be high before you fuck him, which doesn't seem super consensual.

Ooooh, here's some more upbeat rhythm. House Of Balloons (Glass Table Girls). He is still reminding you that fucking him is better when you're high, which is still problematic as fuck, Mr. The Weeknd. I'm seriously wondering if you aren't the worst lay in the world, and that's why you demand everyone get fucked up, so you can write mean songs about them later. It's Not Cool.

We end the album with some Wicked Games, as The Weeknd reminds you that he never loved you, and you never loved him, either. This whole ... night ? weekend ? month ? year ? was nothing but The Weeknd trying to get his dick wet (and jizz on your shirt, Never Forget). I hope you get over him soon, because trust, he's always been over you, even if he does like the way you dance. There is also something perversely satisfying to hear The Weeknd end the album with the line Even though you don't love me. Bumper humper, you never loved her, either. Time to spit the martyr out of your mouth, cut down on the pill intake, and find something new to write about.

This is it. The final Queen album in their discography. A long treatise on a slow and painful death. Kind of a bummer, but beautiful sounding. Like Bjork in Black Swan.

You'd think more Queen albums (especially if I'm organizing them) would start with an orchestral intro. But, here we are at the final album, and we're just getting to it. Beautiful Day is not the original version of the U2 song. It's a soft, lyrically straight-forward (because Freddy Mercury) song about the futility of trying to stop him from feeling great, but the music behind it makes you think that this is the ruse of someone extremely depressed.

Brian May wrote Too Much Love Will Kill You about the end of his first marriage, and the beginning of his first post-marriage relationship. But, during the lead ups to the release of the Bohemian Rhapsody movie, he talked about the band's concern about Freddy's "lifestyle" (and I don't read anything homophobic into his use of the word "lifestyle", I think he was was referring to the quantity of dangerous sex practices, which is a rock and roll "lifestyle" issue, and not a homosexual "lifestyle" issue). So I'm choosing to see this song through that lens, that May wrote it about Mercury. 

Innuendo provides the first familiar sounding Queen song. With echoing vocals, fairly basic lyrics, driving guitars, this is pure 70s prog rock. But with flamenco guitars in the middle. You read that right, Steve Howe from Yes and Brian May perform a flamenco breakdown, followed by their usual more metal guitars hitting the same flamenco rhythm before laughing us back into the melody. 

Were you waiting for a sequel to "I'm In Love With My Car" from A Night At The Opera / A Day At The Races​? Well, it's your lucky lifetime. Ride The Wild Wind is another car song, but this time with a touch of "I'm nearing death, so fuck it, I'm going to live dangerously." And car effects, of course. This is a particularly New Wave sounding Roger Taylor song. There is occasional laughter near the end of the song, and along with the repeated lines and the intense drum ending, it's a perfect lead-in to 

I'm Going Slightly Mad. A song about ... well ... deteriorating mental states in  the face of death. It's a catchy song that has a Spread Your Wings feel before ascending into the prog rock epic of 

One Vision.  This is a symphonic prog rock track with the anthemic lyrics of  Spread Your Wings, but also a bit of playfulness (the last line is not, in fact one vision but fried chicken.  See? Slightly Mad!

The outro of "One Vision" probably gave The Christian Whackjobs Of America a conniption fit with its slowed out tape relay sounding vaguely satanic (even though it's actually just saying God works in mysterious ways). But it's a great lead-in to Queen's Highlander theme song, Princes Of The Universe. A song about immortality might seem a strange fit for this album about slowly dying, but there's always that hope, right? That we're somehow going to be the one who makes it out alive.

We slow things down for the summer ballady These Are The Days Of Our Lives, where Mercury remembers that the positive things in his life outweighed the negatives, while May's guitars wail in the background, and Taylor's drums have an 80s Phil Collins sound.

Taylor wrote Heaven For Everyone for a side project (but Mercury did the lead vocals for one version), and it was rerecorded with May's guitars and Deacon's bass for the first posthumous Queen album.  It works really well with "One Vision" as it's a pro-tolerance song with a touch of death. It also has echoed Mercury vocals as the song winds down. But it lacks fried chicken.

The effects transition us into another song with echoed vocals, I Was Born To Love You. This is also a posthumously reworked Queen song. It was originally a Freddy Mercury solo track with a disco beat, but it's all Queened up here. The lyrics are about as trite as possible but Mercury sings them like he means every word.

The gospel portions of  Let Me Live are both wonderful and very unQueen. It's a prayer to be left alone by death for a little while and make a brand new start. It also has the rare feature of having Mercury, May, and Rogers all on lead vocals for different portions of the song. It definitely has a lot of "Take Another Little Piece Of My Heart" vibes (and lyrics!). The Meatloafy piano outro blends into the drum / bass beat of

​Made In Heaven. The title song from the first Queen album released after Mercury's death, has an interesting guitar/bass  break from the melody. Like "I Was Born To Love You", it was originally a solo track by Mercury, which the band rerecorded. This is good because the keyboards and synths solo version lacks the wonderfully hellish grind of the Queen version.

"One Vision" gets a callback as we launch into A Kind Of Magic, the title song from Queen's Highlander soundtrack. This is a Roger Taylor song based on a line from the movie, and it's ostensibly about being an immortal, but it also works, for this project, as a look at mortality.

The synths announce a rare cover song in the discography, as Queen delivers a version of The Platters's The Great Pretender, the classic theme song for people pretending to be happy when they're depressed and / or miserable. Of course, Mercury absolutely destroys this song. In precisely the opposite way that Axl Rose destroyed Queen's "Sail On Sweet Sister".

The thing about "The Great Pretender", though, is that they're rarely believed. So a series of echoes rolls over the end of this song, and sweeps into You Don't Fool Me. This song was created by Queen's producer, David Richards, who had some left over vocal track from the band's Innuendo album, and pieced them together into this song. May, Deacon, and Taylor then produced new music around it. So this is kind of the band and the producer's response to "The Great Pretender" but with Mercury on reconfigured vocals.

So The Great Pretender didn't fool you? C'est la vie. The Show Must Go On. So much of Queen's late 80s / 1991 tracks can be seen as songs about Mercury's death (even though most of them weren't). On this discography, this plays as Mercury's entreaty that Queen continue after his death. Or, it can be viewed as him acknowledging his awareness that everyone sees through his Great Pretender ruse, but he's going to keep it up because it's all that's keeping him going.

The penultimate track, and the final one to feature Mercury's vocals is Who Wants To Live Forever? A low hum ballad where Mercury's vocals are pushed further back in the mix than usual. And while this was actually recorded when he was still healthy, I choose to present it in this discography as a way to disguise how his voice is slightly faltering as he gets closer to death.

The final song is Track 13 from Made In Heaven, an almost completely instrumental track that sounds like the songs from the rest of the album trying to keep going. It's a buzzing, bright, symphonic dirge that's over twenty minutes long with very, very occasional clips of Mercury speaking. It does sound very haunting when his voice appears.

And that's it. We go out on an instrumental dirge.

I sort of assumed that this fourth album was going to be along the lines of Queen's Greatest Hits Vol 2, as its main throughline is: Songs By Queen From The 80s That I Loved That Don't Make Thematic Sense On The Final Album In The Discography. But, actually, the final album has more songs from Greatest Hits Volume 2 than this one, mainly because Queen's Greatest Hits actually encapsulates much more of their career than Volume 2, so some of these songs land on Volume 1, despite coming out much much later in their career.

If Flick Of The Wrist was an intro to their 70s AM radio style, and A Night At The Opera / A Day At The Races was their White Album, and Spread Your Wings is their Arena Rock album, then Radio Ga Ga is their fun, peppy album before they go dark. And the last album Will Be Dark.

A spaceship lands. Because this album is from outerspace. I mean, it has David Bowie on it. The song lands on the piano, of course, as Mercury invites us to Play The Game of love! Then more synth before the very May guitar riff lands.  It's trademark Queen from beginning to end. With or without synths.

Hand clapping and bass lead us into the upbeat admonition to Don't Try Suicide. Every time I hear it, I think of the movie Heathers. But this is a way better song, informing you that Nobody's worth it and You're just going to hate it. Nobody gives a damn as a reason, hasn't aged well, but it's meant to be tongue-in-cheek. The breakdown in the middle of the song is amazing.

Sometimes, I put two songs together because it amuses me. That's why you get the stacatto bass and guitar, the synths leading you into Another One Bites The Dust. If you know me from slam in the late 90s / early 2000s, you know that I have a song based around an incident at my alma mater where a bunch of homophobes literally carved the word "Homo" into the back of a classmate who listened to Queen. I've refused to let that incident, or that poem ruin my enjoyment of this song. I love its unnecessary spaciness at the end, Mercury's echoey fade in and outs before the final verse. Unless you saw me perform it at my second Cantab feature, or at one of my last gigs on the Cape, you may not know that I wrote the poem precisely to the song, so that if you play the song behind the poem, any time I reference a lyric or sing, it's actually synced up timewise.

The space opera portion of the discography continues as we go to the only truly beloved song from Queen's Flash Gordon Soundtrack: Flash Gordon Theme. It's a predecessor for their also somewhat underwhelming Highlander Soundtrack: A Kind Of Magic, which appears on the next album. There are a bunch of clips from the movie, including silly laser sound effects to keep this song buoyant, despite its very spare lyrics.

From sci-fi we crash back into the fantasy realm where Queen lived in the 70s, as Dragon Attack ambles into a staccato territory somewhere between Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog" and Guns N Roses's "Paradise City". It's basic message: heroin isn't a monkey on your back, it's a fucken dragon. It's inspired by the Chinese expression "chasing the dragon".

Next up, Vanilla Ice! It's the promised David Bowie duet, Under Pressure. Another of my absolute favorite Queen songs. If you've never seen Vanilla Ice explain his way around his outright theft of the bassline as a sample, check out Youtube. Totally worth it. I debated putting this on the next album, as it does fit, thematically, but I like having this on an album with less weight.

When the snapping fades out, the synths come back in, as Dr. May takes over the vocals for Sail Away Sweet Sister, which definitely sounds like a band sailing out of the 1970s very slowly. Weirdly, Queen never played this song live, but the aforementioned Guns N Roses have. It's almost good, but it quickly devolves into fucken terrible. I can't link you to it. You are unlikely to have offended me enough that this is suitable punishment.

Drums and synth crash through the outro waves for the title track, Radio Ga Ga. This is anthemic enough to have been on Spread Your Wings but it's such a mid-80s tentpole. The performance of it at LiveAid is considered one of the best live rock moments in history.

A synth robot from space intercedes to bring us into Invisible Man, a very unQueen like mix that takes pieces of The Flash Gordon Soundtrack and A Kind Of Magic and takes them to a pop single extreme.

Drums shatter the end of the song, as we go rockabilly with Man On The Prowl. This song would be out of place, except rockabilly is going to come back later. This is a feel good bouncy song about embracing your inner-turd and being a lazy cheat trying to get laid outside your relationship, despite not doing much work. Session keyboardist and pianist Fred Mandel absolutely slays the end of this song.

We hit a weird 80s soft rock dance zone for Backchat. It's a funk prog rock fusion by Deacon. It's by no means one of their most successful singles but it's the best non-Under Pressure song on Hot Space, and it's definitely worth the listen.

Hammer To Fall brings the Anthemic 70s rock back. There's a darkness to this song if you view this Radio Ga Ga album as an aware precursor to Was It All Worth It? which will be the final Queen album in the discography. As it's sort of about The Cold War, but more about waiting for the inevitability of death, which is the entirety of the next album.

The guitars stay heavy and classic Queen for I Want It All. It's another hedonism anthem demanding immediate and constant satisfaction. This is another song that could have easily been on Was It All Worth It? but the trilling breakdown in the middle just works better on this album. And the driving guitars at the end are too heavy for that album.

In addition to "All", I Want To Break Free. It's the final synth poppy cut on the album. I hate that it has made me think of sugar free Coca-Cola products now. On the plus side, the original video to this song is amazing, and it's where the cover of this Radio Ga Ga album comes from.

The rockabilly returns for Queen's first #1 American single,  Crazy Little Thing Called Love. It's an Elvis tribute that according to the band's mythos, was written by Freddy Mercury in under ten minutes, while taking a bath and playing guitar, which he sucked at.

Closing out the album we set Mercury in front of a piano again for Save Me, a Dr. May song about the ending of a marriage. It may seem odd to end their most 80s album with a ballad from the late 70s but I really like it as the final song before the band's impeding climactic album.

Really, I hope you enjoy this album, because, I can't stress this enough, the next album is filled with music I love but it's a major, major downer to end on.

It's possible to make a sports arena playlist without any Queen on it, but you'd be a fool to do so.  From the stomp stomp CLAP stomp stomp CLAP of "We Will Rock You" to the completely overplayed and, most likely, unnecessarily hyperbolic "We Are The Champions" to the probably inappropriate "Another One Bites The Dust" when someone either strikes out, or their NASCAR vehicle has to pull over due to being completely on fire, there's a Queen song for every sports occasion.

Often "We Will Rock You" and "We Are The Champions" are packaged together, one immediately following the other, even though it makes no narrative sense, and the songs don't really flow into each other. So I've taken my favorite late 70s Queen songs and strung them between these two classics, not to provide a narrative, but to give them some breathing room, and make Queen's most anthemic album of this discography.

I have cheated a bit. I know I said I was going to start with "We Will Rock You", and I sort of do, but I wanted to give it some sort of build-up before the clapping and stomping, so the album actually beings with an Intro containing the first twenty seconds of "Mustapha". This should also keep all of your racist relatives from stealing this fictional CD from your imaginary CD player.

Then stomp stomp CLAP stomp stomp CLAP, We Will Rock You, probably Queen's most famous song for elementary students. It's pure banner waving aggression and braggadocio. By the time the guitar hums in, the song is almost over. It's an unnecessary flourish to the song that I wish had been kept off. But, ehhh, it's part of history now.

More Of That Jazz is a weird suite of songs wrapped into one. It's a Taylor song with him doing all of the vocals, and most of the instruments. Mercury isn't the only one who can bogart a studio. The guitar riff is straight 70s metal. But then, about three minutes into the song, there's a harsh cut into other tracks from the album for reasons I don't understand. It was the final track of the album Jazz, so I guess it served as a coda. Here, it's an aggressive appetizer.

Before I heard the original, Queen version of Get Down, Make Love, I heard a version of Nine Inch Nails' cover as part of a 90 minute long mix of NiN songs from the early 90s. The original is relatively tame, with its simple bassline, spare piano chord progression, and occasional drums and guitar riffage. The instruments only come together during the chorus.

A piano riff that Billy Joel left, forgotten, in a bar too well lit for anything dangerous to happen, gets picked up by Dr. Brian May, who was just there to use the rest room. He gives it to Freddy Mercury, Jealousy ends up sounding like almost every late 70s piano ballad.

Bicycle Race doesn't sound like anything but a weird Queen song. The lyrics are the most pop culture-focused you're likely to find in a song that's mostly Mercury talking about how much he wants to ride a bicycle.  He also drops a reference to the impending "Fat Bottomed Girls" in this song, and a fun little bicycle bell solo in the middle.

And, lo, do the Fat Bottomed Girls show up right at the end with a choral acapella intro, followed by a guitar riff buried into one track of the stereo recording in a frustrating way. I almost edited this into mono just to relieve the tension from the tonal imbalance. In 2000, I read a poll where this was voted The Worst Song Ever Recorded. In 2001 it was unseated by Eric Clapton's "Wonderful Tonight". Those are both sound choices. This song is completely ridiculous, but it's very much pro-fat bottomed girl. It's the 70s prototype for Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back". It ends with a fury of guitars.

It's Late is a historically weird little song. It's a Dr. May concept where he treats each verse as an act in a romantic farce. He also uses a guitar technique called "tapping" which is most associated with Eddie Van Halen, whose debut album, Van Halen, came out just a few months after the "It's Late" single. It's, by far, the longest track on the album, ending with a killer gatling drum effect.

Mercury croons Don't Stop Me Now with a beautiful staccato chorus. It's the theme song for hedonism and selfishness. But it's so fun, and it has such a magnificent jacknife guitar riff about two and a half minutes into the song.

I mix the climbing piano of All Dead, All Dead into the end of "Don't Stop Me Now". This is Brian May's solo work, as he sings, and plays both piano and guitar on this track that's ... ummm ... about the death of his cat.

The piano keeps on going into one of Deacon's songs, Spread Your Wings. It's pretty much High School Poetry 101. Inspirational song about flying, dedicated to someone in the service industry that the egocentric narrator really believes in, man.

My Melancholy Blues tells the story of the aftermath of "Don't Stop Me Now". It's a bluesy piano ballad about what happens when all the partying stops, and you're left behind.

The final track on the album, as promised is We Are The Champions, which I always feel starts as if it's the second or third line of the song. It's another banner-waving braggadocio anthem, this time with guitars all the way down.

This is the best Queen album you're ever going to get that isn't just a Greatest Hits album. It has their best song. It has their most cohesive sound. It has their most creative arrangements. It's their most operatic, and it's tied with their best produced of these reimagined albums. And yet, it has only two actual hits.

In the real world discography, I would argue, and find a lot of support for my theory, that A Night At The Opera is the best Queen album. Any top ten or top one hundred list of The Greatest Songs In Rock And Roll History that don't include Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Science will back me up on this.

If you're looking for a Queen album to put on at a party, this one is not the correct choice. You're going to want to go with Spread Your Wings (the next album) or Radio Gaga (the fourth album). But if you want the best album in the reimagined discography OR in their real discography A Night At The Operais the place to go.

Whether you're British or American, it's a terrible time in world history to be patriotic about it. We're both shameful, racist nations. America has proven that Representative Democracy has an expiration date, and we've past it, and England has proved that trying to mix Representative Democracy and a Monarchy is just as poor an experiment. So why does this album open with God Save The Queen? (which is also the music to America [My Country 'Tis Of Thee] ... which would be a much better national anthem for The United States Of America) Well, one because this version rocks, and two because I choose to believe that, despite it's title, it's actually an instrumental version of The Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen Theme Song. If the inclusion of the song offends you, please take a knee. No matter what anyone says, it's a respectful way to protest.

A trilling piano skips us away from any controversial or subversive thoughts, as we go Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon. Mercury's vocals sound like a tinned 40s recording while the harmonies and guitars sound decidedly 70s. It's a glorious earworm.

Sweet Lady is A Dr. May song written in a slightly complex time structure (for a rock band ... plenty of pianists and classical musicians seem to be able to handle it). It's an unrequited love song with heavy guitar riffs.

The first time I tried to mix these albums was in 2014, I was getting ready for a poetry tour, and I wanted a Queen road mix. I had never, until then, truly appreciated I'm In Love With My Car, a Roger Taylor song. It was inspired by a roadie who ... well ... listen to the song. It's been used in a few car commercials since I first began to appreciate it, but, more importantly, it's part of a fantastic scene from the TV adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's "Good Omens". There are a ton of Queen songs in the series, because according to Terry Pratchett, "All tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into Best Of Queen albums."

As the revving car fades out, the piano fades in, then the guitars hit heavy. It's time for Death On Two Legs. Which hops back and forth from heavy sci-fi to light and fluffy pop in an entertaining way. It's Queen's only good diss track, against their former manager, whom they never named, but who sued them, and who then wrote a book titled Death On Two Legs: Set The Record Straight. Dude, you're a manager in the music industry. As soon as you introduce yourself as such, people know you're a dogshit human being. I have, literally, never heard anyone say anything positive music management.

Let's get the taste of diss out of our mouths with a bright, sunshiney love song that Deacon wrote for his wife. You're My Best Friend just sounds like the ending credits theme for a movie about summer camps in the 1980s.

Keeping it poppy and friendly, we have a banjo strumming Dixieland song by Dr. May called Good Company, which seems competitive with the previous track, as it's about how great his wife is. It has a very Beatles White Album vibe, which I love. But as it goes on, the wife and friends leave him, and the song is more about how content he is with his business, and how he doesn't care that he's alone. I love it.

Seaside Rendezvous brings Mercury back to vocals, on another Beatlesque happy track. The middle song has an amazing vocal part where Mercury and Taylor ape a variety of instruments, such as kazoos, tubas, and clarinets for no damned good reason, other than it adds to the ridiculous fun of the song.

Ballady piano kicks in, and then a fucken harp as Mercury croons for the Love Of My Life, who has, of course, left him. Because lovers are like that. If they don't treat musicians so bad, what would they write about?

And now, perfection. Yes, it's their most successful (if you count the multiple times it's charted, it was not their most successful song during its first run) single, and best song, Bohemian Rhapsody. Even the muppet version of this song is amazing. The scene in Wayne's World where they sing along to "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the car, is the highlight of both Mike Meyers and Dana Carvey's film career.

Thus ends the A Night At The Opera portion of the album. I chose not to interweave the albums partly because they do both have slightly different feels and partly because there is only one way to follow "Bohemian Rhapsody" and that's to have it's closing gong overlap with the opening gong of Tie Your Mother Down, the first track from the A Day At The Races portion of the album. This is one of the tracks where I wish I had the original recordings to smooth out, because there's a jagged transition a little after the one minute mark, resulting from the limited technology at the time, and the band's decision to sometimes physically cut and tape tracks together. Sometimes, like with "Bohemian Rhapsody", it ends up flawless. Othertimes, less so. But there's a whirlwind effect for the guitar riffs that I love.

Long Away ambles along the thick, thick, boundary of The Who and The Byrds, with Dr. May on vocals, it falls well on The Who side of things. It's as folky as I'm willing to put with when listening to Queen.

A piano breaks through the wall of guitar. Freddy is back on vocals, crooning about whether or not he thinks about you when he's gone. I mean. Yes. The soaring vocals really elevate the pedestrian love song lyrics. When the chorus hits, it's all Sgt Pepper's on Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together), even the ending sounds like Sgt. Pepper's production.

More piano. Scattershot bass riff. A playful back and forth between the instruments before Mercury comes in for the lighthearted Millionaire's Waltz. It's really spare for a track on this heavy mother of a record until it surrenders to bombast. The guitars thunder down, the vocals get pushed back in the mix, and then everything lightens back up, and gets heavier again. It's a fun ping pong match.

Mercury comes in acapella on You Take My Breath Away, for a long stretch before the piano comes in. Again the vocal range and the piano make you ignore how utterly basic the lyrics are. This could be from a Mercury solo record, as there are no other instruments aside from his voice and his piano.

White Man hasn't aged super well, even though its message is completely relevant. Mercury, himself, is of Indian (from India) descent, but this song is from the perspective of Native Americans, and it's about how awful British colonizers were as they were becoming Americans. And it's totally right. And it has a killer metal inspired guitar riff, and the chant of White man, white man is perfect. But lyrics like You took away the sight to blind my simple eyes and the repeated use of the word simple to describe the non-white people is a pretty dated stereotype. This was progressive and interesting in 1975, but it's a shame that song is just a few edits away from being a timeless takedown of colonization.

We go back to Roger Taylor for Drowse, another song in an unusual time signature, this time with added slide guitar. If "You Take My Breath Away" could have been a Freddie Mercury solo album cut, this one is definitely from a Roger Taylor side project.

Mercury and his piano come back for Good Old Fashioned Loverboy.  It's another think of me when I'm not with you song.

We close out the album with another song with magic production. Somebody To Love is an amazing ballad. The vocal mix is astounding. The simple lyrics come off as more direct than empty. The drums are so perfect that you barely notice they're there. While there are several songs on this album that you can go "Oh, that sounds a bit like (name of another band)", this song, like "Bohemian Rhapsody" is one that just sounds like Queen. It could end a minute earlier and still be perfect, but I do like the over-the-top repeated chorus ending.

Some of the fun of playing around with the discographies of Prince and U2 involved rearranging classic albums into new configurations. Prince and U2 each have a few albums which didn't really need to be reimagined, as they were already great. But it was fun to come up with new angles to approach the music from.

I love Queen. Freddie Mercury had one of the greatest voices in rock and roll history, and the entire band combined their efforts to make a few really creative and mesmerizing musical experiences, and some very straight forward jock jam classics. But they only had one good album. The other fourteen studio albums are all collections of one or two great songs, maybe a good song, and then mediocre songs in the style of whatever was trending: disco, new wave, prog rock, heavy metal. While their prog rock album,  Queen II, is actually a very good progressive rock album, I'm no longer seventeen, and don't ever have the urge to listen to Rush, Dream Theater, early Genesis, or Queen II. And while I'm sometimes in the mood for disco or new wave, I'm never nostalgic for Queen's songs in those categories.

So, this discography is going to be brief, concise, and vastly different from their actual discography. Therefore, with the exception of the good album and a half (A Night At The Opera and A Day At The Races, which I've blended into one album), even the names of the Queen albums will be completely different from the originals.

The first two of the five album discography are roughly chronological, the final album is a concept album, and the third and fourth albums are stews of the delicious leftovers.

The first album, A Flick Of The Wrist, is a combination of Queen's debut album, and their third album, Sheer Heart Attack. If you like progressive rock, you should totally check out Queen II, on its own merits, but it stylistically clashes with everything else on this album, so I've left it out entirely.

When Prince drops the word "Prince" into his song, he is talking about his purpleness. Queen is not of the same ilk, despite also being royalty. So opening up with Queen Killer is not the same as starting out with "My Name Is Prince". This is not a thesis statement. This is a very 70s classic rock pop song. Noodly rock guitars, AM friendly keyboards, but Freddie Mercury classes up the song with his wide-ranging vocals, which is the highlight of the band, and the reason for their success, despite Dr. Brian May, Roger Taylor, and John Deacon all being fantastic musicians in their own rights. "Queen Killer" is just a fun little riff about praising an object of desire, she's never disparaged, her figure is never mentioned, it's just a "Hey there's this rich lady who's good at what she does, and while that might be sex, it might also be amateur magic, playing Trivial Pursuit, or hosting parties. She's just great! Guaranteed to blow your mind."

It's A Hard Life falls right out of "Queen Killer"'s final chord. It's a generic "I'm sad because I've been dumped" song, but it has a great keyboard track, some cool background vocal tricks, and hints at Queen's operatic future.  It also has a very 1970s guitar riff-off in the third quarter of the song. The lyrics are so generic, that it's impressive that Mercury is able to pack so much emotion in them.

Some hand clapping and light drumming lead us into Liar, the most 70s of all the Queen songs that survived into this discography. It launches into a guitar riff-off right away, and then the sweet AM style vocals croon in. This track is the most stark example of the "Am I talking about sex, religion or both?" category where both U2 and Prince flourished. Mercury doesn't go there as often, but he's all-in during this song. The staccato liars almost demand you sing along with them. The talking section (it's definitely not influenced by rap, it's just musical talking) where he switches the genders of his conversation from father to mother lead into an ending that you can almost imagine would have been a hard rock Billy Joel song, if Billy Joel could sing.

The bass and the guitar wind around each other in a very pleasing banjo-like progression as we segue into Keep Yourself Alive. The chorus is pretty weak, and the lyrics continue to be generic, but now generic self-help, instead of generic love. This is one of the songs where the instruments outshine Mercury's voice. Mixing it up from the previous songs is that the third quarter of the song has a drum-focus for a solid thirty seconds before the guitars come back in.

Now I'm Here has an echoey Marco Polo beginning, as Freddy Mercury tells you where he is. Sometimes it's here, sometimes it's there. He was super good at Hide & Go Seek. Once the echoes are over, we're solidly into 70s layered vocal rock. A heavy metal inspired guitar riff, and an overall feeling that you should be listening to this song in a tractor trailer truck, speeding down a highway in 1974. You are almost required to grow a mustache to sing along with this track.

A clearly ballady piano with a little country guitar twang rise out of "Now I'm Here" to give us Doing All Right, which could have come out of Andrew Lloyd Weber's Jesus Christ Superstar. It's not religious, it just has the spare instrumentation, and the very late 60s/early 70s trio backgrund vocals that devolved out of R&B and Doo-wop to be utterly spineless "oooooh"ing. Then, of course, the guitars kick in, and we're in very familiar riffy territory.

Bring Back That Leroy Brown, with its honky-tonk piano and bass lines, is a nice little anomaly for early Queen. It's from a Western movie. It's from another planet. It's from Freddie Mercury's super brain, and Roger Taylor's expert hands.

We fall back solidly into 1970s classic AM rock with Stormtroopers In Stilettos. It's Brian May on vocals, and mainly him and John Deacon on strings. Without Mercury's vocals, it could be from almost any band from that era. But the heavy breathing and drum outro give away the song's Queenness.

Freddy is back for the prog-rock influenced Mad, The Swine. Originally cut from their debut album, it showed back up on rereleases. It's really a precursor to Queen II, with its fantasy elements and more spacey guitar work. If this is your favorite track on the album, definitely check out their second album from their real world discography.

From prog rock to heavy metal, Stone Cold Crazy launches out of "Mad The Swine", trailing guitar riffs behind it. The combination of the guitars and Mercury's vocals are unlike anything else that was happening at the time, but once the late 70s/early 80s hit, this was a more common style of vocal for metal songs.

Misfire ooohs and ahhhs us back into layered Mercury pop. He spends much of the time in his smooth falsetto range, which isn't quite as cool as his screech falsetto, but works well with the rotarying guitar riffs.

Lap Of The Gods sounds like it's from a C level sci-fi movie soundtrack (where Queen will end up in just a few years). It's our first rare occasion to hear Mercury's voice distorted, to give it a more alien feel. I don't ever want to see the movie that would feature this song. Fun trivia fact, the really high falsetto scream in this song is the highest note on the album, and it's not even Freddy Mercury, it's Roger Taylor.

Taylor takes over the vocals for Tenement Funster (and Deacon takes over guitar from May), the first part of a trilogy of songs. Flick Of The Wrist is the second part, with really cool occasional octave spaced vocals, and Dr. May's background vocals. The trilogy concludes with Lily Of The Valley, a piano focused ballad about ... love, of course.

Mercury's letter to his sad peers, Dear Friends, is another piano ballad. It has a more Beatlesesque feel than any other track on the album, as it lullabies us to the album's close

andI never met Mozart, I never met Duke Ellington or Charlie Parker, I never met Elvis. But I met Prince - Bono

Making the decisions for the U2 discography was simple. I've heard all of their albums, apart from the most recent two, hundreds of times. I've heard their two most recent albums enough times to make educated decisions about them. I consider myself an expert on U2.

I'm an amateur Prince fan.

I've owned most of his albums, but apart from Purple Rain and Sign O The Times, I didn't really sit down and listen to any of the albums straight thtough on a regular basis. There were four albums of his that I hadn't even heard of until I started this discography.

I can't say I learned anything from making the Reimagined U2 Discography. It was fun, and I enjoyed sharing some of the albums with people, but I didn't come out of it with a new appreciation for their music. I already liked what I liked, and was familiar with what I didn't enjoy.

I had forgotten that I have a bootleg of Prince and Bono singing "The Cross" from Sign O The Times, but recorded two years Before the release of Sign O The Times.  I'm almost afraid to listen to it, even though it's from a time when everyone involved in the performance was at their peak. I'm hoping the reason I don't remember it is not that it sucks, but that I was unfamiliar with the song, and stopped listening as soon as it got Jesusy.

What I learned from listening through Prince's discography and then condensing it, and remixing parts of it is that I'm a much bigger Prince fan that I thought. I once believed that the only Prince that mattered was the one producing music between 1985 and 1995. That everything after that was forgettable, and everything before it was inferior. I was very wrong.

Here's my ranking of the Reimagined Prince Discography from Least Favorite to Favorite. (Please note, I like All Of The Albums, That's Why They're On The Reimagined Discography, I just like some more than others.)

13: Musicology
12: The HITnRUN EP
11: Prince
10: An Honest Man Vs The Truth
9: The Breakfast Album
8. Diamonds & Pearls
7. Rave
6. LoveSymbol
5. Revolution
4. The Vault
3. Purple
2. Controversy
1 Sign O The Times

The top 10 Prince songs, based purely on how often they get stuck in my head:
10. "Count The Days"
9. "Purple Rain"
8. "Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic"
7. "Little Red Corvette"
6. "Scandalous"
5. "Diamonds & Pearls"
4. "Starfish & Coffee"
3. "Kiss"
2. "Sexy M.F."
1. "Crystal Ball"

I've been playing the remagined albums in the store, and have had several conversations with people about them. I had a pair of women around my age talking about how they were trying to get more familiar with the  mid-90s Prince, and they wanted to get their hands on my version of The Vault. I also had someone say how much they liked Purple because it was better than Purple Rain, his friend was quick to tell him he was wrong. Their discussion got more intense, so I hung back and nodded, rather than try and change anyone's opinion on what is, essentially, the same tracks in a different order, with a couple of additions.

Looking at the entirety of Prince's Discography, album to album, I'm not going to try and rank them all, but I will put them into categories. I'm not including any Greatest Hits collections, live albums, or any posthumous releases.

Nah, You Can Keep That Trash Outta My House: Chaos & Disorder, Kamasutra, Lotusflow3r, MPLSound

I'm Not Going To Send The Whole Meal Back, I'll Just Eat Around The Parts I Don't Like: Lovesexy, Graffiti Bridge, Crystal Ball, The Rainbow Children, Musicology, The Slaughterhouse, HITnRUN Phase One, HITnRUN Phase Two

Not My Cup Of Tea, But I Understand The Appeal: C-Note, NEWS, X-pectations

Cool: For You, Prince, Dirty Mind, The Batman Soundtrack, Come, The Gold Experience, The Vault, Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic/Rave In2 The Joy Fantastic, 20ten, The Chocolate Invasion, Plectrumelectrum

Hell Yes, I Need More Of That: 1999, Parade, The Undertaker, Emancipation, Planet Earth, Art Official Age

I Will Play This On Repeat Until My Friends Love It, Too: Controversy, Around The World In A Day, Diamonds & Pearls, Emancipation, The Truth, 3121

Truly, The Best Of The Best: Purple Rain, Camille, The Black Album, Sign O The Times, Love Symbol, Goldn----a

I plan on coming back to this discography much later, and adding in a live album, a Best Of, and a posthumous album. But, for now, I'm pleased with where this journey took me. I am nowhere near tired of listening to the reimagined albums, even though I've been futzing around with them for about six weeks, listening to at least one album every day.

If you're looking for more writing about Prince from an actual expert on the subject, you should check out Scott Woods Makes Lists, and buy his book.

All good things must come to an end. Ok, terrible things end as well. And mediocre things feel like they're going on forever and ever, but they also end.

This is the end of the discography that represents the music that Prince intended for release before he passed. There have been a couple of posthumous releases, and more are on the way. Some day, I might sit down and make a 14th entry called Posthumous.

HITnRUN was a series of albums Prince released with his final band, 3rdeyegirl. Only two were released, and they're ... of variable quality. But I've put together an EP length collection.

It's a summer day. For some reason we're on a boat. A voice we haven't heard before, Hannah Welton-Ford, is singing about the weather. A guitar kicks in. So Prince is somewhere on this boat. With a guitar. The thing is, we're not here for another protoge, even though this one is very talented. She has a clear voice that you don't often hear in a Prince song. The Whitecaps slap the boat, as the guitar breezes over the deck. Then, somewhere in the vocal mix of the second chorus. It might be Prince. He's still under the deck, maybe, somewhere?

We get off the boat, and on to a train. Prince is Definitely part of the vocal mix now, playing the guiding track to Hannah Welton-Ford's leads. Look, Prince, I'm going to Stopthistrain if you don't get on vocals. These slowjams are nice, and definitely have your fingers all over them, but we're not here for your fingers, Prince. As the last line echoes out, we're waiting for you to hit the spotlight. One more ... ohhhh ...there.

The lick of a bass. Prince shows up. Talking about his old days, taking the stage in our underwear. Who can help but Stare at Prince when he's on stage? And now that we've put the proper funk into the music, we're in familiar territory. He even pulls out the "Kiss" lick to remind us who he was. Ok. But who are you now, Mr. Nelson?

The drums hit. The ... is that an accordian in the background ? The fuck kind of 70s slow jam is this? Oh, there's the falsetto. When She Comes could have come off of Come or maybe Lovesexy, something that's not one of my favorites. But this would have been one of my favorite tracks if it fell between two absolute bangers. But there's no bangers yet, so this weird respite feels unearned. But damn it's nice to hear that falsetto.

Here we go, Prince wants to make this woman scream in Hardrocklover which is half slow jam, half rock track. All Prince. This is the first production that sounds 2010s. It could be a Frank Ocean track. Beyonce could be on vocals here.

Fixurlifeup sounds like a Foo Fighters track. A really good one. The lyrics are generic fixyourlifeup bumper sticker wisdom. But the guitar is a buzzing wasp, killing everything in its path.

Another Love  has a riff and vocal pattern that screams turn of the millenium rock. Incubus is the strongest contender. It's interesting to hear this musician who was such an influence on modern music evolve to sound more like the people he influenced than the people who influenced him. And while it's not his best material, he pulls it off much better than most musicians trying to sound like younger bands.

The drums bang in, and suddenly the riff from Rage Against The Machine's "Revolver" is in a Prince song. Plectrumelectrum was originally released by 3rdeyegirl member, Donna Gratis. Prince has funked it up a bit with a Very Prince guitar solo but this is 100% Donna's instrumental song (minus the heavy RatM influence).

I got a little worried when mixing the album that the last track was Revelation. I thought, didn't I already use this on Musicology? Turns out, that was "Reflection". This smooth jazz piano is a little bit too Kenny G for me. I wish there was something stronger from these albums to go out on. But at least we have a falsetto goodbye. I just can't get into the 90s brass, or the soft cymbals. It just screams vaselined camera shooting white curtains flowing in the breeze. I want a better final bow. But I guess I'm part of the army of haters for this album. Only, I don't hate it. I just want more from it. I appreciate the eventual fuzzy guitar. I just wanted more of it. But I guess that's the trick. To leave us wanting more.

The end of this discography is nigh. This is the final full-length album, filling out his 2005-2011 music. It's less boring than Musicology, but it's still lacking a lot of early Prince flair.

Still, I wouldn't want to lose any of these songs, particularly "Breakfast Can Wait", from which this fictional album takes its name.

We start dark and effect heavy as the uncredited background vocalists tell you You need to Lay It Down. This is a futurefunk track. Like people from the 70s might have imagined funk would sound like in the 90s. The reference to being the purple yoda is cute, but would have been more powerful if he'd only said the line once.

The Guitar is aptly named. It sounds 100% Revolution-era Prince with an added guitar track from the 2000s. It's silly, fun, and danceable. If Prince has ever sounded more like Richard O'Brien (Riffraf / the playwright who wrote The Rocky Horror Show), I don't remember it.

The channels change on an old fashioned TV set, and the soft rock synths rain down with occasional piano trills as Prince extolls the virtues of a kiss on the neck, when she doesn't expect in the lyrically all-over-the-place Clouds, which Prince doesn't need. This is also the first time we hear Lianne La Havas as the future-voice guiding Prince out of his time being cryogenically frozen.

Charlie Murphy had a hilarious story about Prince on the Chapelle Show in 2001ish. Prince loved Chapelle's portrayal of him so much that he returned the satirical favor as he writes this goofy-ass love song about fucking instead of breakfast. Breakfast Can Wait. Parts of it legit sounds like Chapelle's Prince impersonation more than it sounds like Prince. Not the super up-pitch portions.

Le Havas is back for the affirmation intro to My Way Back Home. Here, Prince sings about how he never wanted a normal life, but, he, uh didn't want to be famous, he just wanted to be treated like he was famous? I think that's a pretty common desire.

All The Midnights In The World is a short, Christmas caroly sounding happy Prince song.

The future-funk comes back with Future Baby Mama, which has a riff and a vocal pattern that always makes me think of "Tomorrow" from Annie. The tracks flows right into

Sea Of Everything. The vocals are back in falsettotown, as Prince wonders what one of his old loves is up to without him. He makes a pun on his name in the chorus, which feels about thirty years late. Maybe he thinks the joke

gets Better With Time. Falsettotown Prince continues his journey of looking back, this time focusing on a relationship that's going well. So, maybe his marriage? Wouldn't that be nice.

Who is Chelsea Rogers? An unknown Prince lovechild? An ex? A current mistress? A fictional creation from Nelson's head? Whoever she is, Prince wrote a banger about her. Once again, the background vocals lift this up from a good song to a great one. Still got butt like a leather seat may be my favorite wtf lyric from 21st century Prince. The horns and bass on this track are on-point.

There's no mystery that Prince calls himself Mister Goodnight in this slow jam about his lovers' inability to keep secrets because he is So Good At Sex. His outro rap is ... not his best, but also not his worst.

Love Like Jazz sounds like head bopping 70s elevator fodder. So not the amazing jazz you might have been hoping for. The background vocals seem slightly off, but I think it's intentional. "Off, but intentionally" being a decent description of most 1970s soft rock.

And then we bring the disco in for 1970s dancin' (definitely no "g" here) to Lavaux, as Prince jams about ... using international vacations to get over the disappointing race relations in the US ? Maybe. It's a nice uptempo bass-funk song.

The One U Wanna C is almost a 1990s Sheryl Crow song. (Crow doesn't appear in this reimagined discography, but she does pop up at least twice in the real world discography.) Prince ain't tryin to be a hater here but he wants to remind you that his penis is still available. Ladies.

U're Gonna C Me seems to be the anti-"On The Couch" song, as Prince bought a bed for his main honey, and he spends this song lamenting that she's not in it with him. He's so sad and so in love that he references It's A Wonderful Life, or maybe this is a secret shout out to Scott Woods.

Another slow jam serves as the final track. This Could B Us is neither Prince's finest closing track, nor his most inspired jam. But it's definitely a windy encapsulation of his 2005-2011 output.

If you were to rank my Reimagined Discography from least favorite to favorite, Musicology would be on the bottom rung. Prince was throwing a lot of pasta at the wall, and it stuck. And contrary to 80s movies about Italians, that's a terrible way to test pasta. Any pasta that sticks to the wall is overdone. And the Musicology era is Overdone.

It's mixed to death. The production turns some otherwise perfectly listenable music into what sounds like the original material from a mediocre Prince cover band. Even many of the vocals fall flat.

There are at least three albums of instrumental tracks from this era, and two of them are great, and one of them is Yoga Prince bad. I probably could have switched Musicology out with Shut The Funk Up: The Best Of Instrumental Prince, but it isn't the path I chose.

So here's the songs from the early 2000s that I enjoy more than the other songs.

A plane lands. A guitar wammies. The vocals hit. I really loved Supercute when I first heard it, and for years afterward. It was an automatic choice for a first cut on this album. But when I was listening to it for editing purposes, it sounded muddy. This is the first Prince song that doesn't sound good on headphones. It sounds great on my computer, or over the sound system at work, but it just sounds ... swampy on headphones, and not in a deliberately creative awesome way. So take your headphones off and blast this perfectly fine, happy, catchy song about how much Prince is totally into someone.

Prince screeches his way into Daisy Chain next. It's synth-funky, and a perfect follow-up track. It's like a popular B-side to "Supercute" that you wish was on the actual album. The creepy effect laugh leads us right into

The Word. The vocals on this album so far have had a particular campfire sing along chorus effect. In this song Prince employs the people listening to let's get saved, which, unfortunately isn't a euphemism for sex. The lyrics are all Creepy Preacher Prince. Instead of a laugh, we go back to a screech.

Confession: I had already mixed this album before I heard of When Will We B Paid, but Prince's reparations B-side is, by a landslide, his best B-side from this era, and is better than a bunch of tracks on his actual albums. The lyrics are pretty basic. But it's not a topic Prince usually addresses as head-on as he does here. And the vocal mix on this track is A+.

A dance groove with a super irritating wheezing sound introduce us to Black Sweat. The wheeze drops as the lyrics hit, and the rest of the track is hand-clappy dance nonsense. But in a good way. If you've seen the video for the supposed Black Sweat dance, you know it's uninspired.

Turn off your cell phone, ladies. Now that the minimal "Black Sweat" has been perspired out of you, Prince is gonna get you Satisfied real soon. This has elements of Revolution-era Prince. A constant rising funk swell with an almost-falsetto vocal, and an occasional break that has him actually going falsetto. At 2:43, I don't think he got her very satisfied before he quit.

Te Amo Carazon is smokey, club, jazz number. It hits all the right notes, but it lacks Prince's usual vocal passion. I would love to hear a version recorded ten years earlier, or five years later. It's nearly a great song. Focusing more on his vocals and piano would have put it over the top.

People who only knew Prince from his hits might, mistakenly, assume Incense And Candles had pitch-corrected vocals because Prince was being trendy. Nah, if you've been listening to this discography, you know he had almost an entire album with pitched-up vocals in the mid-80s. But this track is the most pop-radio friendly / on-trend usage of the technology Prince has ever pulled off. He also has a decent rap about halfway through.

Perfect pop falsettotown and drums break through in the beginning of the timeless funk ballad, Call My Name. This is another track that could be on any Prince album, and would always be a highlight. This might be Prince's best 21st century song.

The Dance is Prince at his James Bondiest. The synth riff screams spy flick while Prince doesn't want to fall in love again. I'm sure that will stick. It gets more and more Eastern as the song goes on but never loses that espionage feeling.

A guitar lick and a phasing church organ. Prince is finally being sent to sleep On The Couch. This has been a long time coming. I do enjoy that he references everyone's favorite movie featuring Regie Gibson, Love Jones, while he tries to convince his partner that he shouldn't be punished. Prince, you DEFINITELY cheated on whoever has you on punishment. You are guilty. Even if they're wrong about this specific time. Grab some purple throw pillows and fetal-position it up, Mr. Falsetto.

Happier days abound in U Make My Sun Shine. Angie Stone is co-lead singer on this gospelly funk track.

Reflection jams like a late 90s Prince track with a generic 70s vocal. You can almost see two forty somethings falling in love, montage style, with this song playing in the background. A TV movie, not a film. A film would have had an actual 1970s jam. It's interesting to end this album with Prince finally acknowledging his ass (and most of the rest of him) is getting old.

On the border of the 21st century, I lost my love of Prince music. It wasn't his fault. Sure, he had oversaturated the market with a series of multiple disc collections of varying qualities, and his production sound changed radically when he left Warner Brothers, but I was also moving around with my five 100 Case Logic CD booklets, and not buying a ton of new music. I had done my time working in record stores, and had moved full time into the restaurant industry, where I got most of my music through their terrible licensed retail stations.

Being inundated with pop, and also moving to and living in a variety of hipster areas, I drowned myself in grunge, modern British rock, and whatever the hell that one popular Moby album was.

It wasn't until 2004 that I saw a video for "Muse 2 The Pharoah" and thought "Wait, what's Prince doing now?" But I didn't follow up for a couple of years. And by then, there were a hundred and fifty new Prince albums of varying quality, and I only knew one song from the whole bunch. So I arbitrarily concluded that I only liked 20th century Prince.

Now, I do *prefer* 20th century Prince. Like most artists fear, he was at his peak in his 20s and 30s, but there are still a few albums worth of good material from The Purple Yoda. Like my version of The Vault, there are a few covers on this album, but they're not better than his original 1999-2003ish songs. This collection is mostly from Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic (and the remixed Rave In2 The Joy Fantastic), The Vault (the actual Prince album, not my reimagined version), and The Rainbow Children.

I really didn't know until I was mixing, and editing, and relistening to, and reordering this album, how much I love the title track Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic. That intro draws me right in, and then falsettotown Prince getting his screech on, like it was the 80s again, matched with the spare guitar riffing, keeps me there for the whole track. Even the deliberately wonky horns and the mostly forgettable lyrics work together for a classic Prince track.

I've used the remix of Undisputed from the in2 album instead of the un2 album. Even though it's only been a couple of weeks since I put the album together, I can't remember why I disliked the original so much, but I did. The remix was a pleasant surprise. The opening get freeeeeeeeeeeeeee drags us into a funk dance party with robotic vocals. How you gonna get my back when you frontin' might be my favorite individual line from this album. Chuck D's verse is a decade and a half late, but it's a nice nostalgic trip.

Next up is the perfect groove of Muse 2 The Pharaoh. Some of the best latter-day Prince harmonies over a jazz drum and piano. It's ending drums lead right into

Man O War. This is a weirdly bullshit premise wherein Prince acts shocked that his partner has accused him of infidelity. Like, have you heard your own music, Prince. You clearly have wandering penis syndrome. And you just said that loving your partner is a waste of time. Oooof. I will throw this song in my catalogue of I Weirdly Know A Bunch Of Stuff About Lenny Kravitz, as he and his song "Fly Away" get namechecked here.

Now, in a stunning 180, Prince is always going to be supportive of his partner, no matter what, as Wherever U Go, Whatever U Do / (he) will always be there for you. Always being there for you is a tired musical trope that I never believe. Has Jon Bon Jovi really always been there for me? Mariah Carey? The Rembrandts? The Jackson Five? Nah. And neither has Prince. I mean, they're always somewhere, but for me? Nah.

There aren't enough Prince piano ballads. Eye Love U But I Don't Trust U is an utterly gorgeous 1970s style falsettotown croon. It almost sounds like a remixed track from his first album. The breathy echoes at the end of certain lines are a vocal trick I don't remember him employing on any other track, and it works really well.

Effects swallow the piano notes as we enter The Digital Garden, a harder drumbeat than we've heard for a while, but mixed with soft pop rock effects and more falsetto. This is one of the few tracks that I saved from The Rainbow Children. Most of the album has a low pitch corrected narration from Prince that I just don't enjoy. But this is a brief, oddly paced soft rock song that really works.

It takes Five Women to take us to the next track. This is a smokey bar, saxophoned night club jam. Joe Cocker released his cover about a decade before Prince released the original, and it's ... fine. It does sound like a Joe Cocker song, but it doesn't deviate too much. The only part of the cover that I wish Prince had employed was the focus on piano.

Mellow Mellow is a synth punctuated conversation between Prince and yet another person he's totally into right now. But in a mellow way. This is one of the many songs where he mentions eating (no, not like that). Offering a spot to go grab dinner. Usually, he's going on about breakfast, and the occasional noticing of what someone else has for lunch. It flows perfectly into

She Loves Me 4 Me. No, not because I look like Leonardo. It's great that there's someone to love Prince who isn't as judgey as Prince has been on pretty much every album.

An orchestral swell leads us into Old Friends 4 Sale, which sounds like something from a late 80s / early 90s noir film. Not an actually serious noir, something like Dick Tracy or Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Something that's an homage to the 1940s but it's all wrong, but in the most entertaining ways.

But cutting through the ending is the clear winner for best single from this album The Greatest Romance That's Ever Been Sold. The lyrics are generic Prince love lyrics but the hook is sharp, and the breathy echoes are back.

Don't hate me because I'm beautiful begins the first classic Prince funk song on this album, Prettyman. It is, remarkably, the first song I can think of where Prince admits to kissing his mirror and smelling himself. It's remarkable that we're this far into the discography and hearing this info for the first time. I also enjoy the James Browns-esque calling out of Maceo Parker.

The Rest Of My Life takes the mood from "Prettyman" and makes it softer, but still containing all the joy. And the saxophone.

The slow, low-pitched narration of The Rainbow Children album is not my favorite, but I needed it to bridge into that title track. Slow funk keeps the trite religious discussion of women that threads throughout his discography in the background. This is definitely a music, and not a lyric song for me. I love the intermittent guitar riffs and breakdowns. I just pretend the lyrics don't exist.

Closing out the album is one of Prince's perfect "credits start to roll" songs. The piano is back in full ballady force for How Come You Don't Call Me No More. A song that would feel at home on any of his albums. But always as the closer.

Prince made several double and triple albums. Occasionally, like with Lotusflow3r, one of the discs is noticeably different from the others (in that case, a different vocalist is featured on disc one), but for the most part, they just sounded like long, disjointed albums, or, more often than not, a series of tracks he didn't feel like thematically linking.

An Honest Man Vs. The Truth is intended as a single album, but more a record or cassette than a CD or modern non-physical album. There is a Side A and a Side B.

As a whole, this album is more guitar oriented than effect or pop oriented, the pop and effect elements are here, but they're not the focus. Side A has a very traditional Prince sound, but it strips away some of the layers he's been building on the albums that lead up to this. Side B, which is all from his sort of unreleased album, The Truth. (All of Prince's unreleased albums were eventually released in some format, otherwise I wouldn't have access to them.) The Truth is an "acoustic album", in that the emphasis is on acoustic instrumentation, but it also has engineering effects and other instruments added because that's what Prince wanted to do.

This album also feels like the most Beatlesque of Prince's work, which I love. And maybe a little Peter Framptony by the end.

I've done this several times, and I'll do it again here. The album starts with acapella Prince. A chorus effect. A religious lovey lyrical chorus. Then instruments swell in beneath the vocals. An Honest Man isn't his finest work, but it's a sweet, brief, Princey intro.

What's My Name creeps in under the opening track with Prince doing a gravelly, pondering voice over a filthy bass, and some exquisite drum breaks. I love the table tennis between the vocal sections, and then the instrumentation. I'm talking, I'm talking, the drums come in, the music goes crazy while I shut the fuck up, I'm talking, I'm talking. I love it.

From gravel we swoop up into falsettotown with Crucial, which could have come off of any Revolution-era album. It also could have come out of the 1940s, or been slapped on the B-side of "Betcha By Golly Wow". I love this style of Prince falsetto (he is one of the few artists who has more than one falsetto style).

The drums pound out of the previous track and then we go all Beatle-synthy for Strays Of The World, oh, we are still in falsettotown. It's clearer here, though. And Prince sprinkles the lyrics with some la-la-las. It ends with a very 1970s epic space guitar solo that would be perfect to fade "Purple Rain" into.

Instead we've got Prince rapping through the close with New Power Soul, not to be confused with the nearly instrumental funk song "New Powersoul", this is a silly Prince sing-speaking over some poppy effects. The lyrics are silly and about loving one another, coming together,  and getting freaky. But this song is less about lyrics and more about horns blending into a cheery song to make you smile. Macy Gray could be the vocalist on this track.

You'll be shocked to learn that Shoo-Bed-Ooh is also not a lyrical masterpiece. And it also sounds like a Macy Gray song. But, like, a really good one.

Some scat singing, howling, and horns, takes us into When You Love Somebody. Apart from the second track, this album has been pure joy, although with every sun shower there's pain. We also have one of Prince's clearest discussions of his polyamory, as he mentions how All my partners say that I need to dismiss ya / Until they see you smile / (Such a pretty smile) / All them fools are buggin' 'cause they just want your lovin' /In the backseat, huh, for a little while / (But I don't care).   Then a break hits, Prince begins rapping. Suddenly we're back in the philosophical funk of "What's My Name", but there's horns.

We're staying heavy and haunted now as Prince implores that body to Get Loose. It's just a heavy dance number that ends with a screech.

Closing out Side A, (An Honest Man) Prince counts us into a funk jam, Calhoun Square. Prince no longer cares what you look like, just as long as you're freaky. It is almost definitely the best song ever written about a shopping district in Minneapolis.

Side B starts us off with Fascination, which has a decidedly folk song feel. But it's the guitars that make this sound like a completely different artist than we've heard so far. Prince is, and always has been, a phenomenal guitarist. It's sometimes easy to forget when he plays the same style of guitar with the same style of effects, you just get used to it. But when he mixes it up, like he does on this Side B (The Truth), and when he did on The Undertaker, you get a whole new appreciation for his genius.

You can almost see Prince, standing in a sold out stadium, with just this acoustic guitar, the entire audience silenced by The Truth. He barely even plays the instrument while he's singing. He doesn't have to. My one complaint is the stupid ticking clock element before he talks about time. I should have edited it out. His screeching comes out of pretty much nowhere, and yet, is a perfect counterpoint to the rest of his spare, whispery vocals on this track.

A wave of rain sound and animal noises tide us into Animal Kingdom. It's interesting to hear the acoustic guitar mixed with the engineered into fuzziness vocals. The effects floating around the acoustic guitar give it a very haunted feel, especially when the fucken dolphins show up and start chattering.

In my sophomore year English class, another student wrote a poem about The Other Side Of The Pillow. It was not as good as this song. Croony Prince and the doo-woppy background vocals of this track make it an absolute treasure.

Dionne keeps the pluckfest going, as well as the 1940s vocal feel. As for the inspiration of this love song? "Dionne lives in London and knows quite well the heart she broke. All Dionnes r heartbreakers!"

A bass drum and some effects take us into the follow-up, One Of Your Tears, which according to Dionne Farris, the alleged inspiration for the previous track, is a factual account of a mail exchange where he sent her a copy of an early version of "Dionne", and she sent him back a used condom. I guess Dionne doesn't fuck around, either.

Comeback sounds so incredibly mid-90s alternative acoustic that it could have been recorded by any recently hair-chopped feel-good rock band. They definitely used the footage from their Unplugged episode as the video. This track would make zero sense on any other Prince album.

Circle Of Amour is a happy, acoustic song about the power of loving high school friendships as only Prince could imagine them. We go from circle of friends to circle of sex because Prince.

The only super serious song on this Side B is Don't Play Me and it is the musical equivalent of that gif where Prince rolls his eyes in exasperation. Like, who would bother to mess with Prince, anyhow? Besides Dionne. And maybe Charlie Murphy.

The album ends with Welcome To The Dawn, a mystical acoustic song with some Yoga Prince effects in the background, and more of his religous-focused lyrics. But also with occasional talk boxing. A sweet way to use effects to close out the acoustic-focused (Truth).