Sign o' the Times

Background

Prior to the disbanding of The Revolution, Prince was working on two separate projects: The Revolution album Dream Factory and a pseudonymous solo effort, Camille. Unlike the three previous band albums, Dream Factory included input from the band members and featured songs with lead vocals by Wendy & Lisa. The Camille project saw Prince create an androgynous persona primarily singing in a sped-up, female-sounding voice. With the dismissal of The Revolution, Prince consolidated material from both shelved albums, along with some new songs, into a three-LP album to be titled Crystal Ball. Warner Bros. forced Prince to trim the triple album to a double album.

Recording

As with many of Prince's early 1980s albums, this album features extensive use of the Linn LM-1 drum machine on most songs. In addition, many songs on the album (such as "If I Was Your Girlfriend") feature minimal instrumentation, and use of the Fairlight CMI, a then state-of-the-art digital sampler. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Prince used the stock sounds of the Fairlight to create the title track. Four of the album's standout songs, "Housequake", "Strange Relationship", "U Got the Look" with Sheena Easton, and "If I Was Your Girlfriend" offer sped-up vocals, ostensibly the voice of "Camille", Prince's alter ego of this era. Of the album's diverse and varied collection of styles, AllMusic stated that "Prince shows nearly all of his cards here, from bare-bones electro-funk and smooth soul to pseudo-psychedelic pop and crunching hard rock, touching on gospel, blues, and folk along the way."

Prince was known for recording his vocals in the control room area of the studio. Typically, in the recording process, a vocalist records in the recording booth, separated from the control room by a window or soundproof door. To have privacy during the vocal recording process, Prince usually asked his engineer, Susan Rogers, to leave the room. Rogers recalls:

We'd get the track halfway or three-quarters of the way there and then set him up with a microphone in the control room. He'd have certain tracks on the multi-track that he would use and he'd do the vocal completely alone. I think that was the only way he could really get the performance.

On some occasions, Prince recorded vocals with his back to her. Rogers monitored the vocals with a pair of headphones so Prince's recording microphone would not pick up the speakers she would usually have used. Prince typically used a Sennheiser 441 dynamic microphone (recommended to him by Stevie Nicks) for recording vocals at this stage in his career.

Though Sign o' the Times was regarded as "less polished" than his earlier efforts, Rogers points out that "we spent more time and money on Sign o' the Times than anything he'd ever done. Much more work went into it."

Two of the album's songs were first recorded in 1982: "Strange Relationship" and "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man". Prince did additional work on both for their placement on the Dream Factory project and involved the "Wendy & Lisa" partnership of Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman on the former. When the project was canceled, "Strange Relationship" was further updated for Camille. The remaining tracks were recorded between March and December 1986. The surviving Camille tracks feature a playful sped-up vocal. "U Got the Look" was also recorded in this manner, though it was not intended for the Camille album.

Reception

Sign o' the Times produced three top-ten hit singles, the most from a Prince album since Purple Rain in 1984, although it sold modestly. It was his most critically acclaimed record. Bart Bull, writing for Spin magazine in 1987, said that Prince's loosely organized songs are "genius" rather than indulgent and that, although there is no song as groundbreaking as "Girls & Boys", "nobody else's outtakes would sound so strong, rock so hard, swing so free." Robert Christgau of The Village Voice said that the album is not a "formal breakthrough", but rather "the most gifted pop musician of his generation proving what a motherfucker he is for two discs start to finish." He particularly praised Prince's "one-man band tricks" and multi-tracked vocals, which he said "make Stevie Wonder sound like a struggling ventriloquist" and express real emotions: "The objects of his desire are also objects of interest, affection, and respect. Some of them he may not even fuck." Sign o' the Times was voted as the best album of 1987 in The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop critics' poll. According to Christgau, the poll's creator, the album was "easily the biggest winner" in the poll's history and "established Prince as the greatest rock and roll musician of the era—as singer-guitarist-hooksmith-beatmaster, he has no peer." The title track "Sign o' the Times" was named the best single of 1987 in the poll, while "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" and "U Got the Look" were also voted within the top 10.

In a retrospective review, Keith Harris of Blender called Sign o' the Times a "masterpiece" and comments that "never has [Prince's] curiosity about women strayed into so many unpredictable corners." Simon Price deemed it Prince's best album, as did Michaelangelo Matos, who wrote in The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004) that it was "the most complete example of his artistry's breadth, and arguably the finest album of the 1980s". Matos also believed it was "the last classic R&B album prior to hip-hop's takeover of black music and the final four-sided blockbuster of the vinyl era". Slant Magazine's Eric Henderson deemed it a "double-disc blowout of sweat, funk, and raw, concentrated talent".

In 1989, Time Out magazine ranked it as the greatest album of all time. In December 1989, Robert Smith of The Cure cited Sign o' the Times amongst the best things about the eighties according to him. The album was ranked number 16 on the New Musical Express list of the All Time Top 100 Albums, 3rd in Hot Press magazine's list of the 100 Best Albums of All Time, and number 35 on VH1's 100 Greatest Albums. The album was also placed 8th on Nieuwe Revu's Top 100 Albums of All Time. The Times listed Sign o' the Times as the 29th greatest album of all time. In 2003, the album was ranked number 93 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. In 2006, Q magazine placed the album at number 12 in its list of "40 Best Albums of the '80s". In 2012, Slant Magazine listed the album at number 11 on its list of "Best Albums of the 1980s" saying "Sign o' the Times is Prince's most varied album and his most self-consciously auteurish".

Track listing

All songs written and composed by Prince, except where noted.

1. "Sign o' the Times" – 4:57
2. "Play in the Sunshine" – 5:05
3. "Housequake" – 4:42
4. "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker" – 4:01

Side two

5. "It" – 5:09
6. "Starfish and Coffee" (Prince, Susannah Melvoin) – 2:50
7. "Slow Love" (Prince, Carole Davis) – 4:22
8. "Hot Thing" – 5:39
9. "Forever in My Life" – 3:30

Side three

10. "U Got the Look" (featuring Sheena Easton) – 3:47
11. "If I Was Your Girlfriend" – 5:01
12. "Strange Relationship" – 4:01
13. "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" – 6:29

Side four

14. "The Cross" – 4:48
15. "It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night" (Prince, Doctor Fink, Eric Leeds) – 9:01
16. "Adore" – 6:30

Personnel

Singles

1. "Sign o' the Times"
2. "La, La, La, He, He, Hee" lyrics jointly written by Sheena Easton

1. "If I Was Your Girlfriend"
2. "Shockadelica"

1. "U Got the Look"
2. "Housequake"

1. "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man"
2. "Hot Thing" (#63 US, #14 US R&B)