• The music makes the musician immortal. (loc. 109-110)
  • Prince touched many of us individually and his music spoke to us in our core, so his loss is extremely intimate and, unfortunately, we will rarely have the chance to share the excitement of hearing it again with crowds of other fans. (loc. 167-168)
  • ‘You’ve got to make visual records.’ The record has got to put you in a place where you visualize something.” (p. 62)
  • “I wanted to shoot there, so I was looking at everything, and then he started playing that song, and I stopped and went, ‘Whoa.’ He finished playing, and I said, ‘That’s the song.’ And so I went up to him after the set, and I said, ‘That song that you did, that one up there, that could be the song,’ and he said, ‘Wow. Okay,’ because he himself hadn’t even thought of it. I asked what’s the name of it and he said, ‘Purple Rain,’ and I said, ‘Okay,’ and he said, ‘Can we call the movie Purple Rain?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s the name of the movie.’” (p. 116)
  • I think I’m only a conductor of whatever electricity comes from the world, or wherever we all come from. (p. 127)
  • Prince would also sample Numan’s “Remember I Was Vapour” (also from Telekon) in his original 1988 version of “Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic.” (p. 133)
  • My music wants to do what it wants to do, and I just want to get out of its way. (p. 148)
  • Prince guitarist Miko Weaver reflected on this when discussing his time with Prince in the studio: “He’ll put down tons of tracks, everything he can think of, then listen back and take what he wants. What ends up on the final mix may be just a fraction of what’s on the tape.” (p. 154)
  • Regardless of who was there, the most important part of the story remains the same: Prince decided to remove the bass, which changed everything. He would do this again a few months later on “Around the World in a Day” and on “Kiss” in April 1985. (p. 273)
  • The funny thing is that they would come, but it was very frustrating living your life knowing that at any moment, someone could call you and you’d have to go into work? It wasn’t only these singers and string players that had to do this, it was also me! And that isn’t a very fun way to live your life. (p. 287)
  • For a man whose entire life appeared to be focused on creating new music, the prospect of having to repeat the same songs over and over for the rest of his career must have been like a prison sentence. (p. 446)
  • As Prince himself said, “All my life is in my records.” (p. 448)