Leaving the Revolution behind
Sign o’ the Times arrived in spring 1987 as Prince’s ninth album and his first billed as a solo artist after he dissolved the Revolution. It did not start out as one record. Across 1986 and into 1987 he assembled and then scrapped a project called Dream Factory, a second effort recorded under the androgynous stage name Camille, and finally a planned triple LP titled Crystal Ball. Warner Bros. would not release a three-disc set, so Prince cut the running order down, dropped seven songs and folded in the newly written title track. What survived is still a double album, sixteen songs and eighty minutes, built from the wreckage of three different ideas about who he wanted to be that year rather than from a single plan.
One man, several machines
Prince cut most of Sign o’ the Times by himself, playing drum machine, guitar, bass, keyboards and sampler across a handful of rooms: Sunset Sound in Hollywood, One on One in North Hollywood, and two home studios on Galpin Boulevard and Kiowa Trail. The Linn drum machine carries most of the rhythm tracks, and a Fairlight sampler stands in for whole sections of a band, using its factory sounds rather than custom samples on the title cut. Engineer Susan Rogers has described him working vocals alone in the control room, mic turned away from her, finishing songs at a pace she likened to a string of sneezes. A malfunctioning desk during The Ballad of Dorothy Parker left a wobbly, submerged quality that stayed in the mix instead of being fixed.
The Camille voice
The record’s strongest moments come from the friction between control and looseness. Housequake and U Got the Look move with the snap of a one-man band who has practised every part separately and only just put them together. If I Was Your Girlfriend, sung in the pitched-up voice, turns a fairly plain question about intimacy into something genuinely strange, closer to a private confession than a come-on. The title track pairs a dry drum-machine pulse with a plainspoken account of gang violence and crack cocaine, refusing to dress the subject up. Adore closes things on pure vocal performance, a long, unhurried soul ballad that trusts the singer over the arrangement. None of it needs the next track to justify it; each song argues for itself.
Songs that argue with themselves
At eighty minutes and sixteen tracks, the album resists easy sequencing, and a few songs feel like they belong to an earlier, discarded version of the project rather than to this one. The pitched-up Camille vocal, so effective on the best tracks, occasionally reads as a gimmick when the song underneath it is thinner, and some of the funk workouts lean on a groove without adding much new to it. Because so much was recorded solo and quickly, a handful of arrangements sound underdeveloped next to the more fully realised centrepieces, as though Prince trusted momentum to carry ideas that needed one more pass. Anyone expecting the tighter, single-minded pop of his mid-decade run may find the sprawl exhausting rather than generous.
Where the seams show
Prince spent the record moving between the carnal and the devotional without treating them as opposites. The Cross sets a plea about faith against a heavy, Eastern-tinged guitar figure, sung with more urgency than polish. Forever in My Life and Hot Thing sit desire and spiritual longing in the same verse, as if one were simply an extension of the other. The Camille persona lets him sing across a gender line without commentary, treating the shift as a fact of the recording rather than a statement. Running through all of it is a sense of a year — 1986 into 1987 — that Prince refused to smooth over: violence in the news, sex without apology, and belief treated as one more urgent subject among the rest.
Who it’s for
This is a record for listeners who want to hear an artist working without a co-writer or a producer to check his instincts, and who do not mind an album that changes shape every few songs. Fans of the tighter, hookier Prince of the earlier eighties may find the scale off-putting, and anyone wanting a coherent theme from start to finish will keep bumping into the seams left by three abandoned projects. It rewards patience and repeat plays more than a single sitting. Listeners drawn to home-studio recordings, drum-machine funk, or an artist testing an alter ego in public will get the most from it; those after a tidy, radio-ready hour should look elsewhere in his catalogue.
A comeback that outgrew the word
Yes, and by a wide margin. Sign o’ the Times succeeds precisely because it refuses to be the follow-up anyone asked for, choosing instead to show an artist rebuilding his own methods in public after losing his band. Its unevenness is part of its case: this is what happens when someone with total control chooses ambition over consistency. Decades on, and especially since Prince’s death, the record has held up as the fullest single account of what he could do alone in a room with a handful of machines. It is long, occasionally rough, and never boring, which is a rarer combination than the reputation of a classic double album usually implies.