Quote of the Week...from Prince

Seems that I was busy doing something next to nothing, but different than the day before."
                                                                        ---Prince

Prince, as I hope you already well know, was an extraordinarily talented and driven American popular musician from Minnesota.  He was most famous during the 1980s, especially 1983-84 when he produced first his breakthrough album 1999 and then Purple Rain, the latter paired with a blockbuster movie starring himself.  "Prince" had always been his name...he was named at birth Prince Rogers Nelson.  But in the 1990s during a dispute with his then-record label he shed the "Prince" name in favor of an unpronounceable symbol, for years thereafter referred to as "the Artist Formerly Known as Prince".  By the turn of the century, though, he resumed his Prince moniker, inspiring me to call him "the Artist Formerly Known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince".  That tomfoolery aside, Prince was a remarkably creative songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, accounting for an astounding 39 complete studio albums over 38 years before his untimely, tragic demise in April, 2016.  Many of his songs, especially earlier in his career, had explicitly sexual themes and language...well, I'm finally ready to plow through all of it, cringeworthy lyrics or not: I've decided to explore each and every one of his albums during the next few weeks.  After all, the current music scene as I see it is falling pretty short in my estimation: many of my favorite acts aren't releasing anything new this year, except for Sufjan Stevens'  The Ascension album coming out two weeks from now.  There's only one standout song I've heard this year: EOB's Shangri-La (EOB is Ed O'Brien, Radiohead guitarist).  So if all goes well with my listening, my "top songs of 2020" will likely consist of Shangri-La, a few from The Ascension, and a lot from Prince.  It'll be a bit like in 2016 when I reviewed all 27 of David Bowie's studio albums after his death that year in January, coming up with several treasures in the process.  As for the above Prince quote, it's from my favorite song of his, Raspberry Beret, and ties in a little to my blog article yesterday about making small daily changes in my life.  The irony for Prince, a very self-disciplined, hard worker, is that he never was busy doing something next to nothing...but trying new things was a deeply ingrained habit that he kept throughout his creative life...