Released in September 2014, Prince’s first new album in four years, PLECTRUMELECTRUM, blasted through the silence as a largely straight-up funk-rock record co-credited to Prince and his newly formed all-female backing trio, 3rdEyeGirl. Issued on the same day as the futuristic electro-pop of ART OFFICIAL AGE, it presented not only Prince the guitar virtuoso but also Prince the mentor, sharing his stage with up-and-coming talent that helped him connect with a younger audience. “I think the kids in this generation need music. Real music,” 3rdEyeGirl’s drummer, Hannah Welton-Ford, said around the time of the album’s release. With PLECTRUMELECTRUM, Prince sought to fulfil that need.
Listen to ‘PLECTRUMELECTRUM’ here.
The backstory: “We didn’t know that it was actually maybe part of a plan”
An industry disruptor long before the “move fast and break things” era, Prince was uniquely attuned to the vagaries of the music industry. Always seeking ways to sidestep the established channels, he’d pioneered internet distribution in the mid-90s and given his 2010 album, 20Ten, away for free with select newspapers in the UK and Europe. But though the gap that followed would be the longest he’d ever allowed between records, Prince was leery of the trends that were shaping the new decade: “We’re in a singles market again,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 2012. “It’s crazy for me to walk into that with a new album.”
New music, however, still flowed from the ever-prolific artist’s Paisley Park studio complex, with Prince occasionally gifting songs to radio stations in cities where he’d arranged shows with his long-running band, The New Power Generation. In December 2012, however, the much-bootlegged artist seemed to have met his match when a self-described “international art thief” calling themselves 3rdEyeGirl began posting unreleased songs and band rehearsals on social media. After Prince’s recently recruited bandmates, Canadian guitarist Donna Grantis, Danish bassist Ida Nielsen and Kentucky-born drummer Hannah Ford-Welton, shared videos of themselves protesting their innocence, a cease-and-desist letter, purportedly sent out from the Prince camp, brought the leaks to a halt.
“We were just goofing around,” Ford-Welton later told this author, for an interview in Record Collector magazine. “We were just trying to make these mysterious videos,” Nielsen added, “and didn’t know that it was actually maybe part of a plan.”
Forming 3rdEyeGirl: “She can play better than anyone and she can look better while doing it”
Nielsen had been part of Prince’s New Power Generation since 2010, and her transition to 3rdEyeGirl happened seamlessly after Prince discovered both Ford-Welton and Grantis on YouTube and invited them out to Paisley Park. (Prince later admitted to being “struck” by Grantis’ trademark half-shaved hairstyle: “She can play better than anyone and she can look better while doing it,” he said.)
Proving they could hold their own during rigorous 12-hour rehearsals, with sessions often lasting until six in the morning, the group made their first public appearance on 18 January 2013, during the final night of a three-night residency Prince staged at Minneapolis’ Dakota Jazz Club. Their official naming came six weeks later, when Jimmy Fallon introduced Prince and the band on his late-night talk show, holding up the 3rdEyeGirl logo and revealing that the group had been this enigmatic entity all along – even if they didn’t know it themselves. “We were like: I guess that’s our name!” Grantis told Record Collector.
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Naturally, Prince could bank high-profile TV slots, but he was determined to have his new group rise through the ranks the old-school way: by sheer graft on the club circuit. “We’ll work our way up, if people like us, to bigger venues,” Prince told the UK press when he took 3rdEyeGirl to the UK in early 2014, for a series of guerilla shows he dubbed Hit N Run. Before that, the Live Out Loud Tour saw the band strafe US audiences with a mix of original numbers and reworked Prince classics in what Minneapolis music critic and longtime Prince-watcher Jon Bream declared to be “the most exciting Prince show I’ve seen since probably the Sign O’ The Times Tour in 1987”. By the summer of 2013, they were booking festival slots in Stockholm and, as part of an expanded NPG line-up, at Montreux Jazz Festival.
The recording: “All of a sudden we had this long list of songs”
As 3rdEyeGirl honed their chops on stage, Prince tracked their progress in the studio, recording new songs such as Screwdriver and FIXURLIFEUP and issuing them as standalone releases. “He’s been bringing all the songs,” Ida Nielsen told this author, yet Prince also knew when to draw upon his bandmates’ ideas. Eventually becoming PLECTRUMELECTRUM’s title track, a near-five-minute instrumental penned by Donna Grantis was, with Prince’s aid, worked up into a textured, riff-heavy piece that fooled gig-goers into thinking it was a cover of Led Zeppelin’s The Ocean, from 1973’s Houses Of The Holy album. “What he did with that was epic – and I love it because everybody’s personality shines through,” Grantis said.
