April 3 - Sometimes It Snows In April

Prince is a genius. Yup, I really believe that. I don't always like what he does, and I haven't always liked him, but the switch eventually flipped, and I consider his mid-80s output from 1984's Purple Rain through 1987's Sign O' The Times to be one of the best strings of pop records ever recorded. Some will balk at the exclusion of 1999 (from 1982) and Lovesexy (from 1988), but this is still my blog - and my taste. I liked the albums that came after better than the ones that came before, and I like both of the aforementioned albums - just not as well as the 84-87 output.

Like I said, I didn't always like Prince. It is similar to my intense dislike for Michigan State, which started with just a slight preference for University of Michigan that became amplified as a protest to the "way too vocal to be healthy for any team" support I encountered for MSU - so now I obnoxiously support any team that plays MSU - including Middle Tennessee State University. It was a little bit of that with Prince as well. I didn't really have anything against him, I just wasn't sold on him. But I had friends, especially Svein and Are, who really liked him and talked a lot about him, so my inner contrarian eventually kicked in full force.

However, at one point, I think it was not too long after the friendship with Svein started getting closer, Svein actually convinced me to start listening to Prince. We were starting to play together a little, and one of the songs he suggested was The Cross from Sign O' The Times. After hearing it, I was blown away. Although I couldn't identify with the lyrics, I did recognize how good they were - and it rocked harder than a lot of what I was listening to. Discovering his edge made me listen - and then I fully discovered his abilities as a guitar player, which are highly underrated. All of this made me ask Svein to get a stack of his CDs for me when he went to the US to study - and I fully committed to this eccentric Minnesotan.

Today's song is inspired by the snow storm I drove through yesterday, even though that's really not what this song is about. It's a hauntingly beautiful jazz-tinged ballad from Parade (1986) called Sometimes It Snows In April. Unfortunately, Prince appears to be patrolling YouTube a little bit too closely, but my fellow countryman Espen Lind has a decent cover version of it - but get the original!