Piano & A Microphone 1983

This album takes you under the piano, so to speak, witnessing genius casually at work.

While the session is informal--he sniffles now and then, and at times something rattles in the piano--the performance is not sloppy for a moment. The one-take, real-time vocals are exquisite. .. He shifts musical styles and vocal personae at whim--melancholy, playful, devout, flirtatious--yet it’s all Prince. ... It’s a glimpse of a notoriously private artist doing his mysterious work.

The “new” material on Piano & a Microphone has already circulated as bootlegs, but this album clarifies its details, rescues it from indistinct hiss.

Despite its intimacy, Piano & A Microphone doesn’t feel like trespassing on Prince because it doesn’t truly expose him. This recording doesn’t reveal the nuts-and-bolts inner workings of one of the greatest artists of all time. How could it? We get to listen as a visionary works with simple tools--and in the end, Prince’s genius remains as mysterious as ever.

Intriguing abandoned avenues and sketches towards masterpieces. [Nov 2018, p.115]

Apart from its near-voyeuristic intimacy, Piano & A Microphone is most interesting when one imagines what this session meant to Prince at the time.

It’s an intensely intimate experience, appropriately voyeuristic and transgressive for a songwriter who wrote about both things so well. The versions of Prince’s better-known songs may disappoint some--Purple Rain is a meandering snippet--but what stays with you is the sense of talent, hardening to genius.

A fitting subtitle could be “Everything You Know About Funk is Wrong,” thanks to a couple of flat-out stunning solo performances on this session. This is not the Holy Grail of lost or shelved Prince albums.

As insightful as it is, Piano & A Microphone is also imperfect: You can hear him flub the rhythm and adjust the tone of his voice. But that’s also part of what makes it so moving now. Here is a truly spontaneous moment, something we can share with a departed icon, his 88 keys and anyone kind enough to dim the lights.

His piano-playing is a joy, his vocals a dramatis personae of lively characters. ... The whole thing feels--thrillingly, poignantly--like you're in the room with him. [Oct 2018, p.84]

Piano & A Microphone 1983 verges on postmortem voyeurism, but it’s also a unique insight into the way a notoriously private artist’s creative impulses fired.

This collection, and its atmosphere of sharing a bench with the 20th century’s Mozart as he explores still nascent songs, is an appropriately seductive tease to what will doubtless be a decades-long unearthing of the vault’s untold treasures. The songs themselves, as they’re presented here, really are secondary to this feeling, something like finding a just unearthed message from a departed loved one. [Dec 2018, p.69]

The first half of Piano & a Microphone 1983 unfolds as a kind of stream-of-consciousness medley. ... The album’s three previously unreleased songs are also of note, even if they’re just rough drafts.

The whole affair plays like the listener is eavesdropping on Prince creating, and there simply can't be a reissue more valuable than that.

It’s Prince as few have heard him: inspired, unrestrained, playing for no one but himself and the engineer who pushed the record button. Clearly this isn’t for everyone. But those looking for a glimpse into the artist, mostly pre-global fame, working out new and old material, will find it an invaluable and unique addition to his already bulging catalog.