BY: Denver Sean
Published 11 years ago
Prince is serving pure face on the cover of the Fall 2013 issue of V magazine.
Aside from the stunning photos, Prince opens up about being on tour and shares his complex thoughts when it comes to time and living in the moment.
Check out a few excerpts.
Prince rests his thin, elegant hands on top of the cane and speaks quietly—he expended his voice during the shows, and now he’s saving it—but never averts his gaze. Framed by thick lashes, his extremely large, liquid eyes seem to occupy half his face.
He takes a breath and then begins a long monologue: “This organization is diferent than most, in the sense that we don’t take directions from the outside world. It’s like a galaxy. The sun is in the center giving of energy, and everything revolves around it.” He talks about what it would be like if instead of the sun giving of energy, energy was trying to exert its force on the sun. That wouldn’t make a lot of sense. It would be, he says, like “meteors hitting a planet!” What makes much more sense is “a sun pulling everything around on its own axis, with information. The sun is information. Nobody really talks to me. Nobody talks to me a lot.” He points at Ramadan. “I talk to her. She talks to you. She talks to Richard. And so on and so forth. If I trust her, then you can trust her.”
Prince likes this system. “I directed a couple flms and it was taxing in that people were asking me questions about their jobs.” He much prefers peace and calm. “I have to be quiet to make what I make, do what I do.” He takes a breath. “Another thing that’s different about this organization is that time here is slowed down, because we don’t take information from the outside world. We don’t know what day it is and we don’t care. There is no clock.”
Living in the now, he says, makes the tour go by very quickly. Indeed he couldn’t tell me how long he’s been on tour because he only counts the hours he’s actually onstage when he thinks about it. So in the last month, “I’ve only been on tour for two days,” he says. “That’s the work.”
He seems to have come to the end of this thought, so I look down at my questions, unsure if I should ask the frst one again. Better not. “Your shows are wonderful, obviously, but known to be very unpredictable,” I say. “How do you decide what you are going to play?”
“I decide in the moment,” he says. “I change the set list right then and there.” He also takes into account the state of his guitar. “To play solos the way I’m playing them, the guitar goes out of tune sometimes. It’s just a piece of wood.”
“What happened with The Roots’ guitarist’s guitar, the one that you threw after your performance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon?” I ask.
“What?” he says.
“Didn’t you borrow a guitar from him and then throw it after your set? It was all over the news.”
“No,” he replies, straight-faced. “Another thing that’s diferent about this organization is that we don’t think about that,” he says, pointing at the TV.
You can read the full interview here.