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prince

32 years after virtuosic rocker Prince and Australian pop princess Kylie Minogue teamed up for a collaboration, their-previously unheard efforts have now reportedly been leaked online.

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The track, titled “Baby Doll”, has been discussed at length by fans of the Purple One, with its origins tracing back to the Australian leg of Prince’s Diamonds and Pearls tour in April and May of 1992. Recorded at Sydney’s Studios 301 during his visit to the country, Prince and Minogue reportedly connected during the former’s performance at London’s Earl’s Court in June of the same year.

“We just kind of hung out,” Minogue told Zane Lowe in 2020. “I don’t even know what that means, but we hung out and he kind of put me on the spot a bit. He was like, ‘So where are your lyrics?’”

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The pair reportedly continued their discussions before Prince sent his driver to Minogue’s apartment with a tape of his efforts. “There’s a cassette in my hand with Prince singing, a song called ‘Baby Doll,’ that I kind of was involved with, but he who slept four hours a night or something and just created stuff the rest of the other 20 hours,” she remembered. “That was my almost, we didn’t record it.”

Ultimately, the track didn’t receive the full studio treatment due to Minogue’s label nixing the idea.

The newly-leaked version of the track arrived on Friday (Dec. 16) via the New Paisley Generation YouTube account and features the same lyrics that Minogue confirmed in 2018 to have written for the collaboration.

Per the upload’s description, “Baby Doll” was one of the tracks from Prince’s Vault that were planned to be included on an intended project called Diamonds and Love in 2022. This release would have included unreleased material recorded during the sessions for 1991’s Diamonds and Pearls album and 1992’s Love Symbol record.

A deluxe reissue of the late artist’s Diamonds and Pearls album emerged in 2023, but was limited solely to the material recorded prior to the record’s original release in October 1991 – ultimately excluding the track.

According to U.K. publication The Sun, a source explained that “Kylie is just as baffled as everyone else as to where the track has come from.

“It was initially delivered to her on a cassette back in the Nineties and since Prince’s death in 2016, belonged to his estate,” they said. “Any leak is annoying but it’s nice for fans to finally know what the mystery song sounds like, God knows they have waited long enough.

“As for what will happen now if anything, fans will have to wait and see.”

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A batch of rare and never-before-seen Prince photos are being released to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the late music icon’s Purple Rain album. The collection, released by Sonic Editions earlier this week, coincides with what would have been Prince’s 66th birthday on Friday (June 7).

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Sonic Editions partnered with the photographers and picture archives to release limited-edition photo prints of music stars including Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin, Aerosmith, Snoop Dogg, Tupac Shakur, Bruce Springsteen and more.

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Prince’s legendary album, released on June 25, 1984, marked a lot of career milestones. Aside from being his first LP to top the Billboard 200, where it remained for 24 weeks, Purple Rain was certified 13x platinum by the RIAA, it sold more than 25 million copies globally and spawned classics such as “When Doves Cry” “Let’s Go Crazy” “I Would Die for You” and the title track.

Sonic Editions’ Prince prints range from $149 -$499 for small (14 x 11 inches), medium (20 x 16 inches) and large (24 x 20 inches) sizes. The XL-XXL prints — measuring 20 x 16 inches and 37 x 26 inches — are priced between $699 -$1,199.

Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ Rare Photo Collection

Sonic Editions

Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ Rare Photo Collection

Sonic Editions

Purple Rain took home a Grammy for best rock vocal performance by a duo or group and was accompanied by a musical film released July 27, 1984. The album earned multiple Grammy nominations, including album of the year, while the film went on to win an Oscar for best original song score.

In addition to the photo release, Prince will be honored in a musical tribute at his Paisley Park home from June 20-24. The annual celebration will feature The Revolution – Wendy, Lisa, Bobby Z, Brownmark and Dr. Fink – taking the stage in honor of Purple Rain’s 40th anniversary. Morris Day (who appeared in Purple Rain) is scheduled to perform along with New Power Generation. The celebration will include a block party in downtown Minneapolis on Saturday, June 22, in addition to themed panels, DJ dance parties, screenings of films from the Purple Rain era and other surprises to be announced.

Like many good things, it started with a deep dive into yacht rock. 
Scott Barkham, who manages the experimental soul outfit Hiatus Kaiyote, was trawling Spotify’s less-traveled byways looking for hidden yacht rock gems when he happened across “Dreaming,” a snappy-yet-plush track by the 23-year-old singer-songwriter-producer Gareth Donkin. “It was really well constructed and executed,” Barkham recalls. “So I investigated further.” On Instagram, he found a video of Donkin covering Bobby Caldwell’s wistful 1980 classic “Open Your Eyes.” “That really got my attention,” Barkham says. He now co-manages Donkin.

Donkin’s debut album Welcome Home, which is out Friday (Aug. 24) on the young label drink sum wtr, is grounded in immaculate R&B from the late 1970s and early 1980s — delicate falsetto, giddily elaborate vocal harmonies, opulent keyboards, nimble bass lines. There are echoes of Debarge, Kenny Loggins, Quincy Jones‘ productions for George Benson and James Ingram, and a host of fragile soul ballads that seem on the verge of evaporating like smoke before a stiff breeze.

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“I really love that classic sound, and I feel like that’s a hole in today’s scene,” Donkin says. “Some people like Silk Sonic and Tom Misch are killing it by revisiting that.” His goal: “Bringing the character from that era’s music” into the present.

Growing up in France near the Swiss border, Donkin started playing piano at age eight and became addicted to the production software program Ableton at 13, the year before he moved to London. “I’ve had such a fascination with music and the creation of it since, well, forever,” he says. “Around the house we were always listening to Prince, Stevie Wonder, Jamiroquai, all the greats.” 

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While Donkin spent some time playing drums, he mostly works with keyboards and technology to translate his ideas. “I can hear parts and find MIDI instruments or very realistic sounding samples to realize and execute those,” he explains matter-of-factly. “A lot of the songs I’ve made I’ve kind of written up here” — he points to his forehead — “before even coming to the piano and playing it out.”

His music found a wider audience in 2019 with “Catharsis,” which contrasts airy, mercurial vocals and a needlepoint guitar solo with an unwavering neo-soul beat. “That was the first fully fleshed-out song that I wrote and recorded vocals over,” Donkin says.  It “caught the eyes and ears of the wider producer/songwriter community on Soundcloud and Spotify. This led to a lot of collaboration opportunities, and music platforms such as Soulection to discover my music and [in turn] put a lot of people onto it.”

Much of the music on Welcome Home was started the following year, during the tumult of the pandemic. Isolation, despite its many drawbacks, did not hamper Donkin’s ability to conjure a sumptuous sound — “Nothing We Can’t Get Through” and “Tell Me Something” come on like they’re auditioning for inclusion on the back half of Michael Jackson‘s Off the Wall. (The reference point he cited for the string arrangement on the former was Disney scores.)

For more oomph, there’s “‘Til the End of Time (Night Sky),” a harmony showcase underpinned by a tricky, propulsive beat that stutter-steps like Al Green’s “I’m Glad You’re Mine,” and “Something Different,” a bright, crunchy, just-too-slow-to-disco track with a virtuosic, head-nodding outro. (That outro is “the oldest part of the record;” Donkin wrote the chords at age 18 while sitting in an airport in Greece.)

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After Barkham heard “Dreaming” — and found that he had already saved “Catharsis” to his library on a previous Spotify discovery expedition — he reached out to Donkin. “When I really love the artistry, I’ll offer my help,” Barkham says. Soon he was listening to an earlier version of Welcome Home. Donkin “was referencing Ashford & Simpson, obscure yacht rock like Bill LaBounty, Brazilian music,” Barkham marvels. “The level of sophistication in his music and his production went way beyond what I was expecting.”

Barkham asked Donkin’s permission to share the music with a few people whose taste he admired. That group included Nigil Mack, a former major-label A&R who helped sign Kid Cudi. Mack was impressed: “To be so young but be able to write at that top-line level kind of blew me away,” he says. “So did his vocal tone.” Mack founded drink sum wtr, which shares services with the indie stalwart Secretly, last year. Donkin was among his first signings. 

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With one album done, he is already thinking about his next release. “I’ve been on a listening binge with Earth, Wind & Fire, and their arrangements and the horns parts are just incredible,” Donkin says. “With the next project I can hopefully get bigger horn parts.”

He’s also in the process of honing a mostly untested live show. Donkin “needs to do tons of shows and start to just play in London regularly and just get himself out there as often as possible,” Barkham says. “I performed some of the songs when they were still in demo stages but not as much as I would like to,” Donkin acknowledges. “I hope to hit the road next year.”  

But first, Welcome Home: “I’ve always envisioned my first big statement being something that I work on over time that just shows where my head has been musically speaking,” Donkin says. “I’m ready to let people in.”

Happy birthday, Prince! Today (June 7) would have been the late icon’s 64th birthday. In honor of the superstar, we’re looking back on some of his biggest hits. Over the course of his illustrious career, Prince had an impressive 47 hits on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 songs chart. Of those 47, he had 19 […]

Pedro Pascal is the latest celebrity to take on First We Feast’s Hot Ones challenge, in which stars eat ten chicken wings or vegan substitutes, with each wing prepared with a progressively hotter hot sauce. Meanwhile, they’ll will answer thoughtful and well-researched questions from host and co-creator Sean Evans.

The Last of Us actor made it all the way through the 10-wing challenge, maintaining his calm and cool personality as much as he could amid the heat. On the last chicken wing, dipped in Hot Ones’ own The Last Dab Apollo sauce, Evans brought up Pascal’s love for Prince, and asked him “Purple Rain” is the song the star would want played at his funeral.

“It’s my favorite song. It’s the most moving song,” Pascal shared. “I don’t know why, but it always emerges even before I actively started implementing it into my spiritual routine, essentially. I didn’t go to church. I was raised by HBO, [Steven] Spielberg and Prince. For me, ‘Purple Rain’ is the most emotionally cathartic, the most musically sophisticated song that I can think of. If it’s casually or spontaneously playing somewhere, I don’t have emotional space to go there because it just moves me so deeply.”

Watch the full episode of Hot Ones below, in which Pedro Pascal talks The Mandalorian, The Last of Us and more.