Prince Roundtable with Corinne Bailey Rae and Alan Light: 2016
Rita Houston, Corinne Bailey Rae, Kara Manning and Alan Light
On this special edition of FUV Live, a roundtable discussion on the brilliant legacy and music of Prince. Joining me tonight for this personal reflection on this deeply influential man’s life and work will be a fellow musician, the singer and songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae; the music journalist Alan Light, who wrote the 2014 book Let’s Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain; and FUV co-moderator and UKNY host Kara Manning.
Prince’s tragic passing on April 21, 2016, was unfathomable for his fans and fellow musicians. Like another iconic musician who we lost in 2016, David Bowie, Prince fiercely guarded his private life. But he generously gave us an abundance of music—39 studio albums at the time of his passing, plus B-sides, mixtapes, demos and the promise of hundreds and hundreds of unreleased songs. Prince championed scores of musicians, like Corinne Bailey Rae, who continue to carry on his genre-blurring approach to music, one that transcends radio formats and easy categorization.
Prince was a Minneapolis native who never left his hometown. A teenage musical prodigy, he was one of the greatest guitarists to ever pick up the instrument—some say the best—and an equally gifted drummer, keyboardist, bassist and vocalist. Prince’s rare discipline and revolutionary way of addressing pop, rock, soul and R&B, remains unrivaled.
As Corinne, Alan, Kara and I discovered in our roundtable conversation about Prince Rogers Nelson, taped at Rockwood Music Hall just about a month after his death—there was so much to say about this man who gave us so much.
[recorded: 5/23/16]
