Prince's musical relationships - with fan and composer Victoria Kelly

Composer Victoria Kelly is such a big fan of the American music icon Prince that she orchestrated one of his songs to be playing when she first kissed a boy.

Following on from last year's popular conversation with Josh Ellery about the artistry of Prince, she joins Jesse Mulligan to dive a bit deeper into his creative process.

Prince worked with a lot of incredible women, Victoria says, and his music seems to have been deeply influenced by women.

One was sound engineer Susan Rogers – who worked with him on Purple Rain and Sign O' the Times – who she describes as "a groundbreaker in every way".

"Still only 4% of sound engineers are female today in 2024. But back in 1985, she came to the attention of Prince and she worked with him and recorded my favorite albums. I feel as if there's something really kind of unique and amazing about how they sound and I think that that's got a lot to do with her."

In 2018, Victoria brought Susan to New Zealand for an event.

"I picked her up in my little car and I forgot that I had my Prince air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror … She got into the car, saw it hanging there and looked at me as if maybe I was a psycho killer … I was really mortified."

Guitarist Wendy Melvoin, who was part of Prince's backing band for the Revolution, is another of Victoria's heroes.

"She said that they were so tight as a band and so well rehearsed that they were like neurosurgeons or heart surgeons. Just so utterly and completely prepared all the time."

She also idolised his long-time drummer and collaborator Sheila E.

"She was so fierce in her own way and you watch her perform, it's just astonishing. She's an animal on the drums. it's that kind of genius energy that he seemed so drawn to [for] such incredible collaborations."

Songs played:

The Family: 'River Run Dry' (sung by Bobby Z)

Prince seemed to have too many ideas for one person so had all of these different bands and creative outlets over the years, Victoria says. 

One of these was The Family, whose "left of centre" self-titled album of 1984 was his first collaboration with composer and jazz arranger Clare Fischer. 

"When you hear this, you'll hear that it is not like pop music. This is what I really love about Prince, he's always an experimental thinker, always open to very left-field ideas. You'll hear complex harmony and you'll hear a really sparse arrangement, which is typical of Prince's best work.

"I just think that that arrangement is astonishing. And for Clare Fischer's mind to just work that way around a song like that…

"When Susan Rogers and Prince sat down to listen to that through for the first time Prince was ecstatic and absolutely adored it. And she was sitting there kind of wondering what on earth was going on."

 

Prince: 'The Ballad of Dorothy Parker'

"This is one of my all-time favourite Prince songs ever and part of it is because it is so strange and warped and dark sounding.

"You just hear this kind of harmonic sensibility that's really really curious and interesting, and that comes from his jazz background.

"When I met Susan and talked to her about the song, she said that the reason it sounds the way it does is because the desk was malfunctioning …She could hear that there was something going on with the desk, that it wasn't sounding right. And he'd said, Hey, I'm liking this desk but it sounds a bit dull, but he didn't seem to mind. And so she didn't stop and because she didn't want to interrupt his flow.

"When he finished maybe a 20,30-hour session, he went up to bed she noticed a power unit on the desk that wasn't actually working properly and therefore a lot of the high-end stuff wasn't registering. It changed the way the whole desk sounded. Once he discovered that he was kind of just delighted with the happy accident because for him that was a form of creativity, as well."

The "real music lovers" among Prince's fan base love his album 1986 Parade because it is so weird, Victoria says.

"It features fruity things, fruity, beautiful orchestrations and approaches. And from a sonic perspective, it's just so interesting, but not poppy, apart from obviously 'Kiss'."

 

Prince and The Revolution: 'Condition of the Heart' (the song Victoria had her first kiss to)

Susan Rogers told Victoria that recording this song (as part of a 48-hour session) was one of her favourite experiences working with Prince.

"She said that basically, it was a candlelit environment. It was quiet, there was nothing going on. And he just went from instrument to instrument to instrument, laying everything down and she was just capturing it as it happened, listening to him think just letting the whole thing flow through the desk.

"It's from Around The World In A Day, which was his follow-up to Purple Rain and as you can see, it's a huge departure.

"I think it was quite a shock to fans who have had [previously] heard this incredible rock pop album and then suddenly got hit with Prince at his most maximum virtuosic and tangential."