not having to find a band and finding an artist who was good and played all the instruments. I thought my perfect plan had just gone belly-down, face-up, because I forgot to find out if he could actually sing the words, which was the reason I was doing this in the first place. [ laughs ] I was committed to finding a solution to that problem. If this had been an audition, and if I’d actually auditioned him beforehand, he would’ve failed the audition. But because I was already down the road with him, I had to find a way to make it work. We went back and forth and back and forth for hours in the studio, and nothing I could do or say would get him to sing any louder. It just wasn’t happening. The longer we went, the worse it was getting, in terms of him feeling bad and intimidated and frustrated and shy. It wasn’t going in the right direction. I was thinking, “I’ve got to come up with a little miracle here; because, otherwise, everything ends right here and now, and it’s all the way back to the drawing board. I got an artist that I think I can work with. We’re developing music and we’re doing stuff together, and I’m liking what’s happening, but the only problem is, I just can’t get him to sing. So we took a break, and I was really wracking my brain: “What can I do? What can I do? What can I do?” And finally, I came up with the idea of making a bed in the middle of the studio. I slept downstairs in the basement of my recording studio. I went downstairs and got my blankets and my pillows. I came upstairs and made a bed in the middle of the recording studio. I said, “Come over here. Lay down. I’m going to put a blanket on you. I want you to put your head on the pillow. I want you to get really relaxed.” He said, “Well, why are you doing this? Why you doing it?” I said, “Don’t worry about it. Just go with it.” I put him down, and I literally put him to bed in this self-made bed in the recording studio. Then, I turned off all the lights in the studio. I took my most sensitive microphone, and I put it as close to his mouth as I could. I said, “Look, you’re all tucked in. You’re all safe. You’re all warm. The lights are off. I just want you to close your eyes. Just relax. I want you to imagine you’re in your room by yourself at night at home, and you’re just singing a song out loud and no one’s around and no one can hear you.” Over the course of some time, I eventually coaxed the voice out of him.
me here tomorrow after school. Take the bus over after school. I’ll be working. I’ll leave two songs on the piano. Pick your favorite song and develop the music. When I get back, I’ll teach you how to record it. We’ll put some songs together.” That’s how it started.
When you began working with him on your material, what were those first sessions like?
Moon: Okay, so, this one should be pretty interesting, because it’s surprising how few people reach out to get the beginning of Prince, because I’ve maintained that Prince was born in my studio. I’m not maintaining I made him—but I’m maintaining he was born in the studio. And after you’re done with this interview, I think you’ll agree. So he would come over—a shy, little, and quiet, five-feet-four-inch kid with an Afro from the North Side of town—and let himself into the studio and pick one of the two sets of lyrics I’d left on the piano. He’d work them up and then I’d show up. I was working at an ad agency back then, so I was learning about advertising, marketing, sales, and all of that. I’d show up to the studio and we’d sit down, and he’d play some music on the piano or guitar, typically. Then we’d start singing the lyrics together until we could work up the melody. And then we started recording it. He had never been in the studio before, so this was all new to him. I started teaching him how to record things, how tracks worked, and how to layer tracks. We got through building up our first song. We spent quite a bit of time working on it. Then, we spent quite a bit of time getting him used to the studio and recording the music to this first song. We were maybe a month into the process, and it was time to lay down the vocals on our first song. He was in the studio, and I was in the control room. He had the headphones on. I started playing the music. It was coming over the headphones. I looked out into the room. I saw his lips moving as the song was playing, and I looked down at my meters and they weren’t moving, and I couldn’t hear anything. I’m thinking, “Okay, I’ve got a bad mic or a bad cord.” So I went into the studio. I swapped the mic out, came back, still nothing. Okay, obviously, it was the cord. I went back, and I swapped the cord out. I came back again and still nothing. Over the course of ten minutes or so, I troubleshot all that equipment because I saw him singing but nothing was picking up. Then, it occurred to me, I went to the door while the track was playing, and I saw him singing and I stuck my head in the studio and I couldn’t hear anything. I walked over to him and he stopped. I said, “Keep singing. Keep singing.” And I realized that he was singing so softly that I could hardly even hear him. I said, “Prince, Prince, Prince, you’re not singing loud enough. I thought that I had a technical problem here. The problem is, I need some volume out of you, man. I can’t even hear you. The mic can’t pick you up.” I had sensitive mics. Then we started this process of trying to get him to sing louder. He couldn’t. I don’t know whether it was shyness or intimidation or being scared or whatever. I started looking at his psychological profile to better understand. I had a five-feet-four- inch Black guy who always wanted to be a basketball player. That dream wasn’t going to happen. It just wasn’t going to happen. I had a five-feet-four-inch, Afro-haired Black dude whose name was Prince, and everyone at school was calling him Princess. They were beating him up because he was short and little. Now, he’s going to break out singing in a falsetto girl’s voice. When I started putting it together like that, I started to realize that the dude was facing some intimidation issues from life. I thought, “Shit, I’ve got a problem here. I’ve got all this time invested in my hand-selected artist.” I knew he could play all the instruments, but I never actually auditioned him vocally. [ laughs ] Here, I thought my perfect plan was solving all the problems, by
How many hours did that take?
Moon: It took all day. I didn’t make him. I didn’t create him. But, in that day, for the first time, I think he found his voice. It was always there. To sing, you’ve got to expose yourself. You’ve got to let someone see your soul. His singing was in a falsetto voice. That’s not a very manly thing if you’re feeling like you’re not very manly to begin with and you’re a teenager. He was sixteen. In that session, we found his voice together. It was pretty shaky at first, but over time, he learned that it was okay to sing in the style he wanted to sing. He got support and encouragement for it, then I taught him overdubbing. You know what overdubbing is? That’s where you sing with yourself. Then you get three or four or about ten tracks of your voice. When he heard that, he really liked it. Because if you overdub any voice enough times, it always sounds cool. I had him overdubbing fairly early just to try and build the confidence in the sound of his voice. He really grooved on that. So that was one of the bigger things that happened for him in the studio very, very early on. Of course, I would sit down and teach him how to record a couple tracks, then I’d take him into the studio and I’d show him how to mix them together, and how he could use equalization and reverb and panning and level. All of that had an effect on the sound. Over the course of the year, I really taught him how to record and produce, which he, of course, never had any opportunity to be exposed to before. Who’s going to give you unlimited time in
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