ANDRE CYMONE talks about his newest album and reminisces about the early, lost recordings by Prince and company. THE REBEL by Ericka Blount Danois
The day that Prince died , childhood friend, bandmate, and family member André Cymone was going into the studio in New York to mix the last song for his new album, 1969 . “I called my engineer,” Cymone remembers. “I couldn’t do it.” If there’s any musician that knows Prince, it would be Cymone, who had lived with Prince as a brother-from-another-mother in Cymone’s mother’s basement when they were kids before the creation of their first band, Grand Central, and later serving as an integral part—songwriting, producing, and musicianship—on Prince’s early albums before going solo. “When I got back home, I ended up finishing that song. My son helped me come up with a beat,” Cymone says. “I think my son cried more than anyone I’ve seen cry since Prince died.” We are living in crazy times, and for some, the prevailing thought is that Prince checked out, along with many of our icons—Muhammad Ali, David Bowie—before they had to witness it. Cymone’s newest album, 1969 , examines social injustice, civil rights, and racism, without being didactic. It is a consciously rebellious rock album that allows for levity amidst the mayhem. “With all the stuff that’s going on right now, it’s like we are reliving 1969 all over again,” Cymone says by phone. “This is Groundhog Day.” Cymone talks about reliving the past, but his album is far less a walk through nostalgia than it is a testament to a time when, as Slick Rick says, “people wore pajamas and lived life slow.” Cymone takes his time to produce timeless work—whether it’s a band member using a Fender Rhodes instead of an electronic keyboard, or playing all of the instruments himself. It’s the craft that’s nostalgic, not the work. Wax Poetics spoke with André Cymone about Prince, the new album, the Rebels project, and everything in between.
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