Jill Jones in the 1984 film Purple Rain .
about it. If something went wrong, he knew how to crawl under the board and fix it.” For me, the standout on Jill Jones was the jazzy pop fusion of “Violet Blue,” a lyric that began as an entry in the singer’s journal. “Around the time Prince and his dad went to meet Elizabeth Taylor, and I remember they kept talking about her eyes, which were violet blue. It’s a song about choices and decisions. It was around that time that he got engaged to Susannah Melvoin.” The fem-funk of “For Love” was the last single released but, like the previous two, failed to chart. Although Prince and Jill Jones started working on a second album, the project fell apart. “It became difficult to do a second record with him, because we were not approaching it the same way,” Jones recalls. “He was putting more pressure on me, and it just wasn’t working between us anymore.” After her appearance in the horrid Graffiti Bridge movie, where her part had been sliced considerably before filming, Jill Jones stepped away from the Paisley wonderland and did her own thing. Although there was very little written about Jill Jones in the American music press in 1987 (the album was better received in Europe), Prince biographer Dave Hill spoke for us who loved it when he wrote in his book Pop Life , “Jill Jones is the female Prince protégé who sounded most like herself.” Thirty years later, the record remains the best album released bearing the Paisley Park label. “I loved that project so much,” Jones says. “To me, it was like a work of art.” .
for their corporate such and such. “Prince had such high hopes for Paisley Park,” says Jones. “But, unfortunately, it never manifested the way he wanted. They kept trying to compromise him, and wouldn’t allow him to run the business as a business. They just swarmed and compromised him.” Prince’s trusted studio companion David Z, one of the few to receive actual production credit, worked on the album as well. According to Jones, “Prince trusted David to articulate what he wanted. Prince might fly in when I was working on vocals, but many nights it was just me and David at Electric Lady. Prince was filming Under a Cherry Moon , so he gave us a ton of freedom.” Writer Miles Marshall Lewis, currently working on the book Paisley Park Forever , says, “At the time, his role was to polish up tracks Prince handed him for Paisley Park acts like Mazarati, who he also coproduced. On Jill Jones , David did five of the eight songs, but Prince coproduced ‘Mia Bocca,’ ‘For Love,’ and ‘All Day, All Night’ himself.” The second single was the raunchy dance track “G-Spot.” While the song, with its prominent honking saxophone, was supposedly written for Vanity 6, Jill says, “I was there when Prince did the demo for ‘G-Spot.’ I was reading an article about it and we talked about it on the plane. On the demo, Prince played the sax part himself. I didn’t even know he could play, but if Prince had to wait too long for something, he just did it himself. Later, he would bring in other players, but he knew the lines that he wanted. I loved working with him in the studio, because he knew everything there was to know
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