In a fascinating digression from his own recent releases, Prince just shepherded the release of Judith Hill’s debut album, Back In Time, which was free for the first 48 hours.
This one is striking because Prince is not dipping into his usual (and frankly, often a bit tired) production style here, instead clearly being influenced by Adele’s work and Mark Ronson’s production over the past several years. In fact, Back In Time compares favorably to Kelis’ excellent Food from last year.
More striking is what it represents in terms of Prince’s production of protégés. Broadly, the women whom Prince has produced albums for as his protégés fall into two categories: There are light-skinned, extremely attractive young women who can’t sing, and light-skinned, extremely attractive young women who are very talented. In the former category, we find Vanity and Bria Valente and Apollonia, and in the latter, we find Andy Allo and Sheila E. and now, Judith Hill.
But strikingly, where even Prince’s efforts to produce erstwhile comeback albums for Mavis Staples around the turn of the 90s were bathed in his (then fairly overdone) production style, Hill’s new album actually deliberately evokes classic soul production. That’s particularly notable because, for being a guy who was born in 1958, Prince has almost never aped classic soul production styles. He loves Detroit, but never sounded like Motown. He seamlessly incorporated horns into his styles after six albums that were assiduously horn-free, but he never appropriated the tropes of Stax’s horns-driven sound at any point in a decades-long career.
And then, all of a sudden, this. Some of it is clearly Prince wanting to show, as always, that any sound that tops the charts is a sound he can do all by himself. But too, there is a maturity here. For all the vaunted minimalism of “When Doves Cry” having no bassline, or “Kiss” being almost skeletal in its arrangement, restraint is never a tendency that’s characterized Prince’s production style. That’s particularly true post-Lovesexy.
Certainly there are some outliers on this album — “Angel In The Dark” sounds like a pastiche of the requisite Ryan Tedder ballad that graces most pop albums sung by women; “Beautiful Life” fits better into the production style of the album but is a very contemporary adult-contemporary song. Overall the material is strong, and particularly striking for how much more grown-up it sounds than a lot of Prince’s own recent work.
Apparently, Prince and Hill put this album together in 2 or 3 weeks, and now they’ve dropped it for free. If this is the kind of work that can still be put together at Paisley Park at the drop of a hat, there’s one more great voice that Prince should put this kind of strong songwriting and mature production behind: his own.
