Please, not Prince. Anyone but Him.

He's gone. Short of say, Stevie himself? There isn't an artist out there that means more to me personally.

Go ahead. Push play and keep reading.

He wrote the soundtrack to my coming of age. He sang the words I wished I could have said and did the things that welllllll let's not discuss that right NOW but...

Artistically, he was taken from us long before he shoulda been, thanks to the same group of wonks I ran away from. But where I'm from and when I'm from was linked to him like few people were. Kraftwerk and the Little Purple Man--that was the D in the 80s. We hogged him for TEN arena shows in the days of Purple Rain, didn't we?

And I stuck with him thru all of it. Parade and Around the World in a Day and both Madhouse albums and Karma, Pimp and Circumstance and not so much the door-knocky stuff but The B-Sides? Hell, we'd hear those on the radio where I'm from.

Listening to the song I've embedded above reminds me of Mark Tilles. Never heard this before he played it over the school PA in my junior year. Not this adaptation, but its lengthy, somewhat bizarre-prefaced original. From vinyl, of course. As I stood beside him. We were the not-actually-cool, but-sort-of-in-a-counter-cultural-way kids who ran the Friday show. He was the radio-voiced deejay. I was voice character actor-slash-writer.

Lost Mark, too. He was gone years before I'd known.
Hadn't been back to the D in so long....

Sometimes it snows
In April
Sometimes I feel
So sad, so sad

Sometimes I wish
Life was
Never-Ending

All good things, they say
Never last

_{- Wendy, Lisa and We-Know Who}