Prince (1) (1958–2016)

I first gave this three stars after listening to the audiobook which was an entirely fine production. I've read reviews that say the editor takes up too much space in the first third of the book, and I agree. After getting the hard copy from my library, I'm adding another extra star! The archival goods and eccentricities of Prince's personal writings add a more personal and tangible dimension to this semi-autobiography. The digitization of some of the photos and ephemera are so crisp it felt like I could pick them up off the page. I'd highly recommend the print experience in addition to or instead of the audio experience.… (more)

The intro by Piepenbring had a confusing format that made it hard to follow along. It was well-written but the way it jumped into larger font size was just weird and disrupted the flow a couple times. Otherwise, it provided insight to what it was like working with Prince.

I'm on the fence about whether or not those close to Prince should have contributed to the book or if it should have included more interviews rather than the snippets that caption the photographs. The intention was for it to be Prince's own words. I was delighted to see his own writing in the photographs and thought that was a wonderful addition.

Reading in interviews with Piepenbring, the point of the book was to feel Prince's absence. Which, yes, while reading it I thought how good the book could have been if Prince was able to see it through completion. That's not an easy shadow to live in, even for a book.… (more)

I grabbed the audio for this but ended up checking the book out because I really wanted to see all the photos in it. I was never a huge Prince fan but I enjoyed his music and the first part of the book gives you a bit of an outsider looking in on the life of Prince before he died. He was working with Dan Piepenbring to write his autobiography and there are some parts of this that talk about his early years. There is a section that covers the development of Purple Rain. I think it would have been better if the publisher did the book in a larger format to take advantage of the larger format for all the reproductions of the handwritten pages reproduced in here. The bits at the end of excerpts of past interviews with photos tries to give a bit more of his insights about his lift that wasn’t written down.… (more)