Review: 'Prince: All the Songs- The Story Behind Every Track '

Even if his music wasn't so extraordinarily inventive and alluring, even if he wasn't one of the very few pop artists who actually deserves the crown "genius," Prince would still be noteworthy for his Herculean productivity. The guy never stopped making music, and whether he was among the top stars of his time or more of a "legacy artist," he never slowed down. So we're left with lots and lots and lots of Prince music, and his estate keeps on finding new ways to scrape the archives. 

That means Benoît Clerc set himself up for a Herculean task when he decided to cover Prince in the All the Songs series. He'd previously detailed the output of David Bowie and Queen, neither slouches in the productivity department. But Prince: All the Songs- The Story Behind Every Track is another story. This book is a 630-page monster, and when Clerc claims to cover every track, he means it. He not only created entries on every song on every proper Prince record, but he also detailed the B-sides, archival releases, and box set bonus tracks. 

This was clearly a big and difficult job, so it might seem petty to nit pick, though I do have a few nit picks. Because the entries are so plentiful, they tend to be a bit shorter than the ones in other books of this sort I've read. "Automatic", one of my very favorite Prince tracks, barely gets a few lines, and they focus on a very, very minor detail in this involved, disquieting epic. There is the occasional misinterpretation (he sees "Lady Cab Driver" as nothing more than a fantasy about sex with a cab driver rather than the more unsettling and pointed revenge fantasy against the kind of cabbie who'd refuse to pick up a guy like Prince I always believed it to be) or misrepresentation (Clerc would have you believe that Prince said absolutely nothing during his 1979 interview on American Bandstand when a quick trip to YouTube proves that was not the case at all). 

Nevertheless, Prince: All the Songs is a major achievement, and not just for checking off every released Prince track, but also for providing a pretty satisfying biography of the artist through his music, as well as a colorful wealth of Prince pics and quite a few surprises (the most fun must be when Prince impersonated Sly Stone to meet Chaka Khan; the most disturbing must be Prince's provocative suggestion that "Sister" was more than a mere fantasy about incest). 

Although hardcore fans really must read Duane Tudahl's exhaustive day-by-day series about Prince's recording sessions, which delivers much of what this book does in greater detail (though without the pictures), Prince: All the Songs may be the definitive single-volume book about Prince for both its breadth and the way it views his life through the songs that were the true essence of his being.