A few quick thoughts on Prince's just-released album, 'HitNRun Phase One'

A few quick thoughts on Prince’s new album, “HitNRun Phase One,” that was released Monday on Tidal, Jay Z’s streaming service. Look for a full review later.

1. This 11-track, 38-minute album seems to be an odds and ends collection. Several of the tunes were played for me in a private listening session at Paisley Park in June 2014 after the Bruno Mars concert in St. Paul -- months before Prince dropped two albums, the solo effort “Art Official Age” and the 3rdEyeGirl disc “PlectrumElectrum,” on the same day in September. One track here is a retitled remix of tune from “Art Official Age” and another is a remix from that album without a title change. Others are one-offs from sessions with Rita Ora and Curly Fryz, a 21-year-old Californian who starred in Prince’s 2012 video “Breakfast Can Wait.”
2. These songs sound better on Prince’s sound systems – either in the studio or the soundstage -- than on mine or yours.
3. This feels like a solitary effort – well, just Prince and coproducer Joshua Welton – with lots of experimental sounds that sound like everything from a video game gone wild to a synthesized calliope to manipulated robotic-like vocals.
4.  There are some guitar heroics on “HitNRun” notably on “HardRockLover” on which he sings about turning up his guitar to make a woman scream, and “This Could Be Us,” a ballad that last summer Prince said was inspired by seeing a poster of him riding on a motorcycle with Apollonia, his costar in “Purple Rain.”
5. Not included here is “Baltimore,” Prince’s topical song about the controversial Freddie Gray death in that Maryland city that led to a high-profile Rally 4 Peace concert there featuring Prince and 3rdEyeGirl and others.That song was released in May.
6. One of the highlights is “Fallinlove2nite,” a bright, synth pop ditty that sounds like it could have been an outtake from 1985’s “Around the World in a Day.”
7. The best selections are the final two: the sexy, minimalist, come-back-to-me slow jam “1000 X’s & O’s,” about how he has 1,000 hugs and kisses when his baby comes back home, and the dreamy, rivetingly weird, metaphysical ballad “June” (the month) featuring Prince’s most personal lyrics including his musing that sometimes he feels he was born too late and “I should have been born on the Woodstock stage.” That comes after the disclosure that he and the woman in question make love to a Richie Havens vinyl LP. Another line that jumps out: “How can you be everybody’s dream and still be somebody’s wife” followed by “tell me what did you have for lunch today.” From the sublime to the mundane.
8. Prince is still PG but gets suggestive singing about a pimp in “Like a Mack,” “living in a woman’s jeans” in “HardRockLover,” tying her up in lace on “1000 X’s & O’s” and dropping a line like “a body like that should never be alone” on the droning “X’s Face.”
9. Prince shows his sense of humor by remixing and retitling last year’s “Clouds,” featuring Lianne La Havas, as “Mr. Nelson.” If you didn’t know, that’s Prince’s surname.