Prince fans from around the world have been posting all kinds of Purple and Paisley-punctuated podcasts. Now comes the estate-authorized podcast for "Prince: the Story of Sign o' the Times," with the first of eight episodes available today on Apple, Spotify and other platforms.
Produced by the 89.3 the Current, the podcast features Twin Cities radio personality and historian Andrea Swensson interviewing various people who worked with Prince in that era.
The first episode, entitled "It's Going to Be a Beautiful Night," focuses on guitarist Wendy Melvoin and keyboardist Lisa Coleman, with additional comments from band members Dr. Fink, Brownmark, Eric Leeds and Atlanta Bliss plus engineer Susan Rogers.
The podcast is a prelude to the Sept. 25 super deluxe reissue of 1987's "Sign o' the Times," arguably Prince's best studio album. The package includes 92 tracks – 63 previously unreleased – and a DVD of a New Year's Eve 1987 concert at Paisley Park, where Miles Davis sat in briefly.
Swensson contributed the "Sign o' the Times" liner notes; she did the same for last year's deluxe reissue of "1999" and authored three books for Paisley Park.
To hype the new package, the Prince estate and Warner Bros. today also issued the previously unreleased tune "Forever in My Life" (early vocal version). Other songs from the "Sign o' the Times" project have already been teased, including "Cosmic Day" and a 1979 take of the album's "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man."
