The triple album Warner would not press
On 17 April 1986 Prince tracked Crystal Ball at the Galpin Blvd home studio in Chanhassen. It was a crowded week. Two days earlier the band had overdubbed Witness 4 The Prosecution and recorded Visions without him. Three days later he cut Starfish and Coffee. He sang and played the instruments. Susannah Melvoin sang background. The words were not new to a stage. On 16 May 1983, at the third annual Minnesota Music Awards in the Carlton Celebrity Room in Bloomington, he had already dropped them into a jam.
Through June 1986 he overdubbed and edited at Galpin. Clare Fischer wrote an orchestration, added that summer, with more work in August. By 30 November 1986 Prince had compiled a triple album called Crystal Ball, built from the shelved Dream Factory and Camille projects, and this song opened side three in an orchestrated edit about a minute shorter than the long take. Warner Bros. would not ship a triple. The set was cut down and released on 31 March 1987 as the double album Sign o’ the Times. Crystal Ball the song was not on it.
The lyric looks into the ball and sees a bad night: bombs, hate moving in, and then the claim that the only sure thing is the love made that night. It is a long funk piece, not a single. The version that finally came out runs 10:28. There is no chorus built for radio. There is a scene, a drum machine, and an orchestra Prince hired and then could not put on the album Warner would actually press.
As bombs explode around you and hate advances on your right, the only thing you can be sure of is the love we make tonight.
(Prince, Crystal Ball)
Listeners did not get the song until 29 January 1998, when NPG Records shipped the mail-order box also called Crystal Ball, his first album sent out without a major label. The 1986 recording is track one of disc one. A retail 4CD, Crystal Ball plus The Truth, without the mail-order Kamasutra disc, followed on 3 March 1998. The box mixes vault years. This track is the 1986 one, not a new session cut for the package.
In 2020 the Sign o’ the Times super deluxe added a short edit, about three and a half minutes, among the vault tracks. That edit is a footnote. The 1998 box was also his fourth album under the love symbol, shipped from NPG with no Warner logo on the spine. The piece that explains the title is the Galpin recording from April 1986, the one Warner left off the double album, with Melvoin in the background and Fischer’s orchestra on the edit Prince had wanted at the top of a side.
