11 May 1986, finished before he left the room
On 11 May 1986, at Sunset Sound in Hollywood, Prince tracked It, overdubbed it, mixed it, and cut an instrumental version, all on the same date. The day before he had cut Frustration and If I Could Get Your Attention. The same day he also cut Boy U Bad. Susan Rogers engineered. Prince is the only musician on the tape. Five minutes and ten seconds. No guest, no horn.
The track is a Linn pattern, a bass figure that sits in one spot, and a vocal that keeps naming the title because the title is the request. He was in the middle of the Camille experiments that year, slowing the tape so his voice would come back higher. It does not use that mask. The lead is his ordinary studio voice, close and dry. Rogers has described the working day: machine or drums first, bass and keys next, vocal alone, mix before he went upstairs. This tape matches the clock.
It was not a leftover pulled out of a drawer. On the 3 June 1986 and 18 July 1986 line-ups of Dream Factory it was already track five on the first disc. It kept that place when the project became the triple Crystal Ball on 30 November 1986. When the set was cut down to the double Sign O’ The Times, released 30 March 1987, It was still fifth on disc one, after The Ballad of Dorothy Parker and before Starfish and Coffee.
Prince would typically do a song a day.
(Susan Rogers, BBC News, 2016)
He did not issue it as a single. The singles from the album were the title track, If I Was Your Girlfriend, U Got the Look and I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man. It stayed an album cut. On the 1987 tour he rarely gave it a full reading. Prince Vault logs an instrumental piece of it inside When Doves Cry on 8 May 1987 at Isstadion in Stockholm, and the lyric dropped into Forever in My Life on 28 June 1987 at Ahoy in Rotterdam. The concert film leaves it out.
That is the right size for the recording. It is not a statement and not a ballad. It is the day between two other songs, kept because the machine pattern was already finished and the repetition worked. On a double album full of characters, sped-up voices and older vault songs, It is just him, one studio, one date, asking for the obvious thing and then playing it again. The instrumental mix from the same afternoon proves the track did not depend on the lyric to move. Take the voice off and the Linn figure still sits there, five minutes, no guest waiting in the corridor. He printed the mix before the night was over.
