A slow hymn on the third disc, aimed at a friend who died in July
On 12 July 1996 Jonathan Melvoin died of a heroin overdose in a New York hotel. He was 34. He had played keyboards in the live line-up of The Family, and he is on Around the World in a Day and Parade. His sisters are Wendy and Susannah Melvoin. Within weeks Prince was at Paisley Park cutting The Love We Make, a slow song that says the needle and the spoon out loud.
Prince Vault places the basic track between mid-July and early August 1996 at Paisley Park Studios in Chanhassen, likely the same day as The Divine. Prince sings and plays the instruments. Kathleen Dyson adds guitar, the only other name on the recording. It was never a single. It is track 11 on the third disc of Emancipation, 4 minutes 38, inside the triple album released on 19 November 1996 on NPG Records through EMI.
Emancipation was his third album in shops that year, after the Girl 6 soundtrack in March and Chaos and Disorder in July, the last Warner Bros. set. He had finished the contract and built each disc to run about 60 minutes, 36 songs in all. The Love We Make sits among My Computer, a cover of Joan Osborne’s One of Us, and the title track. Prince Vault reports that he described this song as a way to speak to the spirit of a friend lost to drugs. The lyric does not print Melvoin’s name. The instruction in the chorus is specific enough.
Put down the needle, put down the spoon.
(The Love We Make, 1996)
The release show at Paisley Park on 12 November 1996 went out live on MTV, VH1, and BET at once. The half hour leaned on Jam of the Year, Get Yo Groove On, and One of Us, with a four-piece New Power Generation: Kirk Johnson, Rhonda Smith, Morris Hayes, and Kat Dyson. The Love We Make was not in that set. It stayed an album cut. On stage it turned up later and only now and then, from a House of Blues show in Las Vegas on 31 January 2004 through a second Oakland set on 28 February 2016.
What you hear is a mid-tempo ballad: a plain drum pattern, Dyson’s guitar filling the gaps, and a chorus that repeats one instruction. Dyson had just come into the NPG as a guitarist. Her part here is support, not a solo spot. No chart position, no video. The rest of Emancipation spends a lot of time on Mayte Garcia, married that February, and on the end of the Warner deal. This track is the other fact of 1996. The same recording later sat on Anthology: 1995-2010. The song itself is the November 1996 take: a friend named in the room, not on the label.
