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#PRINCE LADY CAB DRIVER OFFICIAL SERIES#
“Rearrange your mind,” he chants, “Man, you’ve got to be drunk / To think we’d stoop so low and play that old-time funk.” Echoing the individualist messages of earlier songs like “ Uptown,” Prince presents his Minneapolis Sound as the clarion call for an emergent counterculture: “Rearrange your brain / Got to free your mind / Your hair, your clothes, your body, your soul / Won’t be far behind.” Though perhaps not as musically groundbreaking as many of the other tracks Prince would record for 1999, “Rearrange” is a fine example of his ability to merge genres on the fly, with the bassline’s steady eighth-note figure adding a ( different) kind of New Wave tension to the relaxed rhythm guitar groove.Ĭlearly, Prince was taken enough with “Rearrange” to revisit it seven months later by that time, though, its premise had been extrapolated and refined through a series of other musical manifestoes–one of which, “ D.M.S.R.,” even went so far as to recycle his command to “loosen up your hair.” So, he rearranged: stripping the track to its instrumental backing and repurposing the falsetto chorus for the new song’s verses. just thought, ‘I’m in the studio, I gotta record… This is what I’m gonna do.’ Duane Tudahl Prince at New York’s Palladium in December 1981, just a few days before recording “Rearrange” photo by Michael Ochs, stolen from All Songs Considered.Īs a spur-of-the-moment jam, it makes sense that the lyrics of “Rearrange” would center around a topic close to Prince’s heart: his own, groundbreaking fusion of funk and punk. He just thought, ‘I’m in the studio, I gotta record… This is what I’m gonna do’” (Swensson 2019 Episode 2). But this is just speculation ultimately, says Tudahl, we “don’t know whether it was intended for 1999, whether he was searching for a voice for 1999, or whether he was saying, ‘I gotta record another Time album soon.’ But either way it was something that was not planned.
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Given this similarity–not to mention Prince’s guitar solo, which plays neatly to Jesse Johnson’s combustive style–it seems likely that “Rearrange” was at least provisionally mooted for that group. As it turned out, of course, it was real–though it was also little more than an admittedly funky sketch: a stark, mid-paced groove with a slick rhythm guitar hook similar to the Time track “ The Stick.” “I thought it was just some shuffling of his stuff”–a studio note indicating a literal rearrangement of tapes. The song was completed at Sunset Sound on July 7, 1982, the day after “ Moonbeam Levels” but, as the recent Super Deluxe Edition of 1999 revealed, its seeds had been planted during a break in the Controversy tour over half a year earlier on December 8, 1981, in the form of a different song called “ Rearrange.”Īccording to an interview with sessionographer Duane Tudahl for the Minnesota Public Radio podcast The Story of 1999, “Rearrange” was long known to researchers by its title alone: “it was one of those songs that we’d heard existed, but I didn’t think it was actually a song,” Tudahl told host Andrea Swensson. Of the 11 songs that would eventually make their way onto Prince’s fifth album, “ Lady Cab Driver” appears to have had the longest gestation period.