The announcement of the winner didn’t come directly. “But then I had to see it as a gift, and just try my best…” “It was crazy, man! I mean, I had no idea Prince even knew I could produce like that! And here I was, creating a folder on my personal computer that said ‘ Prince Vocals.’ I was freaking out!” Josh’s large neck medallion starts swinging as he gets excited, his eyes widening. He said he had given a copy of the same stems to these two other producers in the big studio and he wanted to see who could finish the song better. “I was working on some of my own stuff in this tiny studio room Prince has here when he walked in one night and just handed me a hard drive. "It kind of started with a challenge,” Welton remembers, sitting at the center of the mixing board, a 10-song iTunes playlist of the new Prince album, HITNRUN, cued up on the screen in front of him. PRINCE: “Can you imagine what would happen if young people were free to create whatever they wanted?” But a lot of times, after he adds his vocals and guitar or whatever, he won’t touch much else…”Ĭould it be that the master notorious for controlling every part of the mix and playing every instrument, the genius musician who, in a 30+ year career, has only been heard on a song he didn’t produce completely himself three, maybe four times now has a creative partner?Īnd if so, how did this 25-year-old Chicago-based dancer and keyboardist kid, formerly of an R&B group called Fatty Koo, end up with the keys to one of music’s most sacred kingdoms? “He still has final approval on everything. “Prince wants me to create as freely as I can,” Welton says quietly, his fingers dancing on the studio levers in front of him. The Prince-ly strings and guitar licks were there, but the arrangement said something younger, fresher, now. Up-tempo and atmospheric, with pretty girls whispering things in foreign languages, the track flipped itself in its last minute, hijacking the beat into a dark, head-knocking dubstep-like end section. Those two records, along with a barn-burning worldwide tour that had fans not only squealing to the rare live sounds of “She’s Always In My Hair,” “Housequake” and “Something In The Water (Does Not Compute),” but also to a loud new set of jams like “FUNKNROLL,” “PRETZELBODYLOGIC” and “FIXURLIFEUP,” re-invigorated all those Prince playlists that were in danger of coming up in too many ‘classic’ Pandora search results on your phone.īut it was the opening song of Art Official Age that signaled perhaps something even stranger was going on in Minnesota. It was released along with a rock hot band album called PLECTRUMELECTRUM, a fierce guitar funk workout that debuted Prince’s new all-female three-piece, 3RDEYEGIRL. Welton is even listed as the recorder and mixer of 2014’s Art Official Age, an album many describe as Prince’s best crafted and most urgent in years. PRINCE: “People always ask me… ‘Why don’t I get the Revolution back together?”įor the first time in decades, Prince shared his spot on the “produced, arranged, composed & performed by…” credit line that has been a signature of his albums since his 1978 For You debut. Given the immaculate purple floor and ceiling design, the large purple candles glowing behind Josh as he speaks, and the eponymous glyph symbol emblazoned in the center of each of the giant speakers, in this space, there is no mistake. Personal touches are all that reveal who may be creating inside. With their thick vault-like doors & soundproofed walls, massive mixing boards and racks and racks of audio equipment, recording studios all typically look the same. “All he knew at the time was that I was husband, and I was like, ‘W hy is Prince squeezing me so hard?’” “The first time he ever met me, he just ran over and gave me a huge hug,” Welton laughs, sitting at the console of Paisley Park’s main studio. He is also the co-producer of Prince’s latest album, Art Official Age, and if you believe in liner notes, the biggest musical collaborator the musical icon may have ever had. Instead, the gatekeeper is 25-year-old Joshua Welton, the keyboardist in Prince’s latest band and the husband of the band’s remarkable drummer Hannah Ford. Like Willy Wonka greeting a child who just won a golden ticket, the brother spins around, lets out a huge Chesire cat grin, and ushers me straight inside…īut this man is- not Prince. “Welcome to Paisley Park… I am so very glad you came.” Standing in a side doorway, dressed in all black from head-to-toe, a long metal medallion dangling around his neck. Pulling into the sprawling white brick compound on the side of a highway, 30 minutes outside downtown Minneapolis, everything is surprisingly quiet. Even under the glare of the hot summer sun, Paisley Park Studios, the fabled birthplace of some of pop music’s most revered songs, displays few signs of its treasure.
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