Prince - Around The World In A Day

Prince had been to the mountaintop, and he didn’t like what he saw. He had spent a full year fine-tuning his sound, his band, his look, and his story for Purple Rain, with the explicit goal of conquering the world. And it had worked perfectly - repositioning himself as a badass guitar hero and fronting a band which included multiple genders and races had opened up new audiences for him, and made him the biggest rock star in the universe.

After he conquered the world with Purple Rain, Prince made a hard left turn into bright and sweet psychedelia with his next record Around The World In A Day. But the album had more going on beneath the surface. The most noticeable thing about Around the World in a Day was what it wasn’t: It wasn’t remotely a sequel to Purple Rain.

Around the World in a Day was completed on Christmas Eve of 1984 and released in April 1985, just two weeks after the final date on the Purple Rain tour (which Prince cut short abruptly, after just six months). His breakthrough album was still riding high on the charts. If Prince had streamlined and rocked up his approach for global domination, now he was creating something more intimate, cerebral, and challenging.

Though Around the World was released with no radio single or advance promotion, it did feature a very commercial tune called "Raspberry Beret" -  the most pure pop song Prince had ever delivered. But “Raspberry Beret” was actually a song he had written a few years earlier, and was a bit of an outlier on the album. The other singe "Pop Life" plays over a loosely thudding drum sound, a skeptical meditation on the trappings of success, the lure of drugs and anti-intellectualism.

Heavyweight vinyl produced by Warner Records in 2016. Semi tri-Fold sleeve.