That time Prince wrote a letter….

Sometime in the 1990s, Prince (or, depending on the date, it could have been the Artist Formerly Known as Prince) seems to have written me…

Sometime in the 1990s, Prince (or, depending on the date, it could have been the Artist Formerly Known as Prince) seems to have written me a letter. In longhand, torn out of a spiral notebook. It was apparently in response to something I wrote about him. There’s no date. It is unclear if the letter was ever sent. It’s addressed to just “Tom,” which means it could have been intended for lots of people, not necessarily me.

When she put it up for auction, Prince’s longtime assistant wrote that it was prompted by my review of Come in Rolling Stone magazine. There’s no record of it at Rolling Stone. Some longtime Prince associates believe the letter is real but think he was reacting to something else I’d written a few years earlier. That notion is bolstered by his mention of alter-ego Camille, who made few appearances on Prince releases during that period.

The letter itself — a legible reproduction is here — is beautiful in a curious and uniquely Prince way. He’s not upset, or terribly defensive; instead, he’s up in the clouds, offering cryptic clues about his thinking, his creative process, his relationship with the muse. “Much like an unborn child, a song’s never conceived whole. That would be like taking dictation…..Pleasure comes from the nurturing process. Whatever we are….whatever we make.”

I learned about the existence of this correspondence long after it sold (for more than $11,000) in an auction of Prince rarities. I was doing a podcast interview around the anniversary of his sudden death. The interviewers, Christy and Josh Norman of the Mountains and the Sea podcast, mentioned the letter like it was common knowledge. I was surprised, to say the least. It was like learning about a message somebody left decades ago, on a long since discarded answering machine.

A few weeks later, telling the story to a friend, I hit on what captivated me about it. It was not the pretty handwriting, or the weird possibility that this artist I’d covered for years was inspired enough to write. More basic than that: The letter reminded me about those occasional off-the-record opportunities to interact with deep, profoundly influential musicians. These went with the territory. They were not routine, but did happen from time to time, and they were hardly what you’d call OMG brush-with-celebrity moments. Sometimes they were contentious. Sometimes edifying. Usually they were healthy, if only because critics should be ready to explain (and elaborate on or clarify) their positions. Especially directly to those who were the targets of wrath or derision.

Many music critics working in the ’80s and ’90s have stories just like it — of sitting at the desk, answering the phone, and hearing an irate rock star or artist manager on the other end of the line yelling complaints and/or disputing, line by line, the arguments in a review. I had these calls with Sammy Hagar on his first Van Halen tour (twice in the same day, after he hung up on me the first time), and Billy Joel, and legendary PR man Paul Wasserman, and U2 and on and on.

So learning about some possible decades-old correspondence from Prince was not some huge ego rush.

But I get why it might seem that way. After all, the whole dance between artists and media is different now. We’re currently in an era of bulletproof stardom, tightly controlled access and exceedingly manicured public personas. “Engagement” happens on press agent terms. The question-asking media is mostly kept at a distance, used to the advantage of a PR campaign and then dismissed. Even those who turn up regularly in the media — Kanye West — approach it on a purely transactional basis. The notion of spending time communicating with a reporter simply to enhance that person’s understanding (or one’s own) seems quaint, or ludicrous.

I’d argue that the old way, with artists doing multiple interviews and occasionally reaching out to someone in media to register displeasure or whatever, was overall a good thing for the art.

Because regardless of how touchy things got, these were conversations. Most of the time, there was open exchange of ideas. The critics maybe (hopefully) picked up insight into aspects they missed about an artist’s approach. The artists maybe gleaned a bit of insight into how what they’re doing is perceived by an audience. As a ton of business books attest, actual conversation is more helpful, and more nuanced, than electronic communication, or the often-terse language of a magazine or newspaper review.

The encounters were driven by something fundamental: Both sides wanted to be understood and to understand. There was mutual recognition that there was something to gain by talking or writing a note — that the sharing of different perspectives might actually be beneficial to each in their subsequent work. And that, though the roles of “artist” and “critic” were different, a higher goal — of spreading music, and raising awareness about music generally and the artist’s work specifically — was served by these discussions.

Music is a matrix of protracted conversations — between current artists and creators of the past, between artists and audiences, between artists and the critics tasked with analyzing and contextualizing their work, between critics and audiences.

Few of these happen in anything close to real time. And anymore, they rarely happen at all. In the last twenty years, the critic’s voice in the ongoing conversation about music has diminished (some would say “disappeared”). The tastes and whims of paying customers are the primary measure of success now; “explainers” or analysts or tour guides no longer play a meaningful taste-shaping role. Through social media, the audience feels it has a direct pipeline to the inner thoughts (and eating habits) of favorite artists. Artists, of course, use social media as a strategic promo portal, seeking out fan reaction to new projects and treating the responses as a form of instant polling.

In that equation, there’s little incentive for anyone in the game — artists, media, managers and labels — to cultivate a genuine basis of interpersonal understanding. It’s just business, all day long. Considerations of art, and its attendant nuances, never even come up.

Should they? The current dustup over Taylor Swift’s masters illustrates how toxic things can get at the intersection of art and commerce, and how the absence of human understanding results in a contentious crossed-wires discussion about two entirely different things. The party purchasing Swift’s catalog sees it as a simple business deal, over and out, with no concern for collateral damage. Swift can’t get past the damage: She’s horrified, perhaps rightly, that her work — these songs she built from the time she was a teenager — is no longer under her control.

That short note by Prince, written around the time he was going through his own epic brawl over masters that’s now cited as precedent in cases like Swift’s, reminds that there are elements in the creation of music that exist apart from and beyond the bottom line.

It affirms the artist as the singular force in the big machine of the business — the fuel that makes things go. To be sure, Prince was savvy about the presentation and marketing of his work. But he was also fully an artist — immersed in questions of craft and tone, intention and message and nuance, day after vault-filling day. He was committed to the humbling, precarious, daunting quest to make something new. He went about it on his own terms, in ways that involved and engaged his audience. He was not looking for a winner-take-all payday every time out. He was receptive to innovative sounds and ideas erupting around him. He experimented — and suffered scorn for it. He tried other things. He kept going.

That approach to art seems almost exotic now. From another era, eons ago, when there was reverence for the long-game path of the artist who was determined to evolve from album to album, year after year.

Similarly, this letter belongs to a different time, before artists existed out of range inside of the protective bubble of celebrity, before criticism became essentially a star-rating “how is my driving?” feedback system. Before the era of self-promoting stars dispensing facile and self-referential music to self-obsessed listeners who scheme for the chance to take a quick selfie alongside the celebrity.

Music is itself a basis for communication, and thus about something more integral to human experience than business hijinks or press takedowns. You could argue that in some small way, the current state of creativity in music is affected by the once thriving and now dysfunctional conversational circuit involving artists, audiences and critics. If nobody’s really talking, there’s a chance that nobody’s listening.