Profonde Musique
April 21, 2026
It is as vivid today as it if happened last week. But it was ten years ago. Today. Prince Rogers Nelson died. Gone. Silenced. Forever. And by that evening I am sitting in the breakfast nook of my kitchen on a writing jag fueled by memory and grief, disbelief and anger, agony and plain shock It turns out in retrospect to be the purest of my writing. It is the one I bring out once a year, on this day, for now, shit, ten years, and still try to fathom. I can’t. I don’t expect to. Too soon. Not him. Not now. Prince died. Fuck. And my deadline loomed. Cover story. Write the requested eulogy. Just me. I’d written about Prince many times for the Aquarian Weekly. This was the plan. Because they’d sent me to a press-only Artist Formally Known as Prince event in 1997 at the Roseland Ballroom. I’m the guy to do it, my editor said. Little did he know. Little did my readers know, it was personal. And that’s how I started.
Ten years ago, somewhere in the late afternoon, I received an email from my sister-in-law, Shannon. Prince died. What? Although the news was shocking, and it was still a developing international story, it made sense it came from her. Shannon and I had shared Prince’s music at nearly every family gathering by then for nearly twenty years. Her sister, my beloved wife, is also a fan, but it was always Shannon who insisted we blast Purple Rain at certain periods of long weekends and would request a Prince song or five when we’d all inevitably be dancing around the living room with or without the kids. Shannon had to be the one to alert me.
Soon after, I received a text from my dear friend and drummer from my 1980s band, Anthony, who also shared in real-time those classic Prince and the Revolution songs and albums from the period – much of which I cover in my most recent release, Revolution – Prince, the Band, the Era.
Not long after, the call came for me to put down the shock and sadness I felt. Try and frame what Prince’s art had meant to me when music was my livelihood, and I held onto his genius, his madness, his dynamic presence as much as I could as a creative and later understood its impact further as a music writer. Moreover, I had to voice the anguish of millions of Prince fans. I had to dig deep. I had to mourn, it turns out, my youth. That is what the Boomers told me when John Lennon was murdered. Their youth was slain. They grew up with him, he spoke to them, he became a voice, an architype for their generation. Gunned down at forty. Distant memories of a time when the music mattered more than bills, taxes, commuting, the usual adult shit. Obliterated.
And so, I wrote about this and kept writing. I eventually just gave out and sent it to press by midnight, and it was widely read – on the cover – less than a week later. But I didn’t read it, would not read it, at least until the one-year anniversary when it dawned on me that I did, in fact, write about me in the thing. There’s stuff about Prince in there, of course, but this was ultimately a requiem to youth and how music takes us there and makes us think of those who were there too, who remember it all as if it were still happening because that is what good music does, what it always does and should always do. It is part of our DNA – our present and our past – what I have based my 300 Favorite Albums podcast on, that magical elixir of nostalgia meets immediacy. It is magic.
And Prince was, after all, a magician, and he never let us forget it. He was always on – the fashion, the sounds, the mystical mumbles that seemed to be prophetic and unhinged, as were the lyrics that were alien guideposts of a clarity unknown.
But enough of this rant. Why not unearth this cover piece one more time? Why not let this free-form regurgitation out of its cage once more? Okay. Sure. Below is what I wrote that day, and what I barely edited, because I didn’t want to write it much less read it. And although I still wince at its brutal, raw-boned honesty about my own sorrow, it still makes sense to me. Maybe it will to you.
I miss Prince and still do.
Ten years now.
And counting.
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