Yes, a rare earnest musical moment from me. 🙂
Out today – My version of Prince’s “I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man”. You can listen to it on your favorite audio streamer.
If you’ve ever listened to me talk about music for more than two minutes then you know I’m a HUGE Prince fan. And I absolutely love his original version of this song from the Sign O’The Times album (which happens to be the album that triggered my Prince addiction.)
But the lyrics are so sad and I always wanted to hear him to a downtempo version that matched the sentiment. So I had to do my own.
This is actually a bit of a vault track. Though my vault is way smaller than Prince’s. I recorded this song in 2006 and it was out for a bit. However the licensing hadn’t been done right so I pulled it down. Now it’s all legit. And this let me go back in for a light remastering too.
While I’ve been doing this song on my Tuesday Livestream show… every Tuesday at 12:30pm PT on Facebook and Instagram… I hadn’t played it in years. Doesn’t usually fit the vibe of my comedy club shows.
My most prominent memory of performing the song was a gig I did for an art car event at the San Jose Museum of Art years ago. Sounds relatively cool. What a shit gig.
I was playing on the front steps of the museum… unamplified. Like a damn busker. In case you were wondering why I can’t stop slamming my voice into the mic and annoying soundmen in the process, I used to do a lot of these unamplified outdoor gigs.
There were a ton of people around checking out the art cars, mostly ignoring me. Then I did this song and the crowd paused, quieted, listened. It was the first thing that got their attention.
And while I enjoyed that they were actually paying attention, I spent the whole song thinking “Oh sure… You’ll pay attention to the one song you already know.”
The power of a good cover, I guess.
Give it a listen and save it to your listening library. Then every so often you can go “Huh, this is weird.”
Looking for more of my releases? Check out the Phil Johnson and Roadside Attraction store!