Another Prince Album Sees the Light
The making of Welcome 2 America
welcome 2 america is available July 30 from Legacy Recordings.
in 2010, prince convened several members of his band the New Power Generation—a revolving-door collective of longtime players and new prospects—to record an album titled
Welcome 2 America. When they embarked on a Welcome 2 America tour that winter, they regaled fans at select gigs with the political outrage of the intended title track. But they neglected to mention that they had just recorded a whole album, and Welcome 2 America was never released in full. For the next decade, it lingered in Prince’s vast, unknowable vaults at his Paisley Park complex outside Minneapolis.
That changes on July 30, when the album will be released as part of the posthumous series managed by the artist’s estate, which also produced 2018’s demo collection Piano & a
Microphone 1983 and 2019’s Originals. Welcome 2 America is a delight. The grooves are airtight and joyous, and Prince—who died in 2016—speaks to a shifting political climate and the pursuit of a better life. In the title track, he advises us to see the country for the imperfect union it is; on “1000 Light Years From Here” and “One Day We Will
All B Free,” he yearns for freedom from inequality and pines for spiritual enlightenment. You may wonder how these songs would have shifted perceptions of a misunderstood stretch of Prince’s career. But the musicians who helped make them are unfazed by this trajectory. “To me, you couldn’t find a better time to drop the album than right now,” says musical director Morris Hayes. “It’s hitting on every cylinder as to what’s happening today.”
SHELBY J., BACKING VOCALIST: Prince always reflected either what was happening right there or how he thought that was going to affect the future. In 2010, you’d just had the financial collapse. You had people losing homes. You had people turning inward, people living on Instagram. You didn’t know what was real or what wasn’t. It was the beginning of all this misinformation. Everybody right now is talking about critical race theory. Prince was also talking about understanding that not everything we were taught is the truth. We were in L.A. one time, and he wanted to go to bookstores to buy all of this different African literature and Pan-African stuff, stuff I didn’t know about. He’d give us DVDs to watch—not to say “You have to watch this,” but more like “I’m trying to open your mind so you can understand the world and where you’re from.” This album is acknowledging that the world’s not perfect and we can’t fix it if we don’t call it out.
MORRIS HAYES, KEYBOARDIST AND MUSICAL DIRECTOR: When Obama was elected, Prince was talking about wanting to meet him, and it wasn’t because he just wanted to be like, “Yeah, we got a Black president.” It was “I want to talk to this dude and take him to task about what needs to happen for people of color, people that’s disenfranchised.” He was trying to get at this dude and say, “Look, man, I’m glad you’re a soul brother. What are you going to do for your people?”
TAL WILKENFELD, BASSIST: In 2009, Prince had called me and said, “I want to make a trio with you, me, and a drummer. I want you to find me the drummer.” Bass players and drummers—you guys gotta like each other. I called four people up and didn’t tell them what it was for. Like, “Come jam.” Prince picked his favorite, Chris Coleman. We recorded the whole
Welcome 2 America album in March and April of 2010. We’d never been in the studio with him before. We’d only jammed once as a group. Then the vocalists overdubbed their vocals to the basic tracks we made as a trio. After he got the tracks with the vocals and the trio, Morris overdubbed keyboards and did production on a few of the songs. HAYES: The song I really love is “Born 2 Die.” Prince told me he was watching Dr. Cornel West videos on YouTube. Prince would get on the internet and go down a wormhole and be bingewatching a bunch of stuff. He got on Dr.
West, who was talking about freedom fighters and Curtis Mayfield. He said, “Prince is great, but he’s no Curtis Mayfield.” Prince was like, “Okay, we’ll see,” and wrote “Born 2 Die.”
WILKENFELD: He liked looking at what was going on, but he always used other people’s devices. He didn’t really use his own phone to call people. I know he had a computer. There’s an iPad reference in a lyric in “Welcome 2 America”; I looked it up, and the iPad had probably only been out for a month when he wrote that.
“Everybody’s always trying to pin a logic on Prince. He didn’t have to be logical for you and me.”
SHELBY J.: The song “Yes” is fun, but if you listen to the lyrics, he’s still dropping stuff there: “Trans4mation for every heart / Everybody’s got 2 play the part.” For a lot of those vocals, the three of us—Liv Warfield, Elisa Fiorillo, and myself—are huddled around one microphone singing the way they do in old Motown footage. Our blend had to be right. I just would like to thank my fellow vocalists for being able to hold that note at the end of “Yes” for 32 beats. There is no breathing.
LIV WARFIELD, BACKING VOCALIST: When he asked us to hold that note, he said, “What, y’all can’t do it?” and then did it himself. He just gave this look. You know Prince be giving looks. He did it and said, “Now you girls go do it.” Then he walked out of the room.
ELISA FIORILLO, BACKING VOCALIST: As we got to know each other in the studio, at the end of some of the songs he’d have us just talking and acting like we were at a party. We’d be watching him from the
sound room, watching us randomly talking about whatever and having him laugh at some of the things we would say. It was like when you’re trying to prove yourself to your parents, trying to make them proud.
SHELBY J.: When the album was finished, we all got in Prince’s car, riding through the park listening …
FIORILLO: We listened to the whole record. We drove around the arboretum. I just remember everybody’s head nodding. That place was banging. The darn car was going right and left.
HAYES: I hate to tell on him, but Prince was a terrible driver. He went too fast.
WILKENFELD: Prince also had two listening parties around May 2010 after we tracked. He was so excited to be playing us fully mixed tracks. He was definitely into the music. People were pulling up in limos dressed in Grammy attire. I didn’t know who they were, but they came and we listened to the music and that was it. Then I don’t know what happened. I never had an inkling the album was coming out. Just because you get called for a session doesn’t mean it’s coming out, so I always just go with the flow and play my part. When it comes out, that’s when I know it’s coming out.
SHELBY J.: Prince always knew when it was the right time to do the right thing, and I know that sounds simple, but if you want to understand Prince, understand he’s the kind of person that is going to do what he wants to do. I think he just put the album away, thinking maybe it wasn’t the right time. Prince was prophetic. He was writing “1999” in 1982.
Welcome 2 America was like a little time capsule he put aside. The album was done. They even had a listening party. If he felt like playing with a band and doing live stuff, that’s what he would do.
He never sat down and said, “We’re about to go on tour, but we’re not going to sing the songs we just recorded.” He called us in to sing, and we would just sing. We didn’t ask, “What is this for?” That’s not how it flowed. It was very organic. Sometimes he might say, “Yeah, this is for the new album.” And sometimes he would change his mind.
We were doing a three-hour show. One of the only new songs we played on the tour was “Welcome 2 America,” and we didn’t even play that over the music to “Welcome 2 America”— it was over another jam. It was different music, but we were
singing the lyrics. The fans were like, Okay, what is this? Is this something new?
HAYES: Prince always, always could put together a crazy show. He knew how to take any song and very quickly arrange it, even a song everybody knows. He put his own thing on it and made it come alive. It was always a mistake for me to hear live versions before I heard the record because everything goes up a notch. It’s going somewhere else. I wore [the title of musical director] very loosely. Prince MD-ed his own set. He put his show together. I just maintained some writing orders whenever he’d step away.
WARFIELD: Frequency was everything. I didn’t understand that until I got onstage with him. Everybody was connected. We just had to be on. You had to flow, and you would have to be ready to go wherever he was about to go. We had to all be there together as one, as a unit.
HAYES: Jesse Johnson [from the Time] told me a long time ago, “Man, really, when Prince do a record, he do three.” I found that to be true. He’ll do three and maybe four sometimes because he writes so much material, then he figures out what he wants to use and where he wants to go. There doesn’t have to be any rhyme or reason. It doesn’t have to be logical. Everybody’s always trying to pin a logic on Prince. He didn’t have to be logical for you and me.
WILKENFELD: He was focused on the music industry and how it was structured based on his bad experiences. We’d spend hours talking about why I shouldn’t sign this record deal. He’d say, “You need to put out your records yourself.” He was very passionate about having control of your own music and image and this and that.
SHELBY J.: It wasn’t like how some people have things all planned out and written out, saying, “It’s going to be coming out on this date.” Sometimes he could be like that but not with
Welcome 2 America. We were just getting out what he wanted to get out. He had all this stuff in him he wanted to get out, and we were there to help him do it. That’s it. Music flowed through him. Thoughts and energies flowed through him. And you had to be able to roll with that. Some people need to know the answer to everything. They need explanations all the time. That’s just not the way it worked in Prince’s world.