Janelle Monáe - The Audition (2003)

Janelle Monáe Robinson was born on 01 December 1985 in Kansas City, and was raised in Quindaro, a working-class community of Kansas City. She was raised Baptist and learned to sing at a local church, and she dreamed of being a singer and a performer from a very young age, citing the fictional character of Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz as a musical influence. As a teenager she was enrolled in the Coterie Theater's Young Playwrights' Round Table, which began writing musicals, one of which was inspired by the 1979 Stevie Wonder album 'Journey Through "The Secret Life of Plants"', and which was completed when Monáe was only around the age of 12. After high school she moved to New York City to study musical theatre at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, but after a year and a half she dropped out and relocated to Atlanta, enrolling in Perimeter College at Georgia State University. She began writing her own music and performing around the campus, and in 2003 she self-released a demo album titled 'The Audition', which she sold out of the trunk of a Mitsubishi Galant. During this period she worked at an Office Depot, but was fired for answering a fan's e-mail using a company computer, an incident that inspired the song 'Lettin' Go', which in turn attracted the attention of Big Boi of OutKast. In 2006 she appeared on the tracks 'Call The Law' and 'In Your Dreams' from OutKast's 2006 album 'Idlewild', and when Big Boi told his friend Sean "Puffy" Combs about her, Combs visited her MySpace page, and was so impressed that he signed her to his Bad Boy Records label. The label's chief role was to facilitate her exposure on a broader scale rather than developing the artist and music, taking its time to build her profile organically and allowing the music to grow. 

In 2007, Monáe released her first solo work, 'Metropolis', which was originally conceived as a concept album in four parts, or "suites", which were to be released through her website and mp3 download sites. After the release of the first part of the series, 'Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase)' in mid-2007, these plans were altered, and Bad Boy Records gave an official and physical release to the first suite in August 2008, which was retitled 'Metropolis: The Chase Suite (Special Edition)' and included two new tracks. The EP was critically acclaimed, garnering her a Grammy nomination for Best Urban/Alternative Performance for the single 'Many Moons', which then led to festival appearances, and touring as opening act for band No Doubt on their summer 2009 tour. In 2010 she released her first full-length studio album, 'The ArchAndroid', a concept album and sequel to her first EP, following this in 2013 with her second concept album 'The Electric Lady', which debuted at number five on the Billboard 200, and served as the fourth and fifth instalments of the seven-part 'Metropolis' series. Her third studio concept album, 'Dirty Computer', was released in 2018 to widespread critical acclaim, and it was chosen as the best album of the year by several publications. She has also branched out into acting, featuring in both 'Moonlight' and 'Hidden Figures' in 2016, and in April 2022, Harper Voyager published her first book, 'The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer', which explores how different threads of liberation — queerness, race, gender plurality, and love — become tangled with future possibilities of memory and time in a totalitarian landscape. Monáe has always been very focussed on her career, and this was evident from the very beginning, when she pressed up 500 copies of her demo album and hawked them from the back of her car, and so for anyone who wants to hear what the fledgling singer sounded like back in 2003 on those thirteen mostly self-penned songs and one instrumental, then here is 'The Audition' - a perfectly named album if ever there was one. 

Track listing

01 Thoughts (Intro)
02 Lettin' Go
03 Party Girl
04 Metropolis
05 Cindi
06 It's Not Fair
07 Time Will Reveal
08 My Favorite Nothing
09 Warm Up (Cloud 9 interlude)
10 Cloud 9
11 Star
12 I Won't Let Go
13 You
14 You Are My Everything

Prince - ...and on guitar (2015)

Prince Rogers Nelson was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on June 7, 1958, the son of jazz singer Mattie Della and pianist and songwriter John Lewis Nelson, and both he and his sister Tyka developed a keen interest in music, which was encouraged by their father, writing his first song 'Funk Machine' on his father's piano when he was seven. When he was 10 his parents divorced, with his mother remarrying to Hayward Baker, with whom she had a son named Omarr. Prince had a fraught relationship with Omarr, to the extent that it caused him to repeatedly switch homes, sometimes living with his father and sometimes with his mother and stepfather. After a brief period of living with his father, who bought him his first guitar, Prince moved into the basement of his neighbours, the Anderson family, after his father kicked him out, and it was there that he befriended the Anderson's son, Andre, who later collaborated with Prince and became known as André Cymone. In 1973 Prince met songwriter and producer Jimmy Jam, and impressed him with his musical talent, early mastery of a wide range of instruments, and work ethic. In 1975, Pepe Willie, the husband of Prince's cousin Shauntel, formed the band 94 East with Marcy Ingvoldstad and Kristie Lazenberry, hiring André Cymone and Prince to record tracks. Willie wrote the songs, and Prince contributed guitar tracks, with Prince and Willie co-writing one song, 'Just Another Sucker'. The band recorded some songs which have since been re-issued as an album many times under different titles, including 'Minneapolis Genius – The Historic 1977 Recordings'. 

In 1976, Prince created a demo tape with producer Chris Moon, but he was unable to secure a recording contract, so Moon brought the tape to Owen Husney, a Minneapolis businessman, who signed the 19 year-old Prince to a management contract, and helped him create a demo at Sound 80 Studios in Minneapolis, which generated interest from Warner Bros. Records, A&M Records, and Columbia Records. With the help of Husney, Prince signed a recording contract with Warner Bros, who gave him creative control for three albums, and let him retain his publishing rights. Husney and Prince then left Minneapolis and moved to Sausalito, California, where Prince's first album 'For You' was recorded and released in 1978, with Prince writing, producing, arranging, composing, and playing all 27 instruments on the recording, except for the song 'Soft and Wet', whose lyrics were co-written with Moon. In 1979, Prince created a band with André Cymone on bass, Dez Dickerson on guitar, Gayle Chapman and Doctor Fink on keyboards, and Bobby Z. on drums, and released the 'Prince' album that year, and despite the record company thinking he needed more time to develop, the album hit the top five spot on the Billboard R&B/Black Albums chart, and the single 'I Wanna Be Your Lover' sold over a million copies. 

The same year he made the first of what was to become many guest appearances, although the following decade was to be particularly busy for him, and it was to be 1989 before he really started regularly guesting on other artist's albums. In 1980 he released the album 'Dirty Mind', which contained sexually explicit material, following this the next year with 'Controversy'. In 1981, Prince formed a side project band called The Time, who released four albums between 1981 and 1990, with Prince writing and performing most of the instrumentation and backing vocals, and at the same time releasing his own four-million selling album '1999', along with a string of hit singles, being the start of his world-domination over the next two decades. When he was asked to contribute to records by other musicians, it wasn't always by famous artists, and even into the 90's he was adding his guitar to tracks by Eric Leeds and Diamond And Pearl, as well as Kid Creole & The Coconuts and Mavis Staples. Similarly, in the 2000's he was guesting with Common and Rhonda Smith, as well as Stevie Wonder. In 2004 he was inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall Of Fame, playing in the all-star band's version of 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps', alongside Tom Petty, Stevie Winwood, Jeff Lynne and others, and performing a stunning, un-rehearsed guitar solo at the end of the song. Other guest appearance were fairly sparse after that, with his final one before his death in 2016 being on Judith Hill's 'Back In Time' album. Although it might seem that more music has been released since his death than there was while he was alive, these guest appearance are generally over-looked as they tended not to be with the superstars that he hung out with, but lesser-known artists who would appreciate his contribution to their music. 

Track listing

Disc One
01 Fast Freddie The Roller Disco King (single by The Imperials 1979)
02 Got To Be Something Here (from 'The Lewis Connection' by Lewis Connection 1979)
03 Love Song (from 'Like A Prayer' by Madonna 1989) 
04 The Sex Of It (from 'Private Waters In The Great Divide' by Kid Creole 1990)
05 The Dopamine Rush (from 'Times Squared' by Eric Leeds 1991) 
06 51 Hours (single by Diamond And Pearl 1992)
07 Melody Cool (from 'The Voice' by Mavis Staples 1993)
08 Why Should I Love You (from 'The Red Shoes' by Kate Bush 1993) 

Disc Two
01 Star *69 (PS With Love) (from 'Electric Circus' by Common 2002)
02 Purple House (from 'Power Of Soul: A Tribute To Jimi Hendrix' 2004)
03 So What The Fuss (from 'A Time 2 Love' by Stevie Wonder 2005) 
04 While My Guitar Gently Weeps (from Rock 'n' Roll Hall Of Fame induction concert 2004) 
05 Time (from 'RS2' by Rhonda Smith 2006)
06 Raise Up (from 'Raise Up' by Larry Graham & Graham Central Station 2012) 
07 Givin' Em What They Love (from 'The Electric Lady' by Janelle Monáe 2013)
08 All Day, All Night  (from 'Back In Time' by Judith Hill 2015)