Notes
Can a guitar solo make me cry? It can and it has...
When on tour, Prince often followed up a mammoth 3-hour show with a late-night aftershow at a small local venue, with little promotion or advance notice. While touring behind Sign o'the Times in The Netherlands in 1988, Prince and his band performed a killer aftershow deep into the night, including a cover of the Temptations classic "Just My Imagination." This soundboard recording has come to be regarded by many Prince fans as his greatest guitar performance ever, and his finest bootleg recording. The song, one of Whitfield-Strong's most beautiful compositions, is a deeply poignant expression of romantic longing and regret, and the pain of self-delusion. Prince's guitar deepens and amplifies these sentiments, taking the listener on an emotional journey from wistfulness to the anguish of desperate, thwarted passion and missed opportunity, finally breaking through to something like transcendence, as if to say that no profound love is ever to be regretted, no matter the cost to one’s psyche. It truly is breathtaking how much can be expressed without words.
Sublime.
I know. I have lived this song. (Audio only)