Rik Flynn
His sales may have waxed and waned a little over the years, but during his 57 years spent on this Earth, Prince never stopped striving to outdo himself and everyone around him. Compulsive and entirely unafraid to do exactly as he pleased, he lived constantly on the edge, with his songwriting and production, often at the risk of losing our attention. As his trusted engineer Susan Rogers once opined, he was someone “who was willing to completely oftend his core audience” for the sake of his art. Few others could make that claim.
Prince put himself through the mill in other ways, too, cutting songs on a daily basis, while often fasting and with very little sleep. Such was his grand vision that he squandered his entire three-album advance on his first record and almost burnt himself out in the process, after months of writing, producing and performing everything himself. Right through to his final hurried burst of activity gigging and recording live with 3rdEyeGirl, his two HitnRun albums, storming London with those unexpected guerilla shows, and on to his poignant stripped-back Piano & A Microphone tour, Prince never stopped. Preferring his chosen artistic medium to anything else life had to offer, here was a man truly possessed. “I am music,” he told Rolling Stone in 2014.