It was 1999 (the record not the year). Lynda came to me and Carol‘s room with the album. She’d just gotten it. Perhaps she had only listened to it fifty times since the day before. I was still reeling from the British release deep Bowie cuts Karen had infiltrated our ears with over the winter…
I will never forget hearing that album for the first time. It woke something up in me. I swear it was spring. I remember it being one of those days when the sun comes back to these hills, and the air sings with new life. Angie, you might have been there, but if you weren’t, you might as well have been… maybe you were… You always were (Still are)… Then we found Dirty Mind… Controversy… For You…
How many times did I make you sit through another Lip Syncing of International Lover?
Good Evening… “This is your Pilot Prince Speaking…”
Fighting with mom to let me hang the shower poster on my wall… She totally won.
But she never could shake the Prince outta me—thank the Goddess…
I just stood in my kitchen and wept when I read the news today… Surely there were some tears just waiting behind the floodgates… My father passed away three years ago tomorrow (Earth Day). I didn’t really know what to do with the news. It was the weirdest thing… Like a little bit more of the child in me died today… A little bit older… a little bit more fragile…
And the song ran through my head… I had to hear it.
Put it on… Find it on Youtube….
“Sometimes it snows in April… Sometimes it feels so bad…
Sometimes it feels that Life is never ending…All good things they say, never last…”
Sometimes the music touches places so deep within us that we bond even when we never locked eyes… Sometimes you just know…
Somehow… I found just what I didn’t realize I was looking for. Scrolling through the Youtube files. When I needed to be consoled… When I needed the healing connectivity of music… the way it touches one heart and then another… I often turn to Shawn Smith.
and there was this blessed version of this blessed song sung by this blessed light being… And I let the tears flow even more freely…
I am not the only one feeling this today…
We all know each other, because we all stood in front of a mirror with a hairbrush and pretended we were Prince.
It seems that I find the time to write these days, when someone leaves this plain. As though it takes the loss of a little bit of my innocence to take a moment to write something.
But I won’t let that be the norm anymore…
It’s Earth Day…
I’ll plant a Rose bush and a Lilac… Celebrating two special lives and the connective Mother Earth we are so fortunate to share space upon.
Prince didn’t be born early enough to make it to “that” stage, but he is gonna rock the shit outta the the great gig in the sky. Another one with brand new wings. I am sure that many of our musical shamans are high flying free–together 😉
Ah Ho.
Palace of Muse 
