Ten Years is a Mighty Long Time #Prince 💜🕺🏿🕊️☔️
Posted: April 21, 2026 Filed under: just because Leave a comment
Prince has been gone for ten years, and I cannot believe it has been that long.
The picture above was taken by my daughter, Bebe, while she was in New York City during the days Prince died a decade ago. Here are a few more:
I wanted to dedicate today’s post to Prince. I tend to loose myself in his music so often. Especially nowadays.
Just a side note, many of these videos will take you to YouTube to play them on that app…I’m giving y’all a heads up. Also if the instagram post do not embed, try reloading the page.
It makes me cry to listen to his songs, but I get so much joy from them…like his halftime performance at the Superbowl in 2007:
Prince could cover anyone and make it sound so damn good:
This is a good look back from The Guardian:
‘He couldn’t wait to show me his room full of fan mail’
Charles ‘Chazz’ Smith, cousin and original drummer in Grand Central
It seems only yesterday that we were kids and went to see Sly and the Family Stone playing at the Parade stadium, Minneapolis. We didn’t have tickets, but they tore the fence down so we ran in and ended up on the front row, with Sly looking down on us. After that, Prince said: “We’re gonna form a band, and you’re gonna be the drummer.” He had an upright piano in his basement and a TV in the wall, and we’d play TV themes such as The Man from UNCLE. Two weeks later his dad got him a guitar and the next day he came back playing Black Magic Woman by Santana, note for note. He was obsessed with being great at guitar, writing songs, playing rock, funk, ballads, everything.
‘He understood what it felt like to be a misfit’
André Cymone, childhood best friend and bandmate
It really doesn’t feel like 10 years. Sometimes it hits me harder than others. My wife and I were in Tucson recently and suddenly in an alley there was a big mural of him. It’s just so weird because I think: this is my childhood friend. We grew up eating bowls of cereal together.
We met in junior high, talked about music and wound up jamming. Then Prince turned up on my mother’s doorstep and lived with us for seven years. His parents had split up and so had mine. He didn’t talk much – you could put Prince in a headlock and you’d maybe squeeze three words out of him – but nobody understood me as an individual like he did. We realised that our fathers had played in the same band and wanted to blow them out of the water. We were brothers in the truest sense; it was a beautiful friendship and we pushed each other. Everything was a competition: music, dancing, basketball, girls. We started the band Grand Central in the cellar. Because we were in Minneapolis we’d listen to stuff from the west coast and the east coast – funk, rock, pop, jazz, avant garde – and kinda filtered it into a unique amalgamation. I played with him until after the Dirty Mind tour, by which point he’d found his own lane, which he did exquisitely.
He understood what it felt like to be a misfit and wanted to speak to misfits around the world: straight, gay, Black, white, Puerto Rican, whatever. He had more than his share of female relationships but was bold enough to think outside the box in ways most artists wouldn’t touch because they felt it would challenge their masculinity. So he’d write songs such as If I Was Your Girlfriend. He’d say to me: “I don’t want to specify whether I’m talking to a girl or a man. I want people to wonder. To create a mystery.” He wanted people to join his philosophical army and feel like they had an artist who spoke to them.
Please read the whole article at the Guardian…some good memories there.
Image by Dilan Parekh
The 100-foot mural of Prince overlooking First Avenue in Minneapolis, on April 15, 2026.
For fans of Prince, Minneapolis, the artist’s hometown, is an essential destination. Above, a mural of Prince, painted in 2022 by the street artist Hiero Veiga, in downtown Minneapolis.Credit…Caroline Yang for The New York Times
A big celebration is planned in Minneapolis in June:
For more information check out the article above.
I will post a few more songs before I end with something new.
Yesterday, the Prince estate released a new song:
Nearly a decade after his death, new music from Prince is still emerging from the vault, and the latest is arriving with purpose. Out today via NPG Records in partnership with Legacy Recordings, “With This Tear” is a previously unreleased studio recording dating back to November 1991. Written, produced and entirely performed by Prince at his Minnesota studio Paisley Park, the track has been newly mixed and mastered by longtime collaborator Chris James.
Shortly after recording it, Prince passed “With This Tear” to Céline Dion, who released her own version in 1992. This newly unveiled original offers a direct window into his early-’90s creative period, when the aritst was particularly unfiltered and self-contained. Sonically, it trades the sweeping, adult-contemporary grandeur of Dion’s take for a sparse, piano-led arrangement with soft synth textures and subtle orchestration. The accompanying video underscores that intimacy, pairing the track with a montage of archival photos and performance footage spanning Prince’s life and career.
And with that, I close this open thread. Stay safe everyone.
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments