Vinyl Record
Prince
Prince on LP vinyl. A 1979 record available from Kilmorna Collection in Listowel, Ireland.
LP ยท 1979
Available from Kilmorna Collection in Listowel.
Buyer notes: 1979 LP, currently available from the Kilmorna Collection vinyl shelf. Pay for pickup in Listowel or ship within Ireland for EUR 5.50.
Prince is the 1979 second album where the prodigy image starts turning into a workable pop identity. For You had introduced the teenage multi-instrumentalist and the studio control, but Prince is where the songs become brighter, sharper and more publicly legible. The year matters: disco was mutating, funk and R&B radio were still central, rock guitar was a language Prince could already bend, and the Minneapolis sound had not yet been named as a world-shaping force. This album catches him before that language fully announces itself. I Wanna Be Your Lover is the breakthrough, a sleek pop-funk single that let Prince cross from R&B promise into wider chart attention. Around it, Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?, Sexy Dancer, Bambi, Still Waiting, I Feel for You and It's Gonna Be Lonely show a young artist testing several futures at once: falsetto seduction, guitar heroics, dance-floor precision, tender balladry and the kind of melodic writing that would travel well beyond his own versions. I Feel for You later became a major sign of how portable his songwriting could be. The album is sometimes overshadowed by the shock of Dirty Mind and the scale of 1999, but that makes it easy to underrate. Prince is not yet the full revolution; it is the moment the mechanism locks in. The sound is cleaner than the mythology to come, but the command is already unmistakable.
Prince matters because it contains the first major public breakthrough of his career and clarifies the artist he was becoming. I Wanna Be Your Lover gave him a genuine crossover foothold in 1979, while the album around it showed that he was not just a studio wunderkind but a songwriter with range. For collectors, it is the bridge between introduction and provocation.
This is core early Prince. It should sit between For You and Dirty Mind as the record where commercial confidence arrives before the explicit new-wave funk shock of 1980. Collectors should listen for the ingredients before they are exaggerated: falsetto, guitar, dance rhythm, romantic theater and full authorship starting to sound effortless.
Late-70s Prince pop-funk with falsetto vocals, disco-era polish, R&B ballads, bright synths, guitar heat and early signs of the Minneapolis sound.
Recommended for: Collectors building the first phase of Prince's catalogue; Listeners who want the origin point for I Wanna Be Your Lover; Fans tracing how funk, disco, rock and R&B fused in his early work; Anyone curious about Prince just before Dirty Mind changed the temperature.
What year was Prince released? Prince was released in 1979, as his second studio album after For You. Which track made the album a breakthrough? I Wanna Be Your Lover was the key crossover single and remains the album's most widely recognized song. How does Prince compare with Dirty Mind? Prince is smoother and more radio-facing, while Dirty Mind pushes the sexuality, new-wave edge and minimalist funk much further.