Trackademicks - "Spend The Night" from HNRL on Vimeo.
"The recipe for ecstasy, I bet it'll you next to me..."
Contrary to popular belief, I didn't grow up on Prince.
Instead, around my late teens, I started to get up on his music at a snails pace, mostly as it related to hip-hop. At the time D'Angelo had just dropped "Untitled" and hella folks were comparing him to Prince. At that point, all I [thought I] knew about Prince was that he was a small androgynous light skinned guy with a high voice.
But over the next couple of years, his sound made its way into my dollar record collection and finally, musical consciousness. At one brief point I was watching Purple Rain like every other day. I realized that the reason I wasn't up on him was because the songs I were truly drawn to like "Pop Life", "17 days", "If I Was Your Girlfriend", just to name a few, hadn't resonated with me yet in a way to contextualize the more radio friendly Pop hits. Backwards, I know. Prince is someone that can do everything at an extremely high level. It took some of his nuanced musical tendencies to pull me in and open me up to his whole agenda. Once I got it, I could never leave it.
It wasn't until some years later (about a year and a half ago) that I got the idea to flip "Take Me With You" into a house track.
See, at the same time, I was already a big fan of all kinds of electronic music. French House like DaftPunk to UK Garage like Wookie to Naked Music in SF. But, of all the music I truly enjoyed, a "pretty" aesthetic was the the common denominator.
The idea for the track came when I heard the bridge of Prince's original. The chords were magnificent. I decided to loop up the phrase and give it the "Trackademick Revaluation". And it must not be a coincidence that the words "All I want is to Spend the Night Together", occupy that part of the song. Pretty much synopsizes the song, not to mention the main objectives of many drunkardly-amorous-nightclub-goers and lovers around the world.
I wanted it to feel like electricity. Fluid. Almost like a dream. A drug-induced dancefloor vacation.
I chose to connect the visual aspect to the sample's origin because I felt that Purple Rain was a perfect stylistic and thematic representation of this song. I definitely wanted to focus on the Prince/Apollonia connection, blatantly disregarding the larger story line, because, just like real life, nothing else matters when everything that you've ever wanted is staring at you in the face...
Shout out to Rob Critical for putting the visuals together.
