![]() But he didn't go back over the work when it was published in book form, for example. HORNBY: Dickens basically published first drafts, even though there were a lot of amendments on his manuscript pages. PRINCE: (Singing) Well, earlier I'd been talking stuff in a violent room. ![]() And that's exactly how it is on the album. But he kind of shrugged and lived with it. PRINCE: (Singing) Dorothy was a waitress on the promenade. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE BALLAD OF DOROTHY PARKER") And he wanted to record the song, "The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker," that's on "Sign O' The Times." And when she played it back, it sounded like he'd recorded it underwater. And she was very nervous about him using it for the first time. And there's a lovely story that his recording engineer, Susan Rogers, tells about building him a studio. And Prince really didn't have the time to spend a year on a track like some contemporary bands are repeated to have done. And they were so consumed, I think, with new ideas and wanting to get on and wanting to finish what they'd started, that they didn't have time to go over things again and again and again. I think that's a very interesting part of what I was interested in. NADWORNY: I loved your notion that part of why their output was so high was that both Dickens and Prince were not actually perfectionists. But yeah, who does a show after they've done a show and then wakes up in the morning and records 20 songs? That's when he did a lot of cover versions, and it was much looser. So the show's finished at 11, and then it starts another one at 1 in the morning and play a two or three-hour show with the band. And he went on these tours, which, once he'd finished the show, his people would have found him somewhere else to play. He recorded too much for his record company. And there is an estimate that there's enough - a new album every six months for the next 40 years or something, everything that's in his vault that wasn't released. He woke up in the morning, and he recorded. HORNBY: Well, Prince never stopped recording. NADWORNY: And how does that compare to Prince? And he kept them somehow apart in his head and moved from one to the other, as far as we know, in the same week. These are big, complicated books full of people and complicated plots. And this business of writing two books at once, I think if you're a writer, it's just impossible to get your head around. So it's very hard to imagine that he slept. And each of those volumes of letters is about the size of one of his novels. ![]() HORNBY: I mean, there's 12 volumes of letters. If you see what Dickens did in the course of an average day, you get tired. It's like they didn't even need to think about it. HORNBY: With both of them, I think their creativity was unstoppable. NADWORNY: The full name of Nick Hornby's new book is "Dickens And Prince: A Particular Kind Of Genius." I started by asking him what exactly that particular kind of genius was. But I just came, having had my socks knocked off, thinking I can't do any kind of straight job. ![]() It was just in the wake of "Purple Rain," and he'd kind of returned to his funk roots, I guess. HORNBY: It was an extraordinary show with his huge band all synchronized to within an inch of their lives, dancers horn section. NADWORNY: And he first saw Prince in concert in the '80s and said it was life-changing. HORNBY: I think I was very grateful that I'd never been introduced to Dickens before because one of the problems I have when I recommend him to people is that they've tried to read him at school, and they hate him because those are some long sentences and some long books. He has loved Dickens since he came across "Bleak House" on his own at university. NADWORNY: He sees the two as creative idols. And I thought, oh, that's so weird, because Dickens used to write two books at once, and it went on from there. And it turned out that Prince was working on three different albums at once. HORNBY: There's something like 63 extra songs, and that's the extra on top of a double album. NADWORNY: Hornby says he started to make the connection a couple of years ago, when Prince's the "Sign O' The Times" box set came out. NICK HORNBY: They both worked harder than perhaps anyone's ever worked in the field of the arts. Have in common? Well, a lot, according to a new book by author Nick Hornby called "Dickens And Prince" - Dickens as in Charles Dickens, the 19th-century English author, and Prince as in, well, Prince. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Reading) It was the best of times. ![]()
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