Key Change: Questlove on Prince

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Hrishikesh Hirway. This is Key Change, where I talk to fascinating people about the music that changed their lives, and my guest today is Ahmir Thompson, AKA Questlove, the drummer and founding member of The Roots, as well as an author, a DJ, and an Oscar-winning film director. You know, a song that changed my life is Double Trouble by The Roots, and the liner notes that Questlove wrote to go with the song. There's a change in the drum sound in that song that blew my mind, and Questlove wrote a little bit about the effort that went into getting that drum sound. And as a drummer myself, I wanted to know everything about that. And that moment, 26 years ago, was maybe when the first seed for Song Exploder got planted in my brain. So getting to talk to him for this was really special for me. Questlove has an encyclopedic knowledge of music. It's really astounding. He knows so much about so many artists. He's just directed a new documentary about Earth, Wind & Fire, which is out now. But one of the artists he knows best is Prince. He was recently asked by Rolling Stone to rank the top 100 Prince songs, and for this episode, we talked about the song that he put at number one on that list.

My name is Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, and I want to talk about a very special version of Prince's breakthrough 1983 song, Little Red Corvette, specifically the 12-inch remix version.

How old were you when you first heard Prince's music?

I was seven years old. Prince entered my life in the most unusual way, which was my grandfather, my mother's father, had just passed away. My mother and my father lived in the East Coast in Philadelphia, and my mother's side of the family lived in Los Angeles. And the family called my father first to deliver the news, and my father had to deliver this news to my mother, who obviously and understandably was very distraught. So this is the first time I'm witnessing my mother having something close to a panic attack.

Mm.

Mind you, I'm seven years old. So kind of on a, a reflex, nothing to see here type of reaction, my sister, who's older than I was and was kind of like a parental permanent fixture of my life, just rushes me to my parents' bedroom and instantly grabs, you know, my father's like studio headphones and puts the jack inside the radio and hands me drumsticks. "Here, just practice." And, "What, what's mommy doing?" "No, no, no, just..." And she turns up the volume, and she puts on WDAS, our station in Philadelphia, and just as the song Street Wave by The Brothers Johnson is fading out, I remember Doug Henderson saying, "And we got a new one from Prince, and this is called Soft and Wet." And I remember that my mother would remind me weekly when I begged her to please cut my hair that, "No, your afro is your crown, and I named you Ahmir because that means Prince."

Hmm.

That was the connection. So I heard Prince's debut record as my mother is going through the most painful reaction to my grandfather's death. So that's how I remember Prince entering my life in the summer of 1978.

Wow.

But to tell you