The FIRST 10: Paisley Park Records (1985)

After the immense worldwide success of the Purple Rain album, Prince's contract with label Warner Bros. was quickly renegotiated, securing his services for the foreseeable future with a bump in royalties, a sizable cash advance as well as his own label for both his releases and other acts in his growing stable. Prince dubbed the new label Paisley Park. Lots of great music was issued on the label though it would come to a crashing down in 1994 amid mismanagement and lawsuits. The final Prince album on the Paisley Park label was The Hits/The B-Sides in 1993.

Below are the First 10 records issued in the United States bearing the Paisley Park logo; both long-playing albums and commercially available singles.

01) Around The World In A Day, the highly anticipated follow-up to Purple Rain, was released in April 1985, and featured highly stylized labels, including a different font for each song, setting the design template going forward for the album's singles

02) The album's first single, "Raspberry Beret", released in May 1985, carried on the design and theme established by the album. Prince also continued his wonderful habit of including non-album B-sides on his singles. (The twelve-inch single pictured above was released in June 1985 and appears here only in an effort to undermine my credibility and confuse you, my dear viewers.) "Paisley Park", pictured at the top of the post, was the album's first single in Australia, the UK, and throughout Europe though "Raspberry Beret" was released in those markets as the album's second single while "Paisley Park" was never released as a single here in America.

03) Released in July of 1985, "Pop Life" was the album's second single here in the US. The paisley-patterned A side label and cloudy sky B side label continued their run as did the inclusion of a non-album track as the single's B-side.

04) When The Time broke up in 1984 shortly after the release of their Ice Cream Castle album, Prince put together The Family, primarily as a vehicle for his girlfriend Susannah Melvoin, using three former members not named Jesse, Monte or Morris. The group's first single "The Screams Of Passion" was released in July 1985, and with the exception of the vocals and sax work heard on the record, it was all Prince.

05) Sheila E. was fresh off the success of her The Glamorous Life album but curiously absent from the Purple Rain album and film projects though she appeared as the opening act on the massive Purple Rain tour which wrapped in April 1985. Sheila then released her fourth solo single "Sister Fate" in July 1985 in advance of her second album.

06) When "Sister Fate" failed to crack the Hot 100, "Bedtime Story" was deployed as the second single in August 1985. The single failed to chart at all.

07) The Family's self-titled album was released in August 1985 with little to no promotion. A couple of the band members were otherwise preoccupied in France filming Prince's second movie at the time. Today, the album is known primarily as the very first appearance of the song "Nothing Compares 2 U".

08) Romance 1600, Sheila E.'s sophomore album was released a week after The Family, in August 1985. Despite the lackluster performance of the two preceding singles and Sheila's dandy highwayman couture, the album did fairly well, spending more than half a year on the charts.

09) Prince returned with the third US single from Around The World In A Day with "America" in October 1985. In trade ads for the single, the twelve-inch was called a "terrifying" mix of the song, which runs over twenty minutes.

10) Sheila E. first recorded with Prince on the infamous non-album track "Erotic City". For the third single off Romance 1600, the two paired up on the mic again for "A Love Bizarre", released in November 1985. The dang near thirteen-minute album track was edited down to two less than four-minute parts for the seven-inch single. Sheila also appeared in Krush Groove, released in October 1985, performing "A Love Bizarre" and "Holly Rock" though only the latter track appeared on the film's soundtrack album.