Last year, The Second Disc had nothing but good things to say about Dearly Beloved: A Prince Songbook, Cherry Red's triple-disc tribute to the music of Prince. The set told a story of The Artist's massive impact on pop, rock and soul by way of songs he gave others to record and a galaxy of genre-bending covers. In a year of considerable challenges in Prince fandom, it was a veritable oasis in a desert.

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of speaking with Adam Mattera, the curator and producer of Dearly Beloved. For U.K. pop and reissue connoisseurs, he's well known as a journalist who served as an award-winning editor of the British magazine Attitude and has produced a multitude of archival releases, compilations and box sets - particularly Cherry Red and RT Industries' ongoing partnership in exploring Sheena Easton's EMI catalogue.

In this warm, easygoing chat, Mattera shared some lovely memories of interviewing Prince nearly 30 years ago, the art of selecting Dearly Beloved's track list and what he hopes fans will take away from the listening experience.

What was your first exposure to Prince? When did you become a fan?

My first "thing" would have been in "1999," when it came out as a single in the U.K. When 1999 came out in the U.K., it was a single album. I had to hunt down and get my copy of the double album. By that point, I had already sort of become obsessed about looking at the back of record sleeves and reading who wrote things for whom. I had Stephanie Mills' Merciless, and my favorite track was "How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore?" I remember seeing the name "Prince" - it was an unusual name when I saw it. I was thinking, "Is this the guy?" Then I remember in a secondhand store finding a 7" of "I Wanna Be Your Lover."

I suppose there's a sort of uniqueness and directness to what he's doing, lyrically and musically. It is timeless in a way. A lot of his music doesn't sound like music that's tied to a certain era.
It still sounds fresh. Although there may be certain production sounds, drum sounds, that sometimes obviously could say, "oh, that's very '80s," it doesn't date at all.
So it always retains that freshness and immediacy. And also, I suppose he's just so present in the grooves of the records - his spirit somehow. The songs that become his legacy that most people know, you still really feel it somehow, because he's such a committed, soulful artist. 
And the breadth of genres: that he can appeal to rock, soul, jazz even, across the board. That uniqueness keeps him alive, I think.

And you've interviewed him, yeah? What was that like?

Yes, I did interview him.
I interacted with him a couple times - I even danced onstage with him once, which was one of the most surreal moments of my life. He was doing a showcase for Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic. It wasn't just me - there was a bit at the end where they were grabbing people to go on stage. There were about 20 or 30 of us. I could have reached out and touched Prince. So surreal.

It was a few years before that I interviewed him. and I was working at a magazine called Echoes, a Black music magazine. This was around the time of The Gold Experience; prior to that, he famously barely ever spoke to the press. We got an e-mail or a phone call: he's doing interviews tomorrow with select journalists, you've got to be at a certain place at a certain time, there's a coach taking you to Wembley where he was ready to do some shows and you're gonna do the interview there. You can't call him "Prince," you have to call him by the symbol.

You weren't allowed to take notes. They drew straws to decide which order the journalists went in to see him. They built an area backstage at Wembley for him - kind of like a harem vibe? It's kind of a maze back there. That was the weirdest thing, actually - walking through the maze to get to the back, and then a door opens and Prince is literally standing there. It was like seeing a unicorn. Do you know what I mean? It was unexpected.
When you go into a room you sort of prepare, when you interview people, that when you walk through the person will be there. But then a door suddenly opens and Prince stands there in his look at the time, very perfumed as well. That was kind of amazing.

We draw the straws, and we're only given a very small amount of time - I think it was like 20 minutes or something. It was short. It was all candlelit and there were veils. It was a tentlike atmosphere.
And you didn't have anything! Normally you have a recorder or something, so you have to try and do the interview and also memorize what you were saying. And so that kind of adds a certain pressure. I had a million questions to ask him, but he wasn't interested in talking about anything apart from the present. If you tried to say, "What about that song you wrote?" he'd say, "Yeah, that was great, but let's talk about The Gold Experience." Or about him being a slave, or how The NPG are gonna buy everybody a computer. He'd say, "We're gonna release our music on the Internet, and you can just download it." "Well, what about people who don't have computers?" "We'll fix that. The NPG will fix that." It was amazing.

Then, after the interview, you'd have to go and frantically scribble down everything you remembered. That was almost like being in an exam, because the other journalists were like, "How did it go?" but nobody wanted to share! Everyone was being really guarded about what he said. It was a really weird experience - but really amazing.

How did you get involved with producing reissues and compilations?

I always loved reissues of albums and things.
And so when I found Cherry Red, I thought, "Well, I'll try and suggest something. I don't really know how this works." I'd pitched Helen Terry, the singer who was with Culture Club. She did an amazing album, and I wanted to have it on CD. We did it as a single disc, because back then they liked doing those. If it was today, we'd do it as a double disc. The second one I produced was Zazu by Rosie Vela. This really great album produced by Gary Katz, featuring performances by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. [This was their first collaboration since Steely Dan's more than decade-long disbandment in 1981. -MD] She was a beautiful model that recorded this one album. "Magic Smile" was a hit in Britain. It's a strange record - pretty good.

I did a whole bunch of those, infrequently at first - maybe one a year. But now, more recently, I've been doing them much more. I've been focusing on it a lot. Sheena Easton has been big because I suggested that to them, and found the people that own the rights. And so over the last three, if not four years, I've been working my way through her EMI catalogue.

Where did the idea for Dearly Beloved come from?

I first suggested the idea to Cherry Red quite a few years ago. Probably four, if not five years ago. It kind of stopped, and then I re-pitched it about two years ago. I revived the idea because Cherry Red has been doing a few compilations of "songbook"-type ideas, The Beatles and all that stuff. And there were several that I'd kind of thought about - but Prince was the one I really wanted to do. I was a little bit worried, thinking 'Are they gonna block it somehow?' But then, there's nothing to do with the estate, is there?

You really had a lot of material to work with, particularly that sort of mid-'80s explosion, where he's being covered but also giving incredible amounts of songs away to other artists.

It's interesting how strategic it seems. He'd never spoken about it, and he always kind of had that veil of mystery around everything he did. But as a songwriter, he's kind of placed certain things in quite a clever way. Other things I don't think he particularly placed - that Meli'sa Morgan track, for example. But Sheena Easton or The Bangles one, it was almost like...concurrently to his own superstar status growing, that was a really, really important part. It was kind of amazing to watch that happening at the time, thinking, "Wait a minute, is this same guy? He wrote that?" It wasn't just the fact that he had this huge shift with 1999 and then he made a film and all that other stuff happening. He wrote that No. 1 hit for Chaka Khan! Of course, the public weren't necessarily thinking "That song was from four years ago." Suddenly, this guy is everywhere, and that added so much to this.

And I think it was interesting as well because the R&B charts, particularly in that in the '80s and the '90s, were so separate. Meli'sa Morgan's was a No. 1 R&B record; I don't think it even cracked the Top 40. There was a different world where he was having these other mega-hits going on. The Time had been huge, though never a pop thing. And those records - the ones he created and the ones he gave to other people - allowed him to have that weird, schizophrenic musical personality. It wouldn't have been a Prince record, but it could be a Sheena Easton record, whoever it might be at any given time,

Someone like Ed Sheeran has written quite a few big hits and given them to other people. But it's not the same. Even contemporaries - people like Stevie Wonder, Barry White or George Clinton -
the acts they made or they worked with were more like variations of their sound. I suppose you could say that with Prince, but it's so diverse, because, say, The Three O' Clock compared to Jill Jones or Vanity 6 or Ingrid Chavez...they're just wildly different.

Some fans, I get the sense when I read some things online, seem like, 'If it's not him singing on it, it's not really...' They make some sort of distinction; I don't. To me, it's all great music Prince was involved in. Whether he sings lead vocal on it or not, it doesn't really make it any less, to me.

Tell us a bit about curating the listening experience of Dearly Beloved.

When I originally started it, I was thinking I just want to have only one song per artist - I can't put two Martika songs there -
and only one song appears each time. So only one version of "Purple Rain" and so on. But as it progressed, I really did want to fill every single disc to the brim, because I don't really like when you get, like, 10 tracks per disc. It's cheating people. So I broke the rule on a couple of songs. "How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore," and I think there's one other, appear more than once. The license came through for the Bilal version of "How Come U Don't Call Me..." I love that version! It's so obscure. I just made sure they didn't appear on the same disc.

It was easy to think about Disc 1: that's going to be stuff he wrote or produced or gave away. is number one and then to have all these tracks and how are they can I make number two and number three distinct. The second disc is kind of more R&B, but not 100 percent - there's quite a bit of jazz going on. And the third one is kind of the "other," weirder stuff. I knew, once we got the Amanda Palmer song, which is like 12 minutes long, that had to be the end of the whole thing. It feels final.
And that great version with Liz Wright on lead vocals of "Sometimes It Snows in April" had to be the end of the second disc because it couldn't really be followed by anything.

There's lots of amazing tracks I wanted that I didn't get. And one of them, which you must check out is because they I think they just didn't it was so hard to get them to they didn't agree in the end, is Mariachi El Bronx - an amazing version of "I Would Die 4 U." I wanted to put mad stuff like that on the final disc. It just goes to show the influence of him.

What are your favorites on Dearly Beloved - the standouts, or maybe songs that fans might not know about or think of from the start?

There's quite a few, really. I mean, Bobby Sparks with a fantastic version of "Sometimes It Snows in April," which is really beautiful. But there's also the curveballs that take a song you've heard a million times. like "Take Me with U" by Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings. It's like a James Brown workout version of that song. It's really fun. Or Robyn - who people think of as a kind of dance artist, that Swedish pop thing -
with this really odd deconstruction, almost, of "Jack U Off." Just honky tonk piano and her singing, quite punkish. I love the old rock version of "When You Were Mine" which I mentioned before.
Hue & Cry, I knew their hits, but nothing in depth. But when I was looking into stuff and they had done a version of "Sign O' the Times," I was blown away by that! The musicality of it, this kind of bebop version, was brilliant. Prince would have loved that. There's a great version of "When You Were Mine" by Lambchop - sort of alt-country take. Some of them, I had never heard before we got them on the set.

Martika's "Love...Thy Will Be Done" - such a brilliant record! It should have been a No. 1 record everywhere. The way it builds, the uniqueness of it. He could pull off records like that over and over again that didn't sound like anything else. That Van Gogh track is amazing. He kind of had that peak, didn't he - and then basically the general public, the masses, lost interest after Diamonds & Pearls or The Love Symbol, more or less.
And so that late '90s period, people weren't really paying attention at all. It's such an obscure track, you know? You can find the CD on eBay, I guess, but some of those are not readily available. Or the older stuff like Princess and Starbreeze, I'd heard that version years ago and I loved it. I wanted to get some of those, to bring into the light, as they say.

I really love the packaging - it feels like a Prince project, through and through. You've got the great quotes from the artists and the track-by-track credits, too!

My work with Sheena and some of the other things I've done, that all connects with Prince as well. So I already knew that when I was suggesting Dearly Beloved, I thought, "Well, I know we can get Martika stuff. I had those quotes from her. And I know that Sheena will be fine because we'll get 'Sugar Walls' - I know the guys at RT."

The artwork was a bit of a challenge. We didn't want to use any images of Prince. I'm really pleased how the artwork turned out. It looks quite smart. The art director photographed those flowers! It was all a nod to Prince's iconography without actually having a picture of Prince on it.

With no major Prince reissue last year, this really served as a great title to focus on. I assume that wasn't intentional?

No, it was a happy coincidence. If it could have been as orchestrated and perfectly planned like I'd like it to be, it could have dropped in April [around the anniversary of his passing]. I would have gone on forever, sort of waiting for the ideal thing. But I was really pleased, because I did get to the point that I wanted, to fill every disc with 80 minutes of music or near enough.

And what would you want someone to walk away from listening to Dearly Beloved with, about Prince?

I wish for people to have a broader and deeper understanding of the breadth and the range of what Prince was capable of. True fans don't [have this, but] there's a general perception of "Prince? He's a funk guy." He's not just this one dimensional, one genre artist. Nothing really compares to that!

Well, you really made something to be proud of. I can say that as a Prince fan!

Brilliant, thank you. I'm suspicious of everyone who isn't!

This interview has been edited and condensed.