From “So Blue” (1978) to the back cover of Controversy (1981) and a cover of “A Case of You” during the famous First Avenue set which debuted numerous Purple Rain songs in August 1983, Prince had already paid homage to Joni Mitchell multiple times before the summer of 1984 when The Time’s Ice Cream Castle was released. Many contemporary listeners must have known that the title of the album and the title track (“Ice Cream Castles”) directly quote the opening lines of “Both Sides Now,” a song Mitchell recorded for Clouds (1969): “Rows and rows of angel hair / and ice cream castles in the air….” My presentation asks how this acknowledgment fits into the pattern of Prince self-consciously incorporating Joni Mitchell’s influences, first as a musician and songwriter and secondly as a performer seeking to free himself from the limitations of racialized and gendered identity. How can it help us better understand his prolific use of personas to express different aspects of his personality? What does it tell us about the album or song? Additionally, what does it say about his intentions for The Time, and does it matter to us that Morris Day admitted in his memoir, On Time, that he only learned about the phrase’s origin “some thirty-five years after [the album’s] release”?

Robert Loss is an associate professor in the Writing, Literature, and Philosophy department at the Columbus College of Art and Design. He is the author of Nothing Has Been Done Before: Seeking the New in 21st-Century American Popular Music (Bloomsbury Academic), which includes a chapter on Prince’s later work. His essay “How the Exodus Began: Prince and the Black Working Class Imagination” appeared in a recent special Prince issue of Black Magnolias Literary Journal. He has presented on Prince at numerous conferences, including Prince From Minneapolis (2018), #DM40GB30 (2020), #1plus1plus1is3 (2021), Prince: 78-88 (2021), #SexyMF30 (2022), and #TripleThreat40. His talk from #1plus1plus1is3, “Deconstruction: Work & Racial Capitalism in The Rainbow Children,” was published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife and their pets.