Prince

sent to me by reader Mat W., no idea where he found it.

Jill Willis(Prince’s publicist, 1989–90, and co-manager, 1990–93): He was always dressed in what could look like show/stage clothes: a couture suit, matching handmade boots from a shoemaker in Paris, his hair done and full makeup. One time, I had taken the red-eye from L.A. to Minneapolis and went home long enough to shower, threw on a baseball cap, jeans, sweatshirt, and drove over to the studio. I went up the stairs and Prince was coming down the hall from his office. “Going fishing?” he asked.

Van Jones: He was very interested in the world. He wanted me to explain how the White House worked. He asked very detailed kind of foreign-policy questions. And then he’d ask, “Why doesn’t Obama just outlaw birthdays?” [laughs] I’m, like, “What?” He said, “I was hoping that Obama, as soon as he was elected, would get up and announce there’d be no more Christmas presents and no more birthdays—we’ve got too much to do.” I said, “Yeah, I don’t know if that would go over too well.”

and

Van Jones: Prince wrote music the way you write e-mails, okay? If you were transported to some world where the ability to write e-mails was some rare thing, you would be Prince. He was just writing music all the time. He slept it, he thought it. And it wasn’t all great—some of it was good, some of it wasn’t. But he had no expectation, he was just being himself. It’s like you cut the water faucet on—I don’t think the faucet is sitting there thinking, “This is the best water ever!” The faucet is just doing what the faucet does. That’s kind of how he was.

The Van Jones ones were the best, which led me to Mr. Jones’ wiki:

Wiki:

He has described his own childhood behavior as “bookish and bizarre.” His grandfather was the senior bishop in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, and Jones sometimes accompanied his grandfather to religious conferences, where he would sit all day listening to the adults “in these hot, sweaty black churches” Jones was a young fan of the late John and Bobby Kennedy, and would pin photographs of them to a bulletin board in his room in the specially delineated “Kennedy Section”. As a child he matched his Star Wars action figures with Kennedy-era political figures; Luke Skywalker was John, Han Solo was Bobby, and Lando Calrissian was Martin Luther King, Jr.