Covering musical and personal ground, New Power Generation keyboardist/musical director Morris Hayes and Purple Current host Sean McPherson taped a marathon interview — more than two hours, all told — so we're sharing it album by album. Here's the tenth of ten.

20Ten

You're with Purple Current. I'm Sean McPherson. I'm chatting with Morris Hayes, longtime keyboard player for Prince, and we're digging in to different records, sort of analyzing that moment and what was happening as somebody who was in Prince's inner circle. I want to talk about 20Ten, which is the latest release to get this portion of the re-release. It's a really interesting sounding record in some ways. It calls back some of the early Minneapolis sound. I'm hearing a lot of bass players playing the same thing as the keyboard player, and there's dusty funky variations inside of it. So what do you hear sonically in that record and in supporting that record?

The thing about that record is Prince did a majority. I only did personally just a small amount that I can recall. Prince did primarily all of the record himself, where he just had some — he played the majority of the parts on it. I remember getting the record. He sent it to me and I had to learn all of these songs, and it was — like I'm listening to it like a layman, like okay this is crazy. And then some of the stuff we had worked on before, and it made it to this record. It ended up getting on the record, but it was a bit different than the version we had worked on.

So it was just that kind of thing, and it had a couple really cool things. One of my favorites on that was "Future Soul Song." We worked on that a couple different ways and then it just really turned out. I was like, I don't know what version it's going to end up, but then it got sorted out.

It's interesting when work on something and then you get the record and it's either completely different and you go like wow, that's what happened there. It's like he just completely departed from what it kind of started out. It just would evolve into something different. And so a lot of it was interesting.

I could tell that he had got a keyboard, just got him one keyboard, and he just went through all the sounds in this one unit and just made a bunch of different tracks, because again, Prince could sit there and churn out an album in so short of a time, and he's not going to spend all week going through sounds. He will find a sound that's cool and make the song, and that becomes that sound for the song. So for me, I would get kind of like everything's out of this, because what I liked was when we used a lot of different types of keyboards that gave you a lot of different type of textures. I could tell when you use one keyboard to do the drums, to do everything. I could hear it all in there and it just started to be flat to me because it's sonically like when they make the patches it's like they use the same algorithm and it's like everything starts to sound like after a while. And so when you get keyboards that are like —

I used to have this Open Labs thing that was amazing. It was a virtual instrument player. So it could be anything. Just load the software keyboard into it, and now it's that. And it could be whatever. That kind of technology kind of spooked him sometimes because it was so powerful. I could make anything. And so I liked that. I liked bringing to him.

I remember as we learned it, I just had to re-color a lot of things because I wanted to spread it out a little bit. But it was cool. I wish I'd have been around more to just like kind of help him with the — just figuring that kind of stuff out and let him just do his thing. But that's a good thing. He didn't need nobody. He could do it and make it work.

So on the record 20Ten, if you're hearing it for the first time like a consumer and then figuring out how to recreate it live, at what point — would you ever get to the point where you'd put too much spice on it, too much variation, where Prince would go hey you know what, Morris, I really like this keyboard. Pull from here. Or was he always encouraging the freedom to make it arrive at a different place if —

No. One of the things I loved about Prince is that he was willing — of course he had in his mind what he wanted to have happen, but he would listen. If you did something cool he would absolutely implement it. He allowed us creative expression.

We had a girl, Cassandra O'Neal — that girl could hear grass growing. She's severe and could play anything. She's like Renato. She had an incredible ear, and he would just allow us to flourish and do what we wanted. She was so dope that whatever she pretty much did, he was like yeah that's great. And I think that was a big part in how he would do things.

To me, [Prince was at his greatest] live. He would make a record, especially the records he would do himself, but then once it got to use he knew how to enhance it to the point where it's like now I know what I'm going to do, and I'm going to let them do their thing and it's going to go up another hundred percent.

You know, "Sticky Like Glue." It's one of my favorite songs even to this day. It's just funk. Just super dry vocal, super — it just was crazy, man, because it just had — I remember we played it. Me and him were hanging out at this club in LA called Avalon, and will.i.am was hanging out with us, and that song came on and Will just went banana sandwiches. This dude started dancing around like an elf from Lucky Charms. And he was just like dude that's hot, that's crazy. It harkened back to like just Prince playing guitar. It was like right in your face, and drum beat, he just put his machine on and put a groove and then you got that Moog, and then this bass line, and it's just bananas. It's just like that kind of stuff is like pure magic to me.

I'm talking with Morris Hayes, and we're talking about a lot of different Prince records, and Morris, I'm so glad you brought up "Sticky Like Glue," which is my favorite track on 20Ten. As you mentioned, spare drum part, real raw, real dry. How do you turn that into something that's going to fill arenas when you're playing it live? How do you take a track like that and flesh it out?

It's all about the groove. It just comes down to this thing. He was so good at - the other thing Prince was so good at — him and Michael Jackson — they could ad lib. You get a groove and then just let him go. And he could ad lib it, and once he gave the girls — like there was a point in the song where he did the line [sings "Sticky Like Glue"] and then he just did it himself. He said that's the part, and then the girls come in. And they hit it, and they hit that, and then he does his thing over the top. And it's just the groove.

He told me once about Michael Jackson. He was like we were on tour and Mike was either ahead of us or behind us in a lot of different spots, and this was a tour where Michael came up through the floor ad just popped up through the floor and then he would stand there for 2-3 minutes and not move and just stand there. And people would just pass out. And he'd just be like man, when he does that you can't do nothing with him. You just got to let him have it. And he says when Mike ad-libs, you just got to let him have it because he just can go get it.

And that's Prince, though. He could do the same thing. And that song had a groove, it was locked in, so once you got it locked he could just go over the top and just do what he wanted to do. And vocally he was so clever, just how he did his background vocals. And that's what I loved about the song. It just kept evolving, but it kept that groove going. It's one of my favorite songs again, that he could make something out of nothing and just make it crazy.

Hosted by Sean McPherson
Audio by Michael DeMark
Video by Steel Brooks and Cecilia Johnson
Web feature by Cecilia Johnson

Morris Hayes on Prince's 1995-2010 discography

The Gold Experience (1995) • Crystal Ball (1996) • Emancipation (1996) • Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic (1999) • The Rainbow Children (2001) • Indigo Nights (2008) • Musicology (2004) • 3121 (2006) • Planet Earth (2007) • 20Ten (2010)