Patrice Rushen – I Was Tired Of Being Alone
Vinyl rip in 24-bit/96kHz | FLAC | Art scans at 300 dpi
353MB (24/96) + 107MB (16/44) + 48 MB (320) | Genre: funk / soul / disco | 1982
Elektra Records ~ K 13184 T
While I had been meaning to upload some more Prince extended 12″ singles in time for the anniversary of his passing last week, I’ve been busy with other things and I had “Around The World In A Day” ready and in the queue. As it turns out, I also picked up a couple 12″-inchers of his that I was missing at the latest Record Store Day along with other goodies in my first time visiting that crazy debacle in several years. However, I’ve also been wanting to do a run of Patrice Rushen material for a very long time as well, and had this single simmering on the proverbial stove. I got this from an independent seller at Camden market in London, because for me every day is record store day. Why am I rambling on, conflating these two seemingly different people? There’s an interesting link – Patrice helped Prince program his analog synths for his debut Warner Brothers album, is rumored to play on a couple tracks, and his song “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad” from his second LP was allegedly pitched to her, and she turned it down. The young Prince may have had a bit of a crush on her, and who can blame him? He was taller than her, and that didn’t happen too often… In any case, she was destined to get together with me instead, and be my wife after Gal Costa dumped me. And she would be too, if the mailman didn’t have a secret agenda against me, hoarding all my letters in a basement next to his stockpile of C4 that he bought off the dark net. I would say something, but I’m too scared of him.
01 I Was Tired Of Being Alone
Horn arrangements, Backing Vocals, Lead Vocals, Piano, Percussion – Patrice Rushen
Backing Vocals – Jeanette Hawes, Roy Galloway
Bass – “Ready” Freddie Washington
Drums – Melvin Webb
Guitar – Paul M. Jackson, Jr.
Horn arrangements, Electric Piano – Charles Mims, Jr.
Written-By – A. Ehigiator, C. Mims Jr., F. Washington, P. Rushen
02 Number One (Instrumental)
03 The Funk Won’t Let You Down
Backing Vocals – Jim Gilstrap, Lynn Davis, Roy Galloway
Bass – “Ready” Freddie Washington
Drums – Gerry Brown
Electric Piano, Piano [Acoustic] – Patrice Rushen
Guitar – Marlo Henderson, Paul M. Jackson, Jr.
Recorded By [Rhythm] – Jeffrey Titmus
Credits
Executive Producer – Patrice Rushen
Producer – Charles Mims Jr.
Producer, Written-By – Patrice Rushen
Tracks 1 and 2 from the album STRAIGHT FROM THE HEART
Track 3 from the album POSH
VINYL TRANSFER INFO: UK Elektra vinyl; Pro-Ject RM-5SE with Audio Tecnica AT440-MLa cartridge; Speedbox power supply); Creek Audio OBH-15; AUdioquest King Cobra cables; M-Audio Audiophile 192 Soundcard ; Adobe Audition at 32-bit float 96khz; clicks and pops removed with Click Repair on light settings, manually auditioning the output; further clicks removed with Adobe Audition 3.0; dithered and resampled using iZotope RX Advanced. Converted to FLAC in either Trader’s Little Helper or dBPoweramp. Tags done with Foobar 2000 and Tag and Rename.
I’ve discovered, from sharing a similar post elsewhere, that there are people out there who don’t know Patrice at all. Good lord what a shame! But it’s never too late. So maybe this upbeat little extended single will serve as a good introduction. Patrice was a keyboard prodigy who began a 3-record contract with Prestige while still a teenager or nearly so. Those records feature some excellent jazz-funk fusion and are all worth tracking down. And I can use this post to also bring us back thematically to some Brazilian music soon, because she played on sessions by Raul de Souza and others during this period. But Patrice really found her groove and made her fortune as a funky soul/R&B singer, and is best known for the smash hit ‘Forget Me Nots’ from the album Straight From The Heart. “I Was Tired Of Being Alone” was presumably the second single from the album (I could check when I have some time) and is leaner and faster than Forget Me Nots, if a little less catchy. The real gem on this 12-inch, though, is an extended mix of the instrumental track “Number One” which proves that she could still have her instrumental chops and eat her cake of commercial success too. The choice to include the barn-burner “The Funk Won’t Let You Down” from her previous album, Posh, is a welcome one. It’s tight as hell, and leaves you wanting more. And if you want more, listen to the version on Posh, wish is almost a full minute longer!
I promise I’ll get to some of her long-players soon.
Patrice is still playing, looking good, and also a music professor at the University of South Carolina. She is a bit of an unsung national treasure in my book.
In other news I have decided to launch a Patreon page. If you’ve enjoyed navigating this site on its own domain rather than the clunky, ugly Blogger version, consider signing up to be a monthly patron. No amount is too small! At the one dollar level, you can participate in fun opinion polls on the site. At five bucks you can make requests for blog posts about specific artists or albums — there is no guarantee I can fill them right away, but I will definitely move yours up in the absurd backlog that has built up over the years. Really though, I hope you would just get some contentment from knowing you are helping maintain the cost of running this humble blog that began as a hobby eight years ago. My own personal situation has been very uncertain and unstable for the last year, and the occasionally very long gaps in posts have a lot to do with that. Some troll recently left a comment on my Barrabás post saying “Who cares, you jobless basement dweller.” Well hopefully some of my regular readers do. And until I cease to be a jobless basement dweller, I’m asking for whatever you can spare to help keep this place a refuge for the jobless, basement-dwelling music obsessives everywhere. You can find the Patreon button at the bottom of this post and (hopefully) in several other places on the site.
DIRECT LINKS
I’m a big Patrice Rushen fan,thank you!
thanks!
Thanks so much!
Thanks from one of the people out there that hadn’t heard of Patrice until today ^_^
This extended mix is exciting, thank you! Only I can’t seem to get the password to work, can you help?
You’re welcome! Are you on a Mac? You’ll need to use a third-party extraction tool like UnRAR-X. There is a link from my ‘links’ page under tools. Also, don’t copy and paste but type it the password, each and every time.