In a Billboard cover story about Prince, writer Gail Mitchell details his time spent with The Artist:
Later on, I will watch Prince audition a drummer. Right now, I’m involved in an audition of my own. “Let’s talk a little,” Prince says as I follow him into a second-floor conference room, “and see if we vibe first.” Without missing a beat and keeping steady eye contact, he makes a few comments about media ownership and control, then shoots out a question. How would I get the word out about, and then monetize a lyric video for, one of his new songs, “Screw Driver,” that I’d been shown a few minutes earlier? I tell him an online post will generate enough interest to get us to monetization-given the fan clamor for new Prince music, there’s a community ready to pay a nominal price to get their hands on said track. Nothing revolutionary, but Prince pauses and thinks it over. I think I may have passed the audition.
That’s one reference to Lake Minnetonka away from being the most Prince-ly thing written about Prince ever. Anyway, the song Mitchell heard being auditioned, the gloriously underproduced “Screw Driver,” has been, in a far cry from Prince’s suing YouTube and the Pirate Bay days, uploaded online, in the form of a lyric music video.
Hear it below, and enjoy the awkward majesty of Prince moaning, “I’m your driver, and you’re my screw.”
