Prince – Parade

Prince – PARADE is the soundtrack album to his 1986 self-directed film Under The Cherry Moon, and it stands as one of the more adventurous left turns in his catalogue, a record that trades electric funk maximalism for something cooler, stranger, and harder to pin down. Released on Warner Bros. with catalog number WB 25395, this is the LP pressing of an album that surprised a lot of people who thought they already had Prince figured out.

What Makes Prince – PARADE Worth Your Attention

By 1986, Prince had already moved through multiple reinventions at a pace most artists never attempt in a full career. PARADE arrived off the back of Purple Rain and Around the World in a Day, and rather than consolidating commercial momentum, he kept pushing. The album pulls from pop, chamber arrangements, jazz inflections, and R&B, with The Revolution still in the picture and contributing to a sound that feels collaborative and experimental in equal measure. The single “Kiss” became the album’s most recognisable moment, a skeletal, percussive track that reached number one, but the record around it rewards closer attention. There is a restlessness to PARADE that makes it genuinely interesting to revisit.

The Pressing: Warner Bros. WB 25395

This is the original Warner Bros. LP pressing, catalog WB 25395. For collectors, the physical format matters here. Vinyl captures the dynamic range of this record well, particularly the quieter, more textured arrangements that can feel compressed on digital formats. The album was sequenced as a proper two-sided listening experience, and that structure holds up best on LP. If you are sourcing PARADE on vinyl, you want the original pressing rather than a budget reissue, and this is that copy. The Warner Bros. release is the correct, authoritative edition, pressed in the period and carrying all the production intent of the original release.

Who Should Own This Record

Collectors with a serious interest in Prince’s output obviously want this in the collection, but PARADE also makes sense for anyone building a library of 1980s R&B and soul that goes beyond the obvious touchstones. It is a film soundtrack that functions completely as a standalone album, which is rarer than it sounds. The music from Under The Cherry Moon outlasted the film itself by a considerable margin, and the LP format gives you the full context: sequencing, artwork, and a listening experience that holds together as a whole rather than a playlist of individual tracks. A solid, purposeful addition to any collection with roots in the era.