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Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds knows that if you pick up the guitar, “you’ve got to be able to play funky” — because it is something Prince once reminded him.
Speaking with PEOPLE during an exclusive interview ahead of his run on Uncle Charlie’s R&B Cookout tour, the prolific singer-songwriter, 67, reflects on the time he joined Prince for a performance of “What Have You Done for Me Lately” at the Rio Hotel & Casino in April 2007, when the “Purple Rain” singer wanted to “see if he could play it all.”
Recalling what went down the moment Prince “called me up” and handed him his guitar, Babyface says, “They were playing a funk song and I think he was testing me to see whether I could play.”
“And then, I played it, and he said, ‘Oh, you can actually play that thing. You actually can play funky,’ ” he adds. “So I got invited back after that, but it was a test. It was like, ‘I want to see if you can even play it all.’ ”
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That moment, Babyface remembers, was a reminder of the importance of being “versatile enough to learn things.”
“I think it’s been a journey, in the sense of never limit yourself to one type of music, one genre, because there are doors that can open,” he says. “And as a musician, I think you should always be able to go into different worlds. It keeps the door open for you to be able to explore and not be put into a box, so to say. So if you pick up the guitar, you’ve got to be able to play funky.”
The star adds: “I’m the kind of musician, a lot of the things that I write, I forget them after I write them. I’d have to go learn them all over again on the piano. I don’t sit there and practice every day. So, it’s one of those things where I’m a writer and a musician, but I’m a writer first, then a musician as needed.”
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Babyface’s skills will be on full display during his forthcoming run of shows with Charlie Wilson, El DeBarge and K-Ci Hailey, which kick off in Los Angeles this month and wrap in early October in Memphis.
As Babyface explains, his favorite part of the live show is when he plays through a medley of songs that he wrote or produced for other artists — sometimes throwing in some Boyz II Men, Brandy or Bobby Brown.
“It comes with so much more energy, and it’s always a surprise for people, because they don’t realize how many songs and how much time that’s [spanned]. So it’s a great walk down memory lane,” he tells PEOPLE.
“There’s a whole lot of songs that I leave out that I’ve done for a number of people, but it all just has to blend in together. I don’t touch things that I’ve done, even that I’ve been involved with or producing writing or whatever for Beyoncé, for SZA, for just a number of people,” continues Babyface.
“[There are] things that I still don’t put in there, because it just doesn’t roll in right with how the songs come in,” adds the 13-time Grammy winner. “So it’s all got to feel right. In order to make it feel right on the stage, it’s got to make sense.”
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