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Members
1 Female
Origin
Lebanon, OH
Genre
R&B
Style
Rock/Pop
Mood
Sensual
Born
1 FemaleOrigin
Lebanon, OHGenre
R&BStyle
Rock/PopMood
SensualBorn
1962
1982 to Present...
Most Loved Tracks4 users
Jill Jones - Gorgeous Wonder4 users
Jill Jones - G-Spot4 users
Jill Jones - Violet Blue3 users
Jill Jones - Pissin' All Over the Sun
Music Video Links Mia Bocca |
Artist Biography
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Early Life
Jill Jones' mother was a model and a singer. At a very young age she was exposed to a lot of music, mostly blues and Jazz, amongst others Nancy Wilson. She also had exposure to music from the likes of Charles Brown, Muddy Waters & B.B. King. Barely into her teens, Jill moved to California where she dived a bit more into the music business. She often witnessed studio sessions and became familiar with the way a record session is organized, and how producers and engineers worked.
Before working with Prince
Soon after Jill Jones' mother started managing Teena Marie, one of Jones' cousins, Teena moved into their house. She and Jill would sometimes write songs together, and thus Teena Marie influenced Jill's own willingness to pursue in the musical direction. Jill practiced on the piano, and writing her own material, up to the point when Teena Marie asked her to sing backing vocals for her. Shortly after, at age 15, she decided to leave school and start a professional career as backing singer. She met Prince in 1980 at age 18, when Teena Marie was the opening act during his Dirty Mind tour.
Work with Prince
Prince encouraged Jones to sing, and stayed in touch with her. After she finished high school, she made contact with him and asked for a job. Prince invited her to the Sunset Sound recording studios in 1982, to sing backing vocals for several tracks on his forthcoming 1999 album. She also got a part in the music videos for the songs "1999" and "Little Red Corvette", as well as "Automatic", and then joined 1999 Tour to sing backing vocals with Vanity 6 and with Prince's band. During the Vanity 6 performance she would be kept behind a curtain (with the accompanying band The Time) and would only appear on stage for 2 songs.
After the tour, she moved to Minneapolis and became Prince's on-and-off again girlfriend as well as a regular on studio sessions, singing on many different projects. In 1984, she had a small part in Purple Rain as the waitress at the First Avenue club and recorded backing vocals for the Apollonia 6 album.
Her solo debut on Prince’s newly established Paisley Park Records materialized in 1987, with the release of her eponymous album Jill Jones. The album included many withdrawn songs from former projects, such as G-Spot, previously intended for Apollonia 6 album. It also featured an unreleased rock effort by Prince, All Day, All Night, and a cover of With You (recorded from scratch without any input from )]. On top of this, Prince wrote original material specially tailored for Jill Jones. Some of the tracks were recorded in Minneapolis and the rest at Electric Lady Studios in New York with the help of David Rivkin.
Apart from With You, Prince was credited as a co-writer with Jill Jones on 4 tracks leaving the other 3 songs credits to her, but in fact, as for his previous protégées records, he wrote all the songs himself, registering them at the library of congress under the pseudonym of Joey Coco. Upon its release, the album received positive reviews from critics, but was not a commercial success in the USA, failing to enter the Billboards Pop and Black Top 100 charts. The 3 singles issued from it, Mia Bocca, G-Spot and For Love did not make any impact on the US charts either.
In the contrast, with the help of Warner UK, the album did well in Europe and Jill spent considerable time over there doing interviews and making TV appearances. With the help of a sepia video shot in Mexico by French director and photographer Jean-Baptiste Mondino, and regularly broadcast by MTV, Mia Bocca became a minor hit in Europe.
Jill Jones went to England in the autumn of 1988 to work on songs intended for a second Paisley Park album, which was never completed. Several demos were recorded, and a video was filmed for the track Boom, Boom (Can't U Feel The Beat Of My Heart) which would have been the lead-off single, but the album never materialized.
In 1990 she appears in Graffiti Bridge, where she has a small role as The Kid's girlfriend.
Input in Prince's Discography
Two of her most standout contributions are on Hello, released as a B-side, and the extended version of Kiss. Jill also claims being a featured, though uncredited, vocalist on the Bangles hit Manic Monday. She can also be heard on It's Gonna Be A Beautiful Night, recorded live in Paris, although Jill's vocals were overdubbed in the studio later. She is also featured in the unreleased Vanity 6 song Vibrator. In this song, she does a skit in a department store where Vanity goes to get batteries for her vibrator. The Prince song She's Always In My Hair, released as a B-side to the single Raspberry Beret, was written about her. ---taken from Princevault.com
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