I Need A Man is a track released posthumously on the Sign O’ The Times Super Deluxe set. A week earlier, it was released as the album's sixth and final pre-release download.
While the released version is from 1986 (with overdubs in 1987), the song was originally recorded in Summer 1981 at Prince's Kiowa Trail Home Studio in Chanhassen, Minnesota (during the same set of sessions that produced Make-Up, Wet Dream and Drive Me Wild). The track contained lead vocals by Jamie Shoop, and was intended for an album by The Hookers, but was abandoned when The Hookers developed into Vanity 6.
The track was worked on further (or perhaps re-recorded) in late 1986 or early 1987, at Prince's Galpin Blvd Home Studio in Chanhassen, Minnesota. Eric Leeds recorded saxophone overdubs on 21 January 1987 (the same day Madhouse's first album 8 was released, four days before saxophone overdubs on There's Something I Like About Being Your Fool). New lead vocals were recorded by American blues singer-songwriter Bonnie Raitt in April 1987, during a short-lived collaboration between the two artists. Although Prince offered four songs to Bonnie Raitt (I Need A Man, Jealous Girl, Promise To Be True and There's Something I Like About Being Your Fool), it is unclear whether this collaboration was intended to lead to an album or to a particular project.
Prince worked on the track again, possibly re-recording it entirely, on 31 May 1988, at Paisley Park Studios in Chanhassen, Minnesota. The released version is the 1987 recording with Prince's vocals, however.
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