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There’s a wonderful new clip up on the @Prince channel showing this fun 2004 acoustic guitar performance of “Cream”, here in NYC at Webster Hall. It was in promotion of his Musicology tour & album, which became the highest-grossing tour that year.
In the clip, Prince debuts what would become a staple but — a call & response egging the crowd on to sing along, showing a playfulness that a lot of casual fans hadn’t seen, and his first acoustic guitar set in concert. (It got more polished & irresistible as the tour went on.)
When he sings, “make the rules / then break ‘em all ‘cause u are the best”, though, he tells a true story that he never tired of repeating: Prince wrote the lyrics to Cream while looking in a mirror.
Prince was so fond of letting people know about how he wrote the lyrics to Cream that he even mentioned it in his own written liner notes for his first greatest hits collection. medium.com/@anildash/prin… 
But the *context* is what gets me. Prince recorded Cream in December of 1990, weeks after the release of his film “Graffiti Bridge”. The movie tanked, and was widely mocked, and this was the first time his career had faced so serious a setback after his record-breaking 80s run.
At what had to have been a stark moment of unprecedented reckoning about his place in popular culture, Prince went back to Paisley Park, looked himself in the mirror, and said, “U're so good — baby there ain't nobody better.” One year later, Cream hit #1 on the Billboard charts.
Never forget this.
