“Literally the same day was when I got contacted by Prince, like literally hours after. That’s just perfect timing of the universe… and that’s what saved me,” Harts recently told triple j of the day he got dropped from Universal.
The 25-year-old one-man-band, who’s on the warpath promoting his new album Smoke Fire Hope Desire with some blazing performances, including a recent appearance at BIGSOUND, says the late rock legend literally saved him from quitting music.
“A few weeks before that I was talking to my manager, my friends, my girlfriend — ‘I don’t think the music game’s for me’; I was already out of it in my mind. He literally saved me and gave me a career, in a way, since then,” Harts told triple j.
“All this exposure that came out of that really … gave me the boost that I needed at the time. So it worked in more ways than one in terms of saving my life.” Prince famously invited Harts to come jam at his iconic Paisley Park home.
Harts’s relationship with Prince meant the icon’s death hit him particularly hard. “I was originally too shocked to believe it – I thought it was fake or something like that. After I had some time to process it all, now I’m feeling really sad at the fact we’ve lost such a musical legend and icon.”
“Also, I’ve lost a bit of a mentor and he was helping me behind the scenes a lot from the time I met him and he was really there for me any time that I needed him. That is a tremendous loss for the world and a loss for me as well.”
“At the same time I’m blessed because I feel as though I’m so grateful I got the opportunity to do what I did when he was alive. He had entrusted me with almost sense of … he wanted me to fulfil the work he was trying to do with the music industry.”
“He really wanted to bring back soul and musicianship [into] the pop world, bring that back and inspire people like me, the young generation to really go there, take the risk and push yourself musically and try get to that level that he was.”
