There's a version of Prince that everybody agrees on, and it starts in 1984. Everything before that gets treated as warm-up, the stuff you skip on your way to the record with the motorcycle on the cover.

His self-titled second album, from 1979, is the most skipped of all of them. It is also, on a turntable, in an otherwise quiet house, one of the more startling things I've put on this year.

He was twenty-one. He played nearly everything on it himself and produced it himself, which at that age, at a major label, in 1979, is close to unbelievable. Not "played a lot of the instruments." Played them. The whole architecture of the thing is one person in a room deciding what a song needs and then going and being the person who does that.

Here's what changes when you own it as an object instead of pulling it up on your phone.

You get it in the order he built it. Two sides, a beginning and a middle and an end to each, and a physical act required to get from one to the other. No shuffle, no skipping the one you're less sure about, no algorithm sliding you sideways into a different decade after track three. You sit down and it plays at you in the shape it was designed in.

That matters more on this record than on the famous ones, because this one is a progression. It opens confident and pop and completely assured, and by the back half it is doing things that make more sense in hindsight than they can have made at the time. The album is a person figuring out in public what he was going to detonate five years later, and hearing that in sequence is different from hearing it shuffled.

The one that gives it away

"I Feel for You" is on this record.

Not the version you know. The Chaka Khan version, the one with the stutter and the harmonica and the wall of 1984 on it, is five years away and belongs to somebody else. Here it is just a track, sitting on the record, unhurried, no idea what's coming for it.

That's the whole argument for owning this album in one song. You are listening to something that later became enormous, in the form it had before anyone decided it was enormous, made by a kid who was writing at a level nobody had caught up to yet. It isn't a demo. It's finished. It just hadn't been noticed.

There's something about hearing that on a physical copy, at the speed the record decides, that a playlist genuinely cannot do. The song doesn't get to be a preview of a bigger song. It gets to be itself.

I don't think this is his best record and I'm not going to pretend it is. It's a pop and R&B album from 1979 and it stays inside those lines, and the stuff that makes him the most interesting musician of his generation is mostly still a couple of albums out.

But "not his best" and "not worth your evening" are different sentences, and this column exists partly to keep them apart. The famous records are famous for good reasons and you already know about them. This one is thirty-eight minutes, it costs whatever a used copy costs, and it contains a twenty-one year old doing something almost nobody his age has ever been able to do.

Heavy rotation. It hasn't come off the platter.