"Clare Fisher, talk about a muse. He was my inspiration for getting the strings on the record. Clare had done work with my father—my father being the arranger and Clare being the string arranger. So, I had that “in,” although that was not how I was thinking about it at the time. Prince and I were listening to a bunch of Rufus records back in the day—and this was before we thought about doing strings on the first record. We were talking about how brilliant the strings were on those albums. I had also been listening to a lot of Claus Ogerman and Bill Evans. There's one record they did called Symbiosis and it's just one of the most beautifully arranged records. Ogerman's string arrangement, and Evans playing the piano over it, is some of the most beautiful music I have ever heard. The only thing that's ever come close to feeling as perfectly arranged in terms of the strings was on the Rufusized record. I just said, “Prince, why don't we get Clare to do the strings on our record?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “My dad knows him.” I called my dad and said “Pop, you gotta call Clare and see if he's up for it.” He was. We sent him the 24 track. He got back to us right away and said “Absolutely.” Within a month we had all the lead sheets and we had the entire score for the record. We went in and cut it and I couldn't have been happier."