Prince’s Simple Phone Call That Re-set Janelle Monáe’s Career Trajectory

Musician and actor Janelle Monáe has often described Prince as more than an influence — he was a direct mentor whose clarity and precision shaped her most important career decisions. One brief call from him — remembered for beginning simply with “Hello, Janelle” — remains the moment she says she returns to when she needs to re-center her artistic choices.

The pivotal line she adopted from that conversation was short: he told her to “cut everything down in half.”
Prince had long used this instruction with his own band members, especially when tension or speed in performance was overtaking intention. Monáe applied it at a far wider scale. In her telling, it became the principle that helped her avoid over-commitment, burnout, and the pressure to accept every invitation. The guideline became a filter: she learned to decline work that did not align with her core creative identity.

The effect went beyond principle and into infrastructure. Prince’s Paisley Park — his private creative complex in Minnesota — directly inspired Monáe’s own headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia: the Wondaland Arts Society. It is both a record label and a collaborative studio center, intentionally built to offer the room to experiment, to evolve, and to work without external pressure.

Prince later formally collaborated with Monáe — notably on “Givin’ Em What They Love” from her 2013 album The Electric Lady — contributing vocals, instruments, and lyric writing. But the more enduring legacy appears to be the philosophy of restraint: doing less, but doing the essential things at a level that cannot be duplicated.

Monáe has said she still gets emotional when remembering the simplicity of the call. For her, it was the moment a global icon affirmed that artistic longevity was not about accelerating endlessly — it was about protecting the work by protecting the person making it.