The idea behind the Praeger ‘Singer-Songwriter’ series is, on the face of it, a good one – commentaries on a major artist's catalogue covering, in most cases, a large body of material. To have access to information on an overall discography has an appeal, a one-stop shop focusing on a songwriter with a significant output. Yet, as I ploughed through James E. Perone's book on one of the more prolific singer-composers of the last three decades, I began to wonder just what this volume – and conceivably other titles published in this style – was actually for.

Here is a book that takes all the principal CD releases in the Prince canon and provides a reasonably comprehensive description of each and every piece on those long-players, twenty-eight of them in fact, from For You in 1978 to 2007's Planet Earth. Yet we are missing rather too much for the exercise to be a satisfying one for the reader. No accompanying albums (we can accept that), no accompanying lyrics at all (a little disappointing), no album sleeve illustrations and no written musical examples mean that the book has a somewhat one-dimensional feel. Elvis Costello's perhaps over-used reference to writing about music being like dancing about architecture might even be worth reviving here.

I would not agree in broad terms with Costello's views on these matters and I wonder if there is anyone involved in the delivery of Popular Music Studies who would concur with them. Yet it does strike me that this edition, no doubt for copyright reasons and the huge expense and time required to negotiate access to the actual material under scrutiny, serves up a semi-forensic examination without really providing enough of the substance we require to make sense of this important artist and his oeuvre.

It brings to mind a fictional Film Studies textbook – maybe they exist – where the author attempts to offer an account of a film director's productions by describing movies scene by scene: no sound, no dialogue, no moving images, no stills, no music, just prose. Certainly this overview of Prince feels like that even if I did have the advantage of knowing perhaps three-quarters of the song-works addressed. The ones I did know, in most instances, came vaguely to mind as Perone tried to conjure them in a paragraph or three, sometimes less, but I still felt the need to re-visit the tracks in the flesh to get a genuine sense of his textual and textural references. Hearing, rather than reading, is believing in this instance.

On the songs I didn't know – probably a quarter – I felt even more so that I needed to put on the album, listen to the songs, to really understand why this funk song, this R&B piece, that particular ballad, had any distinction from the earlier songs described. In essence, the titles – and thank goodness for the world of academe those vital details remain outside the bounds of the copyright labyrinth – are the only hook for our heads to distinguish one song from a hundred or two others.

So, to return to my point, what is the purpose of this book? It is too lacking in biographical or critical detail to give the enquiring reader a wider sense of the Prince phenomenon. Even if its bibliography is quite wide-ranging, its referencing of other sources is infrequent and supporting quotations that are cited are more often magazine or Web-oriented than scholarly. Where it may score is when Perone furnishes brief analytic sketches of songs involving keys, chord sequences, with some reflection on arrangement and a fleeting summary of the lyrical narrative which may give an initial introduction for researchers interested in establishing a quite basic musical vocabulary of the artist. Yet even that seems too superficial. Perhaps the volume's strengths lie in its discographic description and chronological history. Even then, for the Prince-ophile, the completist, even the academic who wants a full sense of the musician's output, this may seem to provide a certain level of frustration: only official albums are included and singles per se, one of Prince's chief promotional devices particularly as his career arc rose in the 1980s, are not addressed, as such, in this book.

This is not a bad book – I quite enjoyed being reminded of the hyperactive production line that Prince has been supervising for the last three decades. It was also worth recalling how the singer has been promiscuous in his musical choices – pop, funk, rock, soul, R&B, jazz and so on – not to say in his attitude to sex play which is a potent plot theme, certainly in the early work, if the multiple partners of his (quite possibly fictional) adventures are totted up. Still a book, academic or otherwise, has to have a use and a function, and I wonder if the next time a Prince dissertation crops up in a pile of final year proposals, I will be rushing to recommend undergraduate students to use this book. It may offer a starting point but that is all; the recordings themselves – the sounds, lyric sheets, album covers et al. – are probably a better place to begin. Perone's material may provide a one-volume aide memoire of the CD catalogue but not a great deal more.