Purple Rain by Prince (1984), № 26 in The Lead-In’s 100 greatest albums. Soundtrack, concept album, live band document, and the Prince record everyone's heard. 'When Doves Cry' was written and tracked in one night after the film was already locked.
Prince Rogers Nelson at twenty-five had made five albums in five years and was about to star in a feature film he had written about himself. The soundtrack would sell thirteen million copies in the US alone. The film made him a movie star. The album made him a genre.
Prince's sixth studio album and the soundtrack to the film he had been planning since his contract with Warner Bros. was renegotiated in 1983. Nine songs across 44 minutes. A film that opened at #1 at the US box office. An album that opened at #1 on the Billboard 200 and stayed for twenty-four weeks.
Prince Rogers Nelson was twenty-five when Purple Rain was released. He had made five studio albums in five years (For You, Prince, Dirty Mind, Controversy, 1999), built a band called The Revolution that could match any rhythm section in pop, and renegotiated his Warner Bros. contract to include a feature-film project he would write and star in. The soundtrack album would be a record of the songs the band played in the film; the film would be a fictionalized portrait of Prince's own rise.
Recording took place at multiple Minneapolis studios, primarily First Avenue, the Minneapolis club where the band played weekly, and Sunset Sound in Los Angeles for final mixing. The Revolution, Wendy Melvoin (guitar), Lisa Coleman (keyboards), Brown Mark (bass), Doctor Fink (keyboards), Bobby Z (drums), was the band on the album. Prince played guitar, keyboards, and most of the additional instruments. The album was tracked partly live (the title track and 'I Would Die 4 U' were recorded at First Avenue during August 1983 concerts) and partly in studio.
'When Doves Cry,' released as the first single in May 1984, became the year's bestselling song. The track was structurally unprecedented for a pop single, no bass line, the song was built around a programmed Linn LM-1 drum machine and Prince's overdubbed vocal stacks. Prince had removed the bass at the final mix, against Warner Bros.' protests. The song reached #1 in the US in July 1984, the same week the film opened in theaters. The film became the third highest-grossing release of summer 1984; the soundtrack stayed at #1 on the Billboard 200 for twenty-four weeks.
The album's nine songs are a survey of Prince's stylistic range. 'Let's Go Crazy' opens with the famous spoken-word benediction; 'Take Me with U' is a duet with Apollonia (Patricia Kotero); 'The Beautiful Ones' is the album's emotional centerpiece, sung in a falsetto register; 'Computer Blue' is the album's most-experimental track; 'Darling Nikki' was the song that prompted Tipper Gore to found the Parents Music Resource Center; 'When Doves Cry' is the bassless masterpiece; 'I Would Die 4 U' is the album's most-direct pop song; 'Baby I'm a Star' is the album's most-aggressive funk track; the title track 'Purple Rain' is the closing nine-minute ballad recorded live at First Avenue.
Purple Rain belongs at number twenty-six because it is the album on which a singular auteur, performer, producer, songwriter, bandleader, film star, produced the most commercially successful artistic statement of the 1980s. The album set sales records for a soundtrack; the film made him a movie star; the songs entered the pop canon en masse. Every subsequent auteur-pop achievement (Madonna, Michael Jackson's Bad, Beyoncé's Lemonade, Frank Ocean's Channel Orange) exists in the shadow of what Prince did across one June day in 1984.
Original 1984 US pressing, Warner Bros. 25110-1, in a gatefold sleeve with a printed lyric/photo inner and an included fold-out poster. The poster is the photographic motorcycle image, Prince in purple on his Honda amid fog within the floral-frame border, not a text graphic. Because the album sold in the region of thirteen million copies, original pressings are extremely common: a clean used copy with the poster typically runs well under £30, with sealed examples around £50-70.
© The Lead-In · an independent, reader-supported music publication.
