1.

Dig, if you will, the picture: It’s the end of February 1984, and director Albert Magnoli has almost finished assembling Purple Rain. Weeks earlier, Magnoli and Prince’s manager Bob Cavallo had screened a rough cut of the film for skeptical Warner Bros. Pictures executives. It hadn’t gone well. “I was horrified,” Cavallo told Alan Light. “It ran at, like, a hundred forty minutes. I’m just sliding down in my chair because of the embarrassing scenes that would never have been in the movie, scenes that they should never have seen.”¹

Humiliated managers aside, the screening wasn’t a complete disaster; Warner agreed to hold up their end of the deal and see the film through to distribution. But it was clearly missing something, and Magnoli thought he knew what. He proposed adding a montage to the second act that would neatly summarize the Kid’s emotional turmoil: “his father, his mother, loss, redemption, salvation–all the themes we were dealing with in the film.” But for that, he recalled, “I needed a song.” So, just as he had with “Take Me with U” in January, he asked his star to write him one. “The next morning, [Prince] called and said, ‘Okay, I got two songs.’”² The first was “God,” which the director ended up using for the Kid’s and Apollonia’s big sex scene. The second was “When Doves Cry.”

Like most tales of Prince’s astonishing prolificacy, Magnoli’s story makes for great copy; but if Duane Tudahl’s authoritative chronicle of the Purple Rain studio sessions is to be believed, it isn’t entirely true. For one thing, “Doves” was completed in three days, not a single night–a quick enough turnaround, to be sure, but downright laborious by Prince standards. And for another, while there’s little doubt Prince wrote the song for the movie, its storyline was just one of many personal and professional influences in the mix.

[Susan] was a little dove and [Prince] was reluctant to let her go.

Susan Rogers

On the personal side, it’s long been whispered that “Doves” was inspired by the artist’s on-again, off-again relationship with Susan Moonsie of Apollonia 6. Prince “wanted her around, but he was kind of losing touch with her,” a source described as “a friend of Susan’s” told biographer Per Nilsen. “He had seen a lot of people, but Susan was always kind of his number one.” According to this unnamed source, tensions between the two came to a head with “a big argument, a falling-out” in early 1984: “that’s when they officially looked at each other and said, ‘Who are we trying to kid? We know we’re not going to make it as a couple.’ Immediately afterwards he wrote the song.”³

It’s important to keep in mind that Prince never corroborated this version of the song’s origin–and, based on his response to similar speculation about “The Beautiful Ones,” we can probably guess what he would have said. Still, I’m inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt, if only because it’s been put forward by multiple sources. Among these is Prince’s longtime engineer Susan Rogers, who confessed she’d “suspected for a long time” that Moonsie was Prince’s inspiration for the song: “I think she’s someone in his life who’s gentle, giving, kind, loving, understanding, and she was a little dove and he was reluctant to let her go.”⁴ Moonsie’s groupmate Brenda Bennett also confirmed that Susan and Prince were “fighting” during the sessions for Apollonia 6 in February, which aligns with the timeline if nothing else.

Of course, nothing in the lyrics explicitly ties “Doves” to Moonsie–nor, for that matter, to any of the other women in Prince’s circle at the time. Instead, its opening verse presents a tableau so essentially “Prince” that it verges on self-parody: A pair of lovers–identified only by the first- and second-person pronouns–are “engaged in a kiss,” the “sweat of [their] bodies” intermingling. As the second verse unfolds, our perspective pulls back, establishing the surreal setting of “a courtyard” housing an “ocean of violets in bloom.” The lovers’ passion has now grown so intense that nearby animals stop in their tracks, striking “curious poses” in the night–compelling enough imagery, to be sure, but not what I’d call psychologically revealing.

It’s at the third verse that things start to get interesting. Erotic daydream gives way to harsh reality: Our narrator’s object of desire has disappeared, leaving him “[a]lone in a world that’s so cold.” This in itself is hardly unusual; if there’s one thing Prince excels at, it’s a wronged-man narrative. But in “Doves,” as in “Computer Blue” before it, he turns his gaze inward, seeing in his own foundering relationship the echoes of his parents’ divorce: himself, like his father, “2 bold”; his partner, like his mother, “never satisfied.” “Why do we scream at each other[?]” he asks, before offering his own (admittedly gnomic) answer: “This is what it sounds like when doves cry.”

This rare emotional frankness is what makes “Doves” so tempting to read at face value. As critic Brian Morton observes, it scarcely matters if the song was inspired by a real person, Moonsie or otherwise: “Whether or not it is autobiographical, the references to family… make it seem so.”⁵ And while the theme of emotional inheritance aligns neatly with the Kid’s character arc in Purple Rain, it was also a preoccupation for the real-life Prince–even, if his unfinished memoir is to be believed, well into his final months. As he told his co-author Dan Piepenbring in 2016, reconciling the warring traits his parents had passed down to him was one of his “life’s dilemmas.”⁶

An early exploration of this “dilemma”–and a likely ingredient in the primordial ooze that yielded “Doves”–was “Why the Butterflies,” the closing track on the private “work tape” recorded before shooting commenced for Purple Rain and later released in 2018 as Piano & A Microphone 1983. At first glance, “Butterflies” couldn’t be a less likely precursor to the painstakingly crafted “Doves”; indeed, it barely qualifies as a song–more of an ethereal, seemingly improvised musical poem. The recording opens with a single, sustained chord that hangs in the air, unresolved, while Prince snaps his fingers in time. His left hand starts up a simple, one-note vamp we’ve heard elsewhere on the tape: a kind of musical holding pattern as he plots his next move. Then his right hand falls in; he ventures a few quick, jazzy fills, before pulling back to the same, plodding groove from before. He tries out a few different chords, searching for the right shapes; then, satisfied at last, he settles back into the groove and begins to sing: “Mama, mama / What’s this strange, strange…” He trails off, doubles back and repeats the same unformed question, before abandoning it for another question entirely: “Mama, why the butterflies?”

If the references to mothers and fathers in “Doves” smack of Freudian talk therapy–the adult self making sense of childhood trauma in retrospect–then the ones in “Butterflies” are something more immediate: a freeze frame of the child self experiencing trauma in real time. The lyrical persona Prince adopts can’t articulate what he’s feeling, much less understand it; he can only ask his mother to explain it. “Mama, mama, what’s this shaking in me? / Mama, what’s this crazy swirling clouds?” Others have connected these lines to the epileptic seizures Prince experienced in his early childhood; he’d later write about them in his aforementioned memoir, noting one in particular–“the last seizure eye recall”–that happened while he was walking with his mother and sister to their grandmother’s house. “Eye just remember sitting down on the sidewalk & feeling very small,” he writes, while “the 2 of them went farther & farther away.”⁷ It’s impossible to know whether this memory directly inspired the “shaking” and “crazy swirling” in “Butterflies”; but it isn’t hard to detect in the adult Prince’s voice some of the terror and confusion he must have felt as a child, watching his mother recede from view as he lost consciousness. Even more telling is the question he asks a minute or so later: “Mama, where is father?” It, like the rest of his appeals, goes unanswered.

With “Doves,” Prince took the raw emotions at the heart of “Butterflies” and shaped them into something more palatable for mass consumption; yet he left a link between the two in the image of “the butterflies” themselves, “all tied up” in his trembling stomach. “My instincts tell me that, even though musically, it wasn’t completed[, ‘Butterflies’ was] the seed for ‘When Doves Cry,’” keyboardist Lisa Coleman told Billboard. “He sings out to his mother and he says, ‘Why the butterflies,’ and it just reminds me of ‘you’ve got the butterflies all tied up…’ It’s like, ‘Oh! That was on your mind for awhile.’”⁸

[Prince] sings out to his mother and he says, ‘Why the butterflies,’ and it just reminds me of ‘you’ve got the butterflies all tied up…’ It’s like, ‘Oh! That was on your mind for awhile.’

Lisa Coleman

2.

All of these things–butterflies, doves, Susan, his parents, Magnoli’s montage–were no doubt knocking around Prince’s brain when he walked into Studio 3 of Sunset Sound on March 1, 1984. But there was another potential source of inspiration that may have fueled the beginning of “Doves” most of all: good, old-fashioned professional jealousy. Just two nights earlier, the 26th annual Grammy Awards were held at Los Angeles’ Shrine Auditorium. Prince was up for two awards: Best Male Pop Vocal Performance, for “1999,” and Best Male R&B Vocal Performance, for “International Lover.” But if it wasn’t already clear that this would not be his night, it became abundantly so in the ceremony’s opening moments, when host John Denver acknowledged the real belle of the ball: “The big words this last year were [music] video, Boy George, and Michael…” he began, cueing the audience to shout out the rest of the name on everyone’s lips: “Jackson!”

While Prince had spent most of 1983 behind the scenes, plotting his conquest of the mainstream through Purple Rain, Jackson had swooped in and actually done it. His sixth album as a solo artist, Thriller, had come out on November 29, 1982, just over a month after 1999; in the space of three months, it had reached Number 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart, where it would remain for a record-smashing 37 weeks, buoyed by an astonishing seven Top 10 hit singles. 1999 was Prince’s best-selling album to date, coming in at a more than respectable Number 5 on Billboard’s 1983 year-end album chart. But Thriller was in another league entirely: not just the best-selling album of the year, but the best-selling album of all time, with 32 million copies sold worldwide by the end of 1983–a number that would only continue to rise in the years to come.

In the face of this global juggernaut, Prince didn’t stand a chance, and he seems to have recognized as much: Despite being in town and presumably available–his session at Sunset wrapped at 5 p.m., hours before the ceremony began–there’s no evidence that he attended the Grammys. Jackson, on the other hand, was unmissable. The future “King of Pop” took the Shrine’s stage an unprecedented eight times: accepting seven awards for Thriller–including both of the categories Prince was nominated in–and one for his storybook audio companion to Steven Spielberg’s E.T., also released in November 1982. When he wasn’t on stage, he remained in pride of place: resplendent in his futuristic military dictator chic of glittering dress uniform, shades, and single bejeweled glove; flanked on either side by reigning it-girl Brooke Shields and diminutive TV child star Emmanuel Lewis. Even if Prince had been in the house that night, one doubts anyone would have noticed.

I started to let Michael [Jackson] listen to some of the Prince music I had and he was intrigued… I realized that there was somewhat of a rivalry developing.

Cynthia Horner

The notion of a “feud” between Prince and Michael Jackson, those twin eccentric geniuses of 1980s Black pop, has perhaps been overly romanticized in the entertainment press; by most accounts, the two shared a healthy mutual respect. Yet even so, it’s hard to imagine an artist as fiercely competitive as Prince seeing Jackson’s history-making Grammys sweep and not feeling a stir of envy. There’s certainly evidence that the future King of Pop had his eye on Prince as a potential claimant to his throne: “I would give Michael copies of the magazines and he would see certain people in the book and ask me lots of questions about the artists he was interested in,” Right On! editor Cynthia Horner recalled to journalist Keith Murphy. “[T]hat’s how he was introduced to Prince. After that, I started to let Michael listen to some of the Prince music I had and he was intrigued. At that point, I realized that there was somewhat of a rivalry developing. Michael had been in the business longer, so naturally he didn’t want to get replaced by the newcomer.”⁹

“The newcomer” formally entered the superstar’s orbit a little over six months before the Grammy Awards, on August 20, 1983. Prince had taken the night off at Sunset Sound, where he was hard at work on the tracks he’d recorded at First Avenue earlier that month, to see James Brown and B.B. King at the Beverly Theatre. Jackson, as it turned out, was also in the audience–something Prince presumably learned along with the rest of the crowd, when Brown invited his most famous young acolyte onto the stage. The consummate performer readily obliged: crooning along to “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” in the voice Brown described as “so beautiful, you had to jump back sometime and kiss yourself,” before showing off his dance moves–including the already-iconic moonwalk–while the band vamped to “There Was a Time.” His demonstration concluded, he threw his arms around the grinning Brown and whispered in his ear. “Give him a big round of applause,” Brown duly announced, “because he just insisted that I introduce Prince, too!”

What followed was a rare instance of Prince being publicly caught off guard. As shown in the video above, he hadn’t forgotten how to make an entrance: We see him slowly emerging from the crowd, borne aloft on the shoulders of bodyguard “Big Chick” Huntsberry–his preferred mode of transportation at the time–and wearing what appears to be the same studded motorcycle jacket he wore at the First Avenue show. He pulls off a glove with his teeth and tosses it into the crowd; as Chick deposits him at the front of the stage, he pulls off the other glove and tosses it, too. So far, so mysterious. But as he strides over to pay his respects to Brown, one gets the distinct sense that the Godfather’s patience is wearing thin: “Prince, you gotta do somethin’!”

It’s at this point that things start to go sideways. Someone hands Prince a guitar and a pick; he plays some bluesy licks and a few Jimmy Nolen-esque trills while preening for the audience, but nothing sticks. So he reaches into his bag of tricks: sinking to his knees for some light guitar-humping, stripping off his jacket to reveal his bare chest–this, at least, elicits some squeals from the crowd–and recreating some of Brown’s patented mic-stand tricks. Finally, he lets out a raspy scream, dances some more, takes a bow, and attempts to lower himself off the stage using a prop lamppost–only for the post to give way and send him tumbling, rather less gracefully than intended, into the front row.

I always wondered if Michael intentionally brought Prince up to put him in that position just to say, ‘Hey, you think you’re on my ass? Well follow this, motherfucker.’

Alan Leeds

Reflecting on the incident in his 1986 memoir, Brown was diplomatic: “Prince played some guitar but I think he was a little nervous,” he wrote. “Michael fit into my thing a little better since he had been studying me for years.”¹⁰ Yet Prince’s lackluster performance was hardly from lack of study; he “just kind of choked in a really weird way,” recalled singer Jill Jones, who was at the show with Prince and drummer Bobby Z.¹¹ His then-production manager, Alan Leeds, concurred: “I always wondered if Michael intentionally brought Prince up to put him in that position just to say, ‘Hey, you think you’re on my ass? Well follow this, motherfucker.’”¹²

If Jackson’s longtime producer Quincy Jones is to be believed, this was more or less exactly the intention. In his notoriously frank 2018 interview with GQ, Jones claimed that Jackson’s actual words to Brown that night were, “Call Prince up—I dare him to follow me.”¹³ Jackson himself never spoke publicly on the matter, but leaked audio from the interviews for his 1988 authorized biography Moonwalk allegedly capture him recounting the moment Prince fell off the stage with relish: “He made a fool of himself,” the Daily Mirror reports him saying. “People were running and screaming. I was so embarrassed.”¹⁴

In any case, Prince’s humiliating experience–in front of one of his idols, no less–clearly left a mark. “Bobby Z called me and said, ‘Oh boy… he made an ass of himself tonight,’” Leeds told Keith Murphy. “He said Prince didn’t say a word the whole way to the hotel.”¹⁵ Jones’ version of the story includes a much more eyebrow-raising claim: Prince “waited in the limousine to try and run over [Michael] and [his sister] La Toya and his mother.”¹⁶ Obviously, as much as I respect Quincy Jones as both an artist and a raconteur, I don’t believe Prince really intended to commit vehicular triple homicide that night in August 1983. What I do believe is that the experience of being shown up by Jackson twice–first at the Beverly Theatre and then at the Grammys six months later–was the last push he needed to create his most sonically inventive and commercially successful work to date.

3.

After so much prologue, the actual recording of “When Doves Cry” had a surprisingly modest start. According to Tudahl, Prince’s March 1 session at Sunset Sound was shorter than usual: just two hours, “probably spent creating the right drum sound on the Linn.”¹⁷ By the time he left the studio at around 9:30 that night, the new track had neither lyrics nor a title; the work order filed by Prince and assistant engineer Peggy McCreary read, simply, “New Song” (see top photo, above).

March 2 was a different story. This time, Prince showed up at 3:30 in the afternoon, and didn’t leave until 7:30 the next morning. In those 16 hours, he completed the entire basic track for the song now officially titled “When Doves Cry” (see bottom photo, above). “[H]e started the way he always did,” McCreary recalled, “with the drum machine, then the bass, then the piano, then this and that, and all of a sudden, he knew he had a hit and he got real excited… He knew exactly what he was doing.”¹⁸

Granted, he wasn’t working entirely without a template. I hear an awful lot of “Traffic Jam,” an unreleased (but circulating) instrumental Prince recorded the previous week, in “Doves”: particularly its heavily phased Linn LM-1 beat and baroque, ascending synth-string outro, which as Tudahl notes was lifted directly for the later song’s live arrangement on the Purple Rain tour.¹⁹ Meanwhile, former bandmate Dez Dickerson heard an awful lot of his own composition, “She Loves 2 Video,” which Prince would have heard at the guitarist’s late 1983 solo show in L.A., shortly after shooting wrapped on Purple Rain. In a 2004 interview with the fansite Housequake, Dickerson said, “The rhythm from ‘When Doves Cry’ is identical to ‘She Loves 2 Video.’ I’m sure it wasn’t intentional on Prince’s part. That’s what happens when you’re in writing mode. But it is unmistakable.”²⁰

Such claims, I’m aware, tend to go over in the Prince community about as well as the proverbial lead balloon. But I’ve heard “She Loves 2 Video,” and Dez ain’t lying: Prince’s drum pattern for “Doves” really is a one-to-one clone of his, right down to the reverb-drenched clap at the end of every second measure. The difference–and the reason you’re not currently reading a 9,500-word essay about “She Loves 2 Video”–is in the execution. A 2009 piece in The Guardian described Prince as “some sort of Hendrix of the LM-1”: an apt comparison, since like that largest-looming of guitar heroes, his crowning achievement was in remapping the sonic possibilities of the instrument.²¹ “He didn’t just select a stock beat and press ‘play,’” LM-1 designer Roger Linn clarified in an interview with gearhead website Reverb, “but rather used it in unusual and creative ways.”²²

[Prince] didn’t just select a stock beat and press ‘play,’ but rather used [the LM-1] in unusual and creative ways.

Roger Linn

Prince’s drum programming innovations began with the features native to the LM-1 itself. As Susan Rogers recalled in a 2016 lecture for Red Bull Music Academy, the back of the machine included “individual outputs for all of the sounds, kick, snare, hat, claps, clave, all the toms”–and each of these outputs had its own dedicated tuning knob, allowing for unprecedented manual control over the sound of each drum.²³ This deep customization was what enabled Prince to create one of his sonic signatures: the hollow “doorknock” effect heard throughout “Doves” (as well as about half of 1999 and two-thirds of Purple Rain). The sound, Linn explained to Minneapolis Public Radio’s The Current, “was merely a recording of what’s called a cross stick snare drum, which is… where you hold the tip [of the drum stick] onto the drum head, and you slap the stick against the rim of the drum. He just used that normal sound, but he decided to tune it down about an octave or more to get… the ‘knocking’ sound.”²⁴ Dubbed “the Prince Sidestick” by one of my favorite thinkers, Scott Woods, it became “a defining part of his [palette], a subversive utensil in a toolbox designed to build the perfect pop star.” Or, put more simply: “When you hear it, you know you’re in a Prince song.”²⁵

As important as it was, however, the “Sidestick” wasn’t the only trick Prince had up his ruffled sleeve; “Doves” is also a masterclass in his pioneering use of effects processors with the LM-1. “He always had his guitar pedal, his guitar pedals were the Roland BOSS pedals,” Rogers told Red Bull Music Academy. “We would take his BOSS pedal board from his guitar rig and just plug it into the output of the drum machine and we could send claps, or snare or toms usually, and hi-hat, whatever we liked through this mixture of the heavy metal pedal and the flanger and the chorus and the delay and the distortion.”²⁶ In the case of “Doves,” the result of this tweakery was a swirling, writhing, non-Euclidean shape of a beat, the heavily flanged LM-1 spitting out phantom rhythms that ping across the soundstage like shrapnel. It’s that rare programmed drum pattern that sounds truly organic—not in the sense of emulating live drums, but in the more literal sense of emulating a living organism unto itself.

With this mutant drum pattern as its foundation, Prince set about building a suitably alien structure for the track. It opens almost in media res, with an abrupt onslaught of lightning-fast guitar shredding–a twin to the climactic solo from “Let’s Go Crazy,” here recast as a bracing statement of intent. The drums come in mid-solo, hammering the frenetic blast of noise into form; an odd, metallic groan–Prince’s voice, likely fed through one or more of his aforementioned effects pedals–emerges as its own rhythmic counterpoint. Finally–just as a less adventurous listener is presumably wondering what the hell it is they’re listening to–Prince drops a doozy of a hook: a simple, three-chord riff played on the Yamaha DX7’s “Koto” patch, its almost absurdly chipper tones cutting effortlessly through the preceding 17 seconds of murk.

Even more than is typical of Prince’s songwriting, these opening moments form the baseline for the rest of the song. “When Doves Cry,” writes the late philosopher Nancy J. Holland, “is a remarkably constricted song in both melody and dynamics. The melody moves only between E and B, and, while the constantly repeated opening chords have a normal structure, the ‘normality’ of the melody itself is always in jeopardy, resolution of the chords coming a half-beat or more after one would usually expect them–and never where the line of the lyrics ends, so that the sung melody never resolves.”²⁷ The track does build toward a climax, but it does so with striking restraint: Prince sings the first two verses unaccompanied save for the LM-1, waiting until the third verse–the same point, as previously noted, when the lyrics turn inward–to drop in another layer of vocals and a sprightly accompanying line on the DX7. This slow embellishment of the arrangement has the effect of implying a bridge that doesn’t exist–much as the main hook’s reemergence immediately after the title line constitutes a kind of phantom chorus.

Its idiosyncratic contours now established, “Doves” loops in on itself again, with a fourth and final verse–augmented by yet another bespoke line on the DX7–followed by two repetitions of the third-verse-and-keyboard-hook refrain. This time around, Prince’s lead vocal firmly breaks free of its melodic and lyrical constraints, taking wing over the backing vocals’ methodical repetition with a gospel-infused call and response before settling back into rapturous harmony with the line, “This is what it sounds like when doves cry.” He croons the title phrase a few more times, stacked vocal harmonies cascading one over the other, while the track settles into an extended vamp: a vehicle for a second, smoldering guitar solo and more ecstatic vocalizations. Then, writes author Ben Greenman, he “unleashe[s] a series of unearthly shrieks”: “six short ones–a hex of them,” followed by “a four-second showstopper.”²⁸

Yet for all that, Prince still isn’t finished. He strips the track down to just the beat one more time, then immediately builds it back up with a chorus of harmonized moans, intertwined with a series of blindingly fast, baroque Oberheim solos–a feat of modest studio trickery accomplished, according to keyboardist Dr. Fink, using Beatles producer George Martin’s old trick of slowing down the tape machine to half speed, playing the solo half-time and an octave lower, and speeding the tape back up so it plays back at double speed and the correct pitch.²⁹ Sated at last, he tops it all off with a final flash of virtuosity: the previously mentioned Oberheim synth-string outro he’d nicked from “Traffic Jam,” repurposed as a bookend for the opening guitar solo.

Holland argues that the structure of “Doves,” with its slow, plateauing build to an extended climax–a few of them, in fact–“constitutes a ‘counter-code’ to the usual male-oriented sexuality of rock music,” which tends toward less sophisticated patterns of tension and release (cf. its own album-mates “Let’s Go Crazy” and “Darling Nikki”), “and represents an attempt to elicit a non-stereotypical female sexuality (i.e., female desire outside of the male sexual economy).”³⁰ This, at least for me, is a big part of what makes the song’s elongated outro so provocative, with Prince’s proliferation of vocal harmonies evoking the sounds of multiple, ambiguously gendered partners reaching simultaneous orgasm. But even putting such prurience aside, there’s an undeniable something about “Doves” that makes one’s ears prick up and pay attention. Certainly, Prince knew he was sitting on something great: Guitarist Wendy Melvoin recalled her and bandmate/girlfriend Lisa Coleman getting a call from their boss soon after he left the studio in the wee hours of March 3, 1984. “He called us at 4 a.m.,” she told Entertainment Weekly in 1996. “We were in our jammies thinking, ‘What now?’ He came over and we got in his car and drove around L.A. listening to that song. He was so excited by it.”³¹

[Prince] called us at 4 a.m. We were in our jammies thinking, ‘What now?’ He came over and we got in his car and drove around L.A. listening to that song. He was so excited by it.

Wendy Melvoin

Proud as he was of his latest magnum opus, Prince still had one crucial change to make. When he returned to the studio late in the day on March 3, he found himself second-guessing the song’s arrangement. “It was just sounding too conventional, like every other song with drums and bass and keyboards,” he later recalled.³² Engineer Peggy McCreary concurred: The track “got so big,” she told the Sunset Sound YouTube channel in 2021. “I remember kinda shutting down on that song, because it just seemed like a wank… just like, oh my God, here we go, raging guitar and raging synths and everything. It seemed so overproduced to me.” As the night went on, however, Prince started paring back, removing elements from the mix: “He kind of ‘un-produced’ it,” she recalled. “And then the last thing he did was he punched that bass out and he smiled at me and said, ‘Ain’t nobody gonna believe I’d do this.’”³³

It’s worth noting that the artist’s own recounting of the story contains some intriguing divergences from McCreary’s: In his version, it’s Jill Jones who was in the room with him, and who ultimately gave him the encouragement to make the fateful call. “I said, ‘If I could have it my way it would sound like this,’ and I pulled the bass out of the mix,” he recalled in an interview with (ironically) Bass Player magazine. “She said, ‘Why don’t you have it your way?’”³⁴ He told a near-identical version–right down to the dialogue–in his unpublished liner notes for 1993’s The Hits compilation. It’s possible that both stories are true and that Prince, ever the showman, was simply recreating his and Jones’ earlier moment for McCreary’s benefit: According to Bobby Z, “He loved to play with and without [the bass track] on playback, smiling and laughing, knowing full well he was going to leave it on mute.”³⁵

Looking back from today’s perspective, one might reasonably wonder why all the fuss over a simple bassline. As Michael Dean observed in a March 2024 episode of his and De Angela Duff’s weekly live stream, “What Did Prince Do This Week?”, hip-hop has an established history of the bass drum providing the necessary “bottom” for a track; so, to modern ears, “Doves” doesn’t sound all that different from the sparse productions on, say, Run-D.M.C.’s first album, released later in the same month “Doves” was recorded.³⁶ The artist then-formerly known as Prince also made this point in the Bass Player interview: “‘When Doves Cry’ does have bass in it—the bass is in the kick drum,” he explained. “Bass to me means B-A-S-E. B-A-S-S is a fish.”³⁷

‘When Doves Cry’ does have bass in it–the bass is in the kick drum… Bass to me means B-A-S-E. B-A-S-S is a fish.

O(+>

In early 1984, though, hip-hop was an underground concern, and the notion of a mainstream pop song with no traditional bass track–by a Black artist, no less!–was all but unthinkable. “A lot of people at Warners felt that it would be a really difficult record” to promote, recalled Marylou Badeaux, at that time a marketing executive in the label’s “Black Music” division. “I remember arguing with somebody, because he was like, ‘Man, what kind of fucking record is this? With a bunch of strange sounds?’”³⁸ Even Prince’s bandmates needed some time to warm up to the unorthodox track: The first time Dr. Fink heard it, he told Per Nilsen, “I didn’t really care for it. I remember saying to him, ‘There’s no bass.’ He said, ‘That’s right. I did that on purpose.’ So of course I had to ask how come? All he said was, ‘Because it’s different. You’ll get used to it.’”³⁹ The award for funniest reaction, meanwhile, went to Prince’s on- and (increasingly) off-screen antagonist, Morris Day of the Time: “I got out the car and said, ‘Next time play something funky for me,’ and slammed the door.”⁴⁰

Ultimately, it’s Prince who would have the last laugh. “Doves” is an undeniably strange song, but that strangeness lies at the core of its enduring appeal. As Nancy Holland puts it, the lack of bass leaves the song’s melody “suspended, ‘vulnerable,’ and unprotected”–all of which only enhances the disarming intimacy of the lyrics.⁴¹ Musician and producer Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, one of the few to have heard the original mix and told the tale, confirmed that it “wouldn’t have grabbed” him in that form: “With the bassline, the song was cool. Without it, it was astounding.”⁴² Besides, it’s not as if “Doves” didn’t have hooks to spare on the other end of the frequency spectrum. Alan Leeds recalled hearing the song for the first time at a band rehearsal after the final mix was completed: “Everyone was teasing [Prince] about the fact that there was no bass on the record, saying, ‘How are you going to have a hit record without bass?’” he told biographer Matt Thorne. “But all I remembered was that simple little piano hook, and I knew it was going to be a hit.”⁴³ As Prince himself wrote, that first night he stripped the bass from the track, “Everyone who passed by” at Sunset Sound “was enthralled by the strange sound coming out of Studio 3.”⁴⁴ In just a matter of weeks, he’d have a lot more listeners in his thrall.

4.

“When Doves Cry” was released on May 16, 1984, as the lead single for Purple Rain–the opening salvo in what would become a multimedia blitz, with the album following on June 25, the film on July 27, and the tour on November 4. It wasn’t Warner Bros.’ first choice: According to Bob Cavallo, the label favored the more traditionally radio-friendly “Let’s Go Crazy.” Seeking a second opinion, Cavallo played the two options back to back for Zomba/Jive Records founder Clive Calder. “I play ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ first, and he likes it,” Cavallo recalled to Alan Light. Then he put on “When Doves Cry.” “The intro goes into the first verse and the start of the chorus, and Clive goes, ‘What is this, a joke?’ And I go, ‘You don’t like it?’ And he said, ‘No, it’s fantastic.’”⁴⁵ Another ad-hoc focus test with Prince’s longtime publicist Howard Bloom had similar results: Cavallo “played me a song that Russ Thyret [from Warner Brothers] wanted to put out as the first single. It was a piece of funk dreck,” Bloom told Matt Thorne. “And then he played me ‘When Doves Cry’, and I could feel the entire film in three and a half minutes.”⁴⁶

If the suits at W.B. had their doubts, they’d be allayed soon enough. “Doves” entered the Billboard Hot 100 on June 2 (at Number 57) and quickly ascended, reaching the top spot on July 7: Prince’s first ever Number 1 pop hit. It would hold that coveted position for five consecutive weeks–famously keeping Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” the breakout hit from his own blockbuster Born in the U.S.A., parked at Number 2. It topped the Hot Black Singles Chart for an even more impressive eight weeks, from June 30 to August 18. By August 21, it would be certified Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, marking two million units sold: the last record by a solo artist to receive this distinction until 1989, when the certification requirements were lowered to one million units. At year’s end, Billboard would rank it Number 1 on its year-end Top Pop Singles list, ahead of “What’s Love Got to Do with It” by Tina Turner and “Say, Say, Say” by Paul McCartney and–you guessed it–Michael Jackson.

[Bob Cavallo] played me ‘When Doves Cry’, and I could feel the entire film in three and a half minutes.

Howard Bloom

All of this would be impressive enough had “Doves” been “just” a runaway hit record; yet it was also arguably the engine that drove both its parent album and film to their own respective commercial peaks. Purple Rain wasn’t the first motion picture to benefit from cross-media synergy with its soundtrack, or vice versa; that tradition goes back to Isaac Hayes’ Platinum-selling 1971 soundtrack for Gordon Parks’ blaxploitation classic Shaft. Usually, though, it’s the movie that does most of the heavy lifting. Kenny Loggins’ theme for Footloose came out in January 1984, over a month before the release of its parent film, but it didn’t reach the top of the Hot 100 until late March. Similarly, Irene Cara’s “Flashdance… What a Feeling” released a month before Flashdance hit theaters the previous April, but didn’t top the charts until the end of May. “Doves,” by contrast, hit Number 1 three weeks before Purple Rain’s theatrical release: There’s a strong argument to be made that it was the song that made a smash out of the movie, and not the other way around.

In any event, the Purple Rain soundtrack would soon follow its lead single to become Prince’s first Number 1 pop album, topping the Billboard 200 on August 4 and remaining there for 24 weeks. The film, meanwhile, had the best box office of its opening weekend, earning back its $7.2 million budget and then some. This meant that, for a brief period in the first week of August 1984, Prince simultaneously had the Number 1 single, album, and film in the United States. No other recording artist in history–not even the Beatles at the height of “Beatlemania”–had managed such a feat. If “Doves” was, as previously suggested, Prince’s Hail Mary response to the cultural dominance of Michael Jackson, then the gambit had clearly paid off. There’s a fascinating photo (see above) of Michael in a hotel room during the Jacksons’ record-breaking Victory Tour, reading a copy of USA Today with the headline, “Will Prince’s ‘Purple’ reign?” His expression is inscrutable, but one thing, at least, is for sure: If he was laughing at his upstart rival after they briefly (and disastrously) shared the stage the previous summer, he wasn’t laughing anymore.

There are any number of reasons why “Doves” became the song to finally rocket Prince into Jackson’s stratosphere; but one particular factor that bears mentioning is its music video, shot by photographer Larry Williams but officially directed by Prince himself. Video, of course, was rightfully considered to be Jackson’s home turf: His Steve Barron-directed clip for “Billie Jean” played a central role (along with Prince’s “1999” and “Little Red Corvette”) in breaking the de facto color barrier faced by Black artists in the early years of pioneering music video channel MTV; while the 14-minute, John Landis-directed short film for “Thriller” not only made history with its novel format and record-setting $500,000 budget, but was also credited with doubling the already-unprecedented sales of its parent album. While Prince’s early videos were not without their charms, they were basic, low-budget performance clips at heart: or, as producer Sharon Oreck memorably put it, “just smoke, then Prince’s face, then smoke, then Prince’s butt, and then smoke. I liked the songs, but the videos were profoundly bad. They were, like, porn bad.”⁴⁷

The video for “Doves” admittedly still evokes porn–it is, after all, a Prince video from 1984–but it certainly isn’t “porn bad.” Over the sounds of the opening guitar solo, we push in on an ornate set of French doors. As we approach, the doors open, as if of their own volition, revealing the breathtaking tableau of an apparently-naked Prince, reclining in a steaming bathtub in the center of a massive, purple room. The floor is littered with cut flowers, an aesthetic link to the similar design elements on the Purple Rain album cover; light pours in from a pair of stained-glass windows on the left side of the frame, a callback to Roy Bennett’s stage design for the Controversy tour; a small bevy of live doves flaps by in the foreground (somewhere in Hong Kong, John Woo is taking notes). The camera continuing to draw closer, Prince turns slowly to acknowledge its/our presence, maintaining unblinking eye contact as he rises to his feet–the frame now centered tightly on his bare torso to (barely) preserve his modesty. Without dropping his gaze, he reaches out to beckon to us.

Then, freeze frame, as another Prince–a gauzy, spectral presence, wearing a maroon fedora with a lace veil sewn into the brim–appears in the corner of the frame, like an Olan Mills double exposure. The floating Prince head lip-syncs the song’s opening lines: “Dig if u will the picture / Of u and I engaged in a kiss.” Smash cut to an extreme close-up of Apollonia and the Kid doing exactly as described, then back, just as quickly, to another shot of the cavernous chapel-cum-bathroom; we now see that one of the stained-glass panels depicts an early version of the artist’s trademark Love Symbol. Prince, still to all appearances completely nude, crawls into the frame and across the flower-strewn floor, the shot cutting away just as we catch a tantalizing glimpse of thigh.

There are still about three minutes left of the video–five, in the extended edit linked above–but I’d argue that it’s those first 50 seconds that come to mind when most of us think of “When Doves Cry.” These are the indelible images–at once hilariously camp, mildly dangerous, and deeply sexy–that have turned generations of viewers’ heads: either to ask, “Who the hell is that?!” or, for the initiated, to marvel at this quintessential version of the fantasy Prince spent the first six years of his career making a reality. It makes perfect sense that, when the Prince “Immersive Experience” opened in Chicago in 2022, one of the setpieces allowed attendees to explore a recreation of the bathtub set: When those French doors swing open at the beginning of the video, it’s an invitation to step into another world; and if you’ve made it this far into this very long post, there’s probably a part of you that entered and never left.

The rest of the video also has its purpose to serve. First, and fittingly for a song written for a plot-hole-filling montage, it’s a hell of an advertisement for the film; in fact, I’m willing to bet that the aggressive airplay “Doves” received on MTV, Night Flight, and Friday Night Videos put more butts in seats than any theatrical trailer. Like many videos for pop songs from movie soundtracks, “Doves” intercuts its bespoke footage with clips from the film: here’s the Kid tooling around Minnesota on his Hondamatic; there he is making out with Apollonia; here he is interrupting a scene of domestic violence between his parents; there he is making out with Apollonia again. Yet unlike most other videos of its ilk, it (mostly) doesn’t come across as cheesy: In his Stereogum column “The Number Ones,” Tom Breihan writes, “Usually, the movie clips in soundtrack tie-in videos are forced and clumsy. But all of Purple Rain looks like a music video, and all of it fits the song.”⁴⁸ So seamlessly do the movie and video elements work together that it only enhances the uncanny overlap between pop star and role-never more so than in the incredible moment when Prince, ostensibly not in character as the Kid, briefly stops lip-syncing in the mirror to gaze at a framed photo of his costar Clarence Williams III.

Second–and less fittingly, for what was arguably the most solo-oriented composition and performance on the album–the “Doves” video was most viewers’ introduction to Prince’s totemic backing band of the next two years, the Revolution. They were hardly new faces, of course: We’d seen Bobby Z and Dr. Fink in TV and live appearances since the 1979 self-titled album; Lisa had been in the mix since 1980’s Dirty Mind; bassist Brown Mark had been on board since 1981’s Controversy. Prince had even hidden a reference to the group’s new name in plain sight on the cover art for 1999, writing the words “and the revolution” in reverse on the cartoon eye superimposed over the letter “I” in “Prince.” But “Doves,” and the Purple Rain project in general, was the first time they would receive equal billing with their leader. “I knew we were The Revolution in the film script, but I didn’t know if it was going to be fictitious or remain,” recalled Bobby Z. “It was a very short period of time before I reali[z]ed that the story in the movie was going to be ‘reality’ and the band was going to be The Revolution. The first time it really occurred to me was when I saw the chroma key [test print] for the Purple Rain album cover. That’s when I really had the chills about it.”⁴⁹

I knew we were The Revolution in the film script, but I didn’t know if it was going to be fictitious or remain.

Bobby Z

As coming-out parties go, the Revolution’s in the “Doves” video is hard to beat. Just as the single edit of the song is reaching its closing moments, we find ourselves in another liminal space: an all-white room where Dr. Fink, resplendent in his trademark scrubs and stethoscope, stands at attention behind his synthesizer. The door behind him swings open, revealing only a purple abyss; Fink spins around, and a single dove flies through the door and across the shot. We cut to Prince, decked out in one of his rococo sartorial confections from designers Louis Wells and Vaughn Terry, silently observing from his perch on a spiral staircase. Then, suddenly, there are four of him–which is to say, he’s joined by Mark, Bobby, and Wendy, all kitted out in similar Louis & Vaughn outfits like a multiracial, multi-gendered set of clones. Due to the song’s stripped-down nature, there isn’t much for the band to mime to; so, in a slightly awkward concession, they dance, backing up the frontman–he isn’t about to cede all of the spotlight–with a simple, but memorable set of steps. As they continue to vamp, a split-screen effect is applied to the shots, further enhancing the impression of the Revolution as mirror images of Prince.

The “Doves” video, and the rest of the Purple Rain project to follow, would make Prince and the Revolution–in exactly those many words–into icons. The Revolution are the last people we see before the standard edit of the video fades into that iconic white face drawn by artist Doug Henders; they’re the ones sharing equal credit with Prince for the songwriting and performances on the album; and they’re the ones whose likenesses would adorn countless bedroom walls in the mid-1980s, thanks to the poster included in vinyl copies of Purple Rain (see above). It was a decision that a proudly individualistic artist like Prince could only come to regret; but it was entirely his decision. Prince carefully shaped the Revolution, like the Time and Vanity/Apollonia 6 before them, into aspects of his own artistic persona: As Brown Mark recalled to Wax Poetics, “He had us blocked and staged in his imagination.”⁵⁰

[Prince] walked over to me and Wendy and lifted my arm up and put my hand around Wendy[’]s waist and said, [‘]There.[’] … That[’]s how precise he was about how he wanted the image of the band to be.

Lisa Coleman

Some times, this “blocking” and “staging” was more literal than others. In a 2009 interview with Out magazine, Wendy and Lisa recounted a moment from the shoot that produced both the “Doves” video and the album poster: “We were all in our different positions and he at one point walked over to me and Wendy and lifted my arm up and put my hand around Wendy[’]s waist and said, [‘]There.[’] And that is the poster,” said Lisa. “That[’]s how precise he was about how he wanted the image of the band to be.” At the time, the bandmates weren’t out as lesbians; but “Prince saw us as the couple that we were and used that relationship to add more mystery to him,” said Wendy. The Revolution was a model of intentional diversity, “D.E.I.” before the buzzword was coined: “The Sly and the Family Stone mentality, that whole black/white/freaky thing on stage appealed to him.” So Wendy and Lisa “weren[’]t just the two girls in the band,” said Lisa. “We were the gay girls in the band.”⁵¹

For all the vaunted sexual and cultural diversity of the Revolution, of course, one doubts it was an accident that four out of six members were that most prized identity in the world of mid-‘80s pop: White. As C. Liegh McInnis observed in a recent episode of “What Did Prince Do This Week?”, Prince alluded to this dynamic in his famous 1985 Rolling Stone interview–specifically naming Wendy, who he would increasingly position as his White, female foil. “Wendy makes me seem all right in the eyes of people watching,” he told journalist Neal Karlen. “When I sneer, she smiles.”⁵² Would “Doves” have become the megahit it was if Prince hadn’t invited Wendy and his other smiling White friends over for a dance party? We’ll never know, and that’s exactly the point: Prince wasn’t taking any chances. He may have named the band “the Revolution,” but he knew the reactionary times he was living in.

Epilogue

What else is there to say about “When Doves Cry”? It’s a question I’ve asked myself for the past 15 months, as I’ve alternated between half-heartedly picking away at this post and doing everything in my power to avoid thinking about it. The song is somehow both too vast to be summed up and too subtle to be pinned down. It was the biggest record of 1984–a famously big year for music–yet to this day it has no real, credible imitators. Even Prince struggled to recapture its magic: At the press conference he held before the release of his 1996 album Emancipation, the artist admitted he “was never really pleased with the way we did it live.”⁵³

To my ears, he was being hard on himself: “Doves” came across just fine on the Purple Rain tour, even if the epic arrangement sometimes seemed to be overcompensating for the lack of studio polish; the version from 1985’s Prince and the Revolution Live clocks in at nearly nine and a half minutes, with a lengthy funk coda that allows Brown Mark to make up for the studio version’s lack of bass and then some. If nothing else, the Revolution deserve credit for taking such a clear product of the recording studio and making it work in a live setting. Fink in particular was justifiably proud of his ability to nail the climactic Oberheim solo without the tape speed tricks Prince employed on the original track–and, often, at an even faster tempo: “How’d I do that?” he recently marveled to author Andrea Swensson. “There must have been a robot attached to my hand or something.”⁵⁴

Even if we take the artist at his word and accept that he never recaptured the magic of “Doves,” he still came a hell of a lot closer than anyone else. Like many of the hits from Prince’s imperial phase, “Doves” has attracted its share of notable cover versions; but its essence has proven more elusive to recapture than, say, “Purple Rain.” Nasally R&B crooner Ginuwine was bold enough to attempt a cover on his 1996 debut The Bachelor, produced by confirmed Prince acolyte Timbaland: Their version, with sampled dove coos on the beat and a couple of catastrophic lyrical revisions (“The sweat of your body covers ‘G’”; “A n**** like me strikes curious poses”), feels like the result of a misguided experiment to strip everything sublime from the song, leaving only the ridiculous. Punk godmother Patti Smith fared better with her interpretation, released on a 2002 compilation and later used in Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film Lost in Translation; but she makes the opposite mistake, weighing down the lyrics with dramatic portent until the song cries out for relief.

One can’t help but imagine that these covers in particular were a contributing factor to Prince’s late-career crusade against the music industry’s compulsory license law: He definitely made his disapproval of the Ginuwine version known, recalling in a 1999 interview with Notorious magazine, “I walked up to him at a party and told him I didn’t appreciate” his take on the song. “He said it was some kind of show of respect. I said, it’s cool if you like my song. Just call a brother up and say so. You don’t have to cover it.”⁵⁵ He was less openly critical of the Smith version, but a question at the Emancipation press conference about whether he’d heard it got only a terse reply of, “No, sir.”⁵⁶

[Songs like ‘When Doves Cry’] don’t sound like anything else… They aren’t conscious; you just have to get them out. They’re gifts.

O(+>

And really, didn’t he have a right to be protective of his baby? More than anything else, “When Doves Cry” existed for Prince as a symbol of what he was capable of when he pushed his artistry to its absolute limits. In a 1996 interview with Jim Walsh of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, he named both “Doves” and 1986’s “Kiss” as songs inspired by what he called his “higher self”: “They don’t sound like anything else,” he said. “They aren’t conscious; you just have to get them out. They’re gifts.”⁵⁷ Unusually for so prolific an artist, Prince never recorded another song that sounded quite like “Doves.” But its echoes reverberate throughout his career, each and every time he came into the studio with something to prove. There would be a lot more where it came from.

(Featured Image: Set of the music video for “When Doves Cry,” 1984; photo by Doug Henders, stolen from RR Auction. Thanks to friend and Prince guru Harold Pride for helping me fact-check Dez on the “She Loves 2 Video” issue. While I didn’t end up citing it, the section on drum programming is heavily indebted to this 2019 Reverb article by Lou Carlozo, whose interview with Roger Linn I did cite above. Check it out of you want more of a gearhead’s account of the wizardry behind the “Doves” drums! Also not cited, but invaluable for the broader industry context, was Michaelangelo Matos’ excellent book Can’t Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop’s Blockbuster Year. Finally, eagle-eyed readers might notice that I edited this post because I completely blanked on Isaac Hayes’ epochal Shaft soundtrack when I originally wrote the part about cross-media synergy. Sorry, Black Moses!)

Footnotes

1. Alan Light, Let’s Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain (Atria Books, 2014), p. 144. ↩︎
2. Ibid., p. 147. ↩︎
3. Per Nilsen, Dance, Music, Sex, Romance: Prince – The First Decade (Firefly, 1999), pp. 135-136. ↩︎
4. Duane Tudahl, Prince and the Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions: 1983 and 1984 – Expanded Edition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), p. 285. ↩︎
5. Brian Morton, Prince: A Thief in the Temple (Canongate Books, 2016), eBook edition. ↩︎
6. Prince, ed. Dan Piepenbring, The Beautiful Ones (NPG Music Publishing/Spiegler & Grau, 2019), p. 5. ↩︎
7. Ibid., p. 94. ↩︎
8. Gary Graff, “The Revolution’s Lisa Coleman Talks ‘Piano & A Microphone 1983,’ Jamming With Prince and Unreleased Gems,” Billboard, September 20, 2018. ↩︎
9. Keith Murphy, “Michael Jackson Vs. Prince: An Oral History.” VIBE, June 25, 2011. ↩︎
10. James Brown with Bruce Tucker, James Brown: The Godfather of Soul (Macmillan, 1986), p. 264. ↩︎
11. Tudahl, p. 144. ↩︎
12. Murphy, “Michael Jackson Vs. Prince: An Oral History (Pg. 2),” VIBE, June 25, 2011. ↩︎
13. Chris Heath, “Quincy Jones Has a Story About That,” GQ, January 29, 2018. ↩︎
14. James Desborough and Christopher Bucktin, “Michael Jackson’s secretly recorded rants about Prince revealed for first time,” Daily Mirror, June 24, 2016. ↩︎
15. Murphy, Pg. 2. ↩︎
16. Heath. ↩︎
17. Tudahl, p. 283. ↩︎
18. Ibid., p. 285. ↩︎
19. Ibid., p. 278. ↩︎
20. Ibid., p. 284. ↩︎
21. David McNamee, “Hey, what’s that sound: Linn LM-1 Drum Computer and the Oberheim DMX.” The Guardian, June 22, 2009. ↩︎
22. Lou Carlozo, “Roger Linn on Drum Samples, Prince, and Unlocking Virtuosity in Electronic Music.” Reverb, August 15, 2017. ↩︎
23. Susan Rogers, Red Bull Music Academy Lecture, 2016. ↩︎
24. Cecilia Johnson, “Roger Linn, inventor of the LM-1 drum machine, talks Prince and ‘When Doves Cry,’” The Current, March 1, 2017. ↩︎
25. Scott Woods, Prince and Little Weird Black Boy Gods (Brick Cave Media, 2018), eBook edition. ↩︎
26. Rogers. ↩︎
27. Nancy J. Holland, “Purple Passion: Images of Female Desire in ‘When Doves Cry,’ Cultural Critique Number 10, Autumn 1988: 92. ↩︎
28. Ben Greenman, Dig If You Will the Picture: Funk, Sex, God, and Genius in the Music of Prince (Henry Holt and Company, 2017), pp. 31-32. ↩︎
29. Tudahl, p. 286. ↩︎
30. Holland, p. 91. ↩︎
31. Tudahl, p. 286. ↩︎
32. Karl Coryat, “His Highness Gets Down!”, Bass Player, November 1999, republished on Prince interview archive. ↩︎
33. Sunset Sound Recorders, “Prince ‘When Doves Cry’ Stories From The Session,” YouTube, February 2021. ↩︎
34. Coryat. ↩︎
35. The Revolution, “Fearlessly Breathe In the Purple Rain… The Revolution Track-by-Track,” liner notes, Purple Rain Deluxe Expanded Edition, music by Prince and the Revolution, Warner Bros./NPG Records, 2017, p. 19. ↩︎
36. De Angela Duff and Michael Dean, “What Did Prince Do This Week? 9 of 1984 (When Doves Cry & Love and Sex),” YouTube, March 2, 2024. ↩︎
37. Coryat. ↩︎
38. Nilsen, p. 144. ↩︎
39. Ibid., p. 135. ↩︎
40. Tudahl, p. 289. ↩︎
41. Holland, p. 92. ↩︎
42. Touré, I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon (Atria Books, 2013), p. 7. ↩︎
43. Matt Thorne, Prince: The Man and His Music (Agate Publishing, 2016), eBook edition. ↩︎
44. Anil Dash, “Prince’s Own Liner Notes on His Greatest Hits,” Medium, May 28, 2016. ↩︎
45. Light, p. 160. ↩︎
46. Thorne. ↩︎
47. Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks, I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution (Penguin, 2012), p. 67. ↩︎
48. Tom Breihan, “The Number Ones: Prince’s ‘When Doves Cry,’” Stereogum, August 26, 2020. ↩︎
49. Nilsen, p. 136. ↩︎
50. A.D. Amorosi, “Agents of Change,” Wax Poetics 67, Spring 2018: p. 47. ↩︎
51. Barry Walters, “The Revolution Will Be Harmonized,” Out, April 16, 2009. ↩︎
52. Neal Karlen, “Prince Talks,” Rolling Stone, September 12, 1985, republished in Prince on Prince: Interviews and Encounters, ed. Arthur Lizie (Chicago Review Press, 2023), p. 85. ↩︎
53. “Paisely [sic] Park Press Conference,” November 12, 1996, republished in Lizie, p. 115. ↩︎
54. Andrea Swensson, Prince and Purple Rain: 40 Years (Motorbooks International, 2024), p. 78. ↩︎
55. Dimitri Ehrlich, “O(+>: Portrait of the Artist as a Free Man,” Notorious, December 1999, republished in Lizie, p. 166. ↩︎
56. Paisely [sic] Park Press Conference,” p. 115. ↩︎
57. Jim Walsh, “O(+> Speaks,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, November 17, 1996, republished in Gold Experience: Following Prince in the ’90s (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 70. ↩︎