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When Doves Cry: The Last Song Written for Purple Rain, the Missing Bass Line, and the Night Prince Did It All Alone
When Doves Cry: The Song Prince Built Alone, Then Dared to Leave Empty Put on “When Doves Cry” and listen for what’s missing. A screaming guitar opens the record — alone, echoing, with nothing underneath it. Then the Linn drum machine kicks in, then the keyboards, then Prince’s voice, soaring and wounded. And underneath it…
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Prince: The Private Man Behind the Purple Myth
He was the most flamboyant performer of his generation and the most private man in pop music — a combination that shouldn’t have been possible, and yet Prince pulled it off for nearly forty years. On stage, he wore lace and lamé and sang about things that made censors blush. Off stage, he lived in…
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How Prince Built “Sign o’ the Times”: Three Dead Albums and a Masterpiece
In the fall of 1986, Prince did what only Prince would do: he broke up his band, shelved two finished albums, assembled a triple album, watched his record label reject it, and then — in a matter of months — stitched the wreckage into one of the greatest records ever made. “Sign o’ the Times,”…
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The Untold Story of Prince: The Genius Who Refused to Be Owned
He arrived in the late 1970s as a shy teenager from Minneapolis with an afro, a falsetto that could shatter glass, and a demand no record label had ever heard from an unknown kid: let me do everything myself. They laughed, then they said yes, and music was never the same again. Prince Rogers Nelson…