It's such a shame our friendship had to end

Prince - 'Purple Rain' (Purple Rain - 1984)

We have managed to ramp up even after the strength of the last two songs we’ve written about, Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell. So far, I’d wager that I Am The Resurrection, Champagne Supernova and to a lesser extent Street Spirit (Fade Out), and All Apologies are the songs that are most famous and most familiar as closers. All of those are eclipsed by this Prince song.

‘Purple Rain’ is an epic closer, in every sense of the word. It is one of the most famous closing songs I will write about; it may be the most famous from 1980 onwards. In 2021 Rolling Stone named it the 18th best song of all time, and in 2015 Pitchfork crowned it the best song of the 1980s¹. The only thing that was able to stop this juggernaut of a song in 1984 was Wham’s ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go Go’, which kept it from the top of the Billboard charts in The US. It was even the winner of The People’s Pop World Cup of Album Closers earlier this year.

It is worth considering the context of where Prince was in his career before 1984. His five albums had seen only one make the top ten, 1982’s 1999, and two top ten singles from that album in the US.² With his musical output to that point, he was more considered a contemporary of the likes of Lipps Inc. and Rick James - not someone who would be competing with Micheal Jackson and Bruce Springsteen at the very top of the album charts with an album that wasn’t just the best funk and R&B album but also the best pop and rock album of the year. Framing it like this, it is all the odder that he was even in a position to be making the movie Purple Rain.

The song’s genesis is that it was initially planned as a collaboration with Stevie Nicks and had more of a country vibe. The Fleetwood Mac star told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2011;

It was so overwhelming, that 10-minute track… I listened to it, and I just got scared. I called him back and said, ‘I can’t do it. I wish I could. It’s too much for me.

From this point, the following change to the song came when Wendy Melvoin joined Prince’s band, The Revolution, and started to play some chords on the guitar around the sketch that Prince had, according to fellow band-mate Lisa Coleman;

"He was excited to hear it voiced differently. It took it out of that country feeling. Then we all started playing it a bit harder and taking it more seriously. We played it for six hours straight and by the end of that day we had it mostly written and arranged."

As the song started to move into the type of arena soft rock ballad territory, Prince fretted, there was a similarity with Journey’s recent hit, ‘Faithfully’. The band’s Jonathan Cain assured Prince that it was only through the chord usage that there was similarity and wished him good luck with the song.

Melvoin's debut show with The Revolution was a benefit concert for the Minnesota Dance Theatre at the First Avenue nightclub in Minneapolis on 3rd Aug 1983. The last three songs on the Purple Rain album were taken from this gig. ‘Purple Rain’ itself is almost fully formed, and only light editing and overdubs are added or taken away. You can see in the video below, which has annotated points on what you hear in the final version and what you don’t - there’s a verse about money that was cut entirely and, amazingly, that outro riff was ad-libbed!

Purple, of course, is the colour of royalty. This association goes back centuries due to the rarity of purple dye and its connection with the ability to afford clothes in that hue. Except for The Man In Black - Johnny Cash, no other musician is as closely associated with a colour. Prince once told NME that.

When there’s blood in the sky – red and blue = purple.. purple rain pertains to the end of the world and being with the one you love and letting your faith/God guide you through the purple rain.

Away from the colour, the rain is cleansing, bringing a new beginning, which is the song’s function in the film. Prince plays ‘The Kid’ in the movie. By the end, he is learning to become a better boyfriend, a better band member, and establish himself, even if those were the same dreams of his father that went unfulfilled. The key is believing that others can believe in you - it is not a film that I’d recommend reading the script over watching; you wouldn’t get the benefits of the set pieces and the music.

Elsewhere in the song, we get a suggestion that Prince needs to either move out of the friend zone or regrets that he has. That all depends on how you want to cut his suggestion that he doesn’t want a weekend lover. Either way, he wants this partner to choose him or end the friendship, and he needs his fans to anoint him as a rock god and personally, he needs to step out of his father’s shadow.

Musically, the song has cavernous drums, swelling strings, and an electric grand piano which gives it an almost gospel tinge. There is the guitar solo that could move continents and the hardest of hearts. It’s hard to hear the outro without thinking of cigarette lighters waving in the crowd. Prince is baptising us all, blasting our misdemeanours away with pulses of guitar and the cleansing power of the rain. It is a cathartic ending, whether it’s the song, the film or the album.

By the end of 1984, the album had been top of the US charts for almost six months³. Competing with Footloose, Born In The USA, Sports and Thriller at the top of the Billboard charts. Prince joined Elvis Presley and The Beatles as an act that had a number one single, album and film at the same time. Purple Rain went on to win Grammys and an Oscar. Billboard magazine has said that only Ronald Reagan was more popular in 1984’s America than Prince.

It ended up being the last song Prince played before he died, Setlist.fm has over a thousand separate concerts listed that he played it at and of course, he managed to play a legendary performance at the Superbowl XLI halftime show in Miami in February 2007 under the purple lights and epic downpour that elevated the status of the version to legendary.

1. In The Rolling Stone song list, ‘Purple Rain’ is the second-highest entry of the 1980s.

2. He did manage a #2 in the UK with ‘1999’/’Little Red Corvette’, but that was in 1985.

3. Non-consecutively.