- Prince wrote this song for his movie Purple Rain. In the film, the song plays under a montage after his character loses his girl (Apollonia) to his rival (Morris – Morris Day of The Time). We see Prince riding his motorcycle along with shots of intimate moments with Apollonia. In the movie, Prince has a difficult relationship with his father, who beats his mom. Scenes of his father come in on the lyrics where Prince calls him “demanding.”The film is semi-autobiographical, but how much is based on real life remains a mystery, as Prince rarely gave interviews and didn’t talk about his personal life. In the movie, the song expresses his fear of becoming like his parents. When the doves cry, that’s his musical refuge – the barrage of keyboards in the chorus represents the doves crying.
- Besides writing and composing the track, Prince played all the instruments on the song.
- There is no bass on this song. Prince took out the bass track at the last minute to get a different sound, though he hated to see it go.”Sometimes your brain kind of splits in two – your ego tells you one thing, and the rest of you says something else. You have to go with what you know is right,” he told Bass Player magazine.
- In the US, this was the #1 song of 1984. It topped the charts for five weeks over the summer, and kept Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing In The Dark” at #2, preventing The Boss from ever having a #1 hit.Springsteen was a huge fan of Prince. “Whenever I would catch one of his shows, I would always leave humbled,” he said in dedicating his April 23, 2016 concert to the recently deceased superstar.
- This was the second US chart-topper with a kind of bird in the title, following on the feathers of the 1975 disco hit “Fly, Robin, Fly.” (The novelty song “Disco Duck” by Rick Dees & His Cast of Idiots hit #1 in 1976, but “duck” does not refer to a specific species.)
- Prince used his trusty LM-1 drum machine (now on display at Paisley Park) on this track to create the unique percussion. Introduced in 1980 by Roger Linn, the LM-1 was the first programmable drum machine that sampled real drums.To make the sound, Prince used a recording of a cross-stick snare drum, where you hold the tip onto the drum head and slap the stick against the rim of the drum. He then tuned it down an octave to give it more of a knocking sound, and ran it through a guitar processor.In addition to his talents on guitar, keyboards and a number of other instruments, Prince is acknowledged as one of the greatest drum machine programmers of his era.
- Peggy McCreary, Prince’s engineer on this song, told Billboard about the day it was recorded and the singer’s confidence that it would become a hit: “[Prince] took the bass out and he said, ‘There’s nobody that’s going to have the guts to do this.’ And he was smiling from ear to ear. He felt this was the best and he knew he had a hit song… so he decided to do something really daring. That’s what Prince was all about.”McCreary also recalled Prince’s exhausting recording process: “He would run through [a song] with just a piano and a vocal. And sometimes he’d do the drums and then the bass… The room was always set up and you had to be ready to do whatever he felt like doing. It was real spontaneous. You had to be there with him, which was the hard part and the exciting part. But when you’re exhausted, it’s hard to be excited. It was the longest I ever worked with anybody in my life. I worked around the clock, 24 hours. He said sometimes the only reason he went home was so I could sleep.”
