Prince made too much music for just one person. He knew this, banking thousands of hours of unreleased material in the vaults of his Paisley Park studios. A year after his unexpected death on April 21, 2016, we're no closer to realizing what he stashed away in his vaults, but what he gave away in his lifetime represents an important chapter in his legacy. Several of these tunes are so well known, they are practically part of Prince's personal canon: Vanity's lascivious club classic “Nasty Girl,” Sheila E's delirious “The Glamorous Life,” the Time's neon funk “Jungle Love,” the Bangles' psychedelic sigh “Manic Monday,” and Sinéad O'Connor's all-time torch song “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Apart from the latter, every one of these was a song gifted to the artist by Prince himself, sometimes in the context where he was the undisputed creative director of its production. Often, these projects are labeled as Prince's protégés, but as with anything involving the Purple One, the reality is complicated. Sometimes he'd discover an artist, sometimes he'd create groups out of musicians he knew, and sometimes his contributions amounted to little more than a composition. He was an advocate and a puppet master, operating from a position of compassion and control: he sincerely wanted to give other artists a boost—but only on his own terms.
While he may have dominated these collaborations, Prince didn't necessarily push himself into the spotlight. He adopted a series of aliases to obscure his identity, a perhaps futile move because the music always bore his signature, whether it was Minneapolis funk or psychedelic pop. Which isn't to say he ignored the personality of a particular artist. He simply accentuated what he believed to be their best attributes.
Prince, The Song Peddler
Prince's cottage industry as a songwriter for hire was a key part of his purple reign in the mid-'80s. He wasn't contracted to write hits but instead gave songs to acts he deemed worthy. Usually these were women, which emphasized Prince's androgyny and feminine empathy, but also reflected the practical reality that he no longer had Vanity 6 and Apollonia 6—the short-lived girl-groups he built, respectively, around his ex-girlfriends Vanity and Apollonia in the early ’80s—as a vehicle for exploring this side of himself. Certainly “Sugar Walls,” the tune he gave to Sheena Easton in 1984, felt like a throwback to Vanity 6's sex-saturated 1982 hit “Nasty Girl,” and Easton delivered it with a heavy-handedness befitting its single-entendre. But if “Sugar Walls” treads familiar territory, “Manic Monday”—written for the scrapped second Apollonia 6 album—was a genuine departure into psychedelic pop. In the Bangles' hands, “Manic Monday” carried a bittersweet sparkle suiting the Paisley Underground scene, which inspired the Revolution's Around the World in a Day.
Prince adopted the cloak of “Christopher” for the credits of “Manic Monday,” but elsewhere he took greater efforts to disguise his identity. Operating under the ridiculous alias “Joey Coco,” Prince took a stab at country songwriting, penning tunes for Kenny Rogers and Deborah Allen. “You're My Love,” the tune he gave Rogers, isn't a bad ballad but Kenny's producer stripped away all elements of the demo until it became canned country commercialism—one of the few times Prince actually seems anonymous. Much better was Deborah Allen's 1987 single “Telepathy,” a weird little number that shoehorns Prince's paranoid eccentricities into the confines of a country tune; naturally, it flopped.
Prince wasn't interested in simply offering songs for artists with charting potential, either. He sent the Violent Femmes a song called “Wonderful Ass,” somehow believing that the jittery Wisconsinites could turn the funk number into a sequel to “Blister in the Sun.” Not long after this, Prince retreated from these pseudo-incognito experiments, burying himself in his own projects but still cherry-picking choice collaborations. He co-wrote and played on “Love Song,” a slinky pop-funk workout on Madonna's Like A Prayer. He turned Kate Bush's 1993 track “Why Should I Love You” inside out by adding instrumentation when all he was asked for was harmony vocals. By the early ’90s, his songwriting for others slowed to a trickle: album cuts for Paula Abdul, Celine Dion, and Joe Cocker, “The Sex of It” for Kid Creole & the Coconuts, and a minor masterpiece in Martika’s moody “Love…Thy Will be Done.”
Prince, The Covers Muse
Prince's 1984 ascension to superstardom coincided with a wave of cover versions of his songs. These started to arrive in the early '80s, when R&B singer Stephanie Mills took on “How Come You Don't Call Me Anymore” and “When You Were Mine” inspired four different covers versions: Cyndi Lauper, Mitch Ryder, Bette Bright & the Illuminations, and Hi-Fi, a short-lived group from Fairport Convention singer Iain Matthews. But it was Chaka Khan who actually had a hit when she vamped up “I Feel For You” in 1984, riding the wave of Prince mania at the ideal time and sounding more Minneapolis than the version he cut back in 1979.
After this initial blast of covers, the next major wave of interpretations arrived in 1988, when the Art of Noise drafted Welsh soulman Tom Jones to blast out “Kiss.” Jones may or may not have been in on the joke of turning “Kiss” into electro-funk worthy of Max Headroom, but the rendition proved how resilient the song was, and the dawn of the ’90s brought similarly inventive covers. Hindu Love Gods—i.e. Warren Zevon fronting a Michael Stipe-less R.E.M.—turned “Raspberry Beret” into a heavy garage rocker in 1990, the same year the Hollies tackled “Purple Rain” live and Sinéad O'Connoruncovered the Family's “Nothing Compares 2 U.”
Tucked away on a 1985 album with little momentum, the Family's original version of “Nothing Compares 2 U” was scarcely heard. In O'Connor'shands, the dirge-like ballad felt apocalyptic: a towering monument of grief so powerfully interpreted, it seemed like the song was written for her. O'Connor's rendition of “Nothing Compares 2 U” opened the doors for radical revisions of Prince that never really arrived. By the mid-’90s, his songbook was solidified across the music world: “Purple Rain,” “Kiss,” and “When Doves Cry” were the standards, with the latter straightened out by Ginuwine in a hit 1996 version. “Kiss” would be covered often—the best version arguably by Ween, who often played it live at the dawn of the 21st century—but “Purple Rain” became shorthand for a Prince tribute, particularly following his death. There’s perhaps no better version (besides the original, of course) than Dwight Yoakam's 2016 bluegrass rendition.
Jazz artists were drawn to Prince, too: Herbie Hancock reworked “Thieves in the Temple” and jazz saxophonist Joshua Redman found “How Come You Don't Call Me Anymore,” but the better-known cover was by Alicia Keys, who based her version on Stephanie Mills’ cover.
Prince, The Patron
At the start of his career, Prince supported friends, idols, and emerging artists, giving them a platform to develop their voice—or sometimes steering them towards his own voice. This is precisely what Prince did with the Time, who stood alongside him as the architects of the Minneapolis Sound in the early '80s. Every musician in the group was either a peer or an old friend of Prince's from Minneapolis' thriving soul scene of the late '70s, but the Morris Day-led Time didn't exist until Prince selected members from Enterprise and Flyte Time to create a funk band designed to act as a funhouse mirror to his own freak act. The Time was essential to Prince's Twin Cities funk fantasy, but slippery synths and slamming drum machines didn't become central to the sound until Prince dreamed it up on 1980’s Dirty Mind.
Prince's next major collaborator was Sheila E., the prodigious percussionist with a sly savoir faire that served her well on 1984's The Glamourous Life. Prince wrote and recorded the title song, a piece of pop-funk so dazzlingly dense it suggested psychedelia, which Prince himself soon embraced. Sheila E. would stay in his inner circle for a while: Prince wrote and produced her 1985 single “A Love Bizarre,” and she'd play in the post-Revolution Sign O The Times band.
Around this point, Prince began inventing side projects to pursue sounds that wouldn't quite fit with the Revolution. Prince pieced the Family together with members of the Time and his own backing band, the Revolution. With a slight fusion bent underneath their soul clothes, the Family's lone album—released on Prince's new imprint Paisley Park—disappeared without much fanfare. Madhouse, the band where Prince indulged his jazz-fusion fantasies, also earned little attention, though it did foreshadow Prince’s jazzier side projects in the '90s and beyond.
Before he got there, he made a 1987 album with Jill Jones, a cousin of Teena Marie who had sung backing vocals on various projects since 1999, but his larger journey was crossing Graffiti Bridge, a 1990 movie designed as a pseudo-sequel to Purple Rain. He revived the Time, brought in heroes George Clinton and Mavis Staples, discovered Tevin Campbell, and gave them all songs to sing. It'd be the last time he'd have a direct hand in a big hit for another artist, making it to No. 12 on the Hot 100 chart with Campbell’s “Round and Round,” the kind of song that felt tossed off despite its immaculate craft. Prince also shepherded two albums for Mavis Staples—1989's Time Waits for No Oneand 1993's The Voice—before turning his attention to Carmen Electra, an ingenue he hoped to fashion into a Vanity for the ’90s. Electra's 1993album felt staid—"Go Go Dancer,” a reworking of “Nasty Girl,” seemed out of step with the era—and it eventually became subsumed in the long-running battle Prince had with his label, Warner Bros.
Once he emerged from that war in 1996, Prince continued to develop emerging artists, every one of them female. As it turns out, Carmen Electra was the last time he attempted to revive the salacious funk-pop sound of Vanity 6. Instead he adhered to the elastic, jazzy funk-soul that became the signature of the New Power Generation, and he'd find singers that suited this sensibility. With Mayte Garcia, the dancer he was married to from 1996 to 2000, Prince made an album that never saw a wide release in America—which is better than the recordings he made with Támar Davis, whose intended 2006 debut Milk & Honey never came out. Instead, Prince turned his attention to Bria Valente, a perfectly pleasant model and dancer, whose debut Elixer came out as part of an overstuffed 2009 triple album from the Purple One. Elixer accentuated the occasional anonymity of latter-day Prince: it was slick and polished, but without a powerful presence at the center, it was forgettable.
He paired with a personality as big as his own when he appeared on Janelle Monáe's 2013 album The Electric Lady, in a cameo that felt like a passing of the torch. Mostly, though, Prince acted as an advocate for gifted musicians who hadn’t quite found their industry footing. Chief among these was 3rdEyeGirl, the power trio of guitarist Donna Grantis, bassist Ida Kristine Nielsen, and drummer Hannah Welton, who recorded Plectrumelectrum with the singer in 2014 and supported him on most of his final tours. He also gave Judith Hill, a singer showcased in 20 Feet From Stardom,a boost in 2015, producing her album Back in Time at Paisley Park.
In a sense, this last round of protegees were the polar opposite of the ones at the beginning of his career. Back then, Prince was all about amplifying his greatness, selecting projects that turned him into the star even when he wasn't taking center stage. At the close of his career, he took pains to promote musicians of uncommon skill who no longer had a comfortable space in the modern record business—the kind of artists who always had inspired him to create his own musical universe.