Released in 1984 as the closing track on the movie soundtrack album of the same name, Purple Rain is one of Prince’s signature songs. However, although it has the great man’s magic sprinkled all over it - not least in the form of an epic guitar solo - Prince didn’t write and record it in isolation.
Purple Rain has just been given a new lease of chart life thanks to its use in the finale of Netflix series Stranger Things, which was released at the turn of the new year. Without giving anything away, we can tell you that, along with When Doves Cry, another track on the Purple Rain soundtrack, it plays a crucial role in the show’s denouement, and the song has now stirred the emotions of a whole new generation of listeners.
It could have sounded very different, though, without the involvement of Prince’s band at the time, The Revolution.
The story goes that Prince originally sent an instrumental of what would become Purple Rain to Stevie Nicks, wondering if she might be able to write some lyrics and collaborate on it. However, with a certain amount of regret, Nicks turned him down.
"It was so overwhelming, that 10-minute track … I listened to it and I just got scared," she told The Guardian in 2011. "I called him back and said, 'I can't do it. I wish I could. It's too much for me.' I'm so glad that I didn't, because he wrote it, and it became Purple Rain."
Prince then brought the bones of the song to The Revolution. “He just said, ‘I have this song idea, and it goes a little something like this,’” recalled guitarist Wendy Melvoin in an interview with Vertex Effects.
Describing what he played them, she says, “It’s like this little country tune, played with triads on the piano. He had the melody and he had words, and he said ‘What are you all going to come with? What can you do? What’s your thing on this?’”
Melvoin’s ‘thing’, it turned out, would be crucially important, as she took those simple triads and extended them.
“I thought to myself, ‘how do I make those chords bloom with this very simple melody?’” she remembers. “And I stretched the chords out.”
What Melvoin means is that she took those triads that Prince had played - Bb, Gm, F and Eb - and added colour, playing the progression as Bbsus2, Gm11, Fadd9 and Ebadd9. “I call them bluer notes,” she says of her changes. “I gave it more blue notes.”
Speaking to The Guardian, Lisa Coleman - Melvoin’s close musical collaborator and keyboard player with The Revolution - remembered that Prince’s ears pricked up when he heard what Wendy was doing.
“He was excited to hear it voiced differently,” she said. “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.”
Fellow Revolution keyboard player Matt Fink also remembers it being a team effort. Speaking to John McKie for his 2025 book Prince: A Sign o’ the Times, he said: “When I heard Purple Rain” I thought ‘He’s got it’. What was great about Purple Rain is that he had the chord progression, he had the lyrics, [but] they weren’t finished. He took the song into rehearsal and we’re jamming it and we’re running through the chord progression and I’m playing the high singing part with the right hand and next thing you know he’s singing along to it. That’s part of the song.’”
Purple Rain was performed for the first time on 3 August 1983 at the First Avenue nightclub in Minneapolis, with Wendy’s guitar intro stretched out for several minutes. It was the recording of this performance that formed the basis of the finished version that you hear on the album and see in the semi-autobiographical movie.
And, although it isn’t true that Purple Rain is “a song the girls in the band wrote, Lisa and Wendy” - the line Prince’s character The Kid delivers just before it’s performed - it’s also fair to say that both they and the rest of The Revolution were heavily involved in its creation.
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