Purple Rain
How do you write a song that’s still unfolding forty years later?
Prince recorded “Purple Rain” live at a benefit show at First Avenue in Minneapolis on August 3, 1983. Most of what you hear on the record is that night. No studio polish, no do-overs. The applause at the end is real, from people who didn’t yet know they were witnessing the moment.
He was 25.
The song is eight minutes and forty-one seconds long, which is absurd for a pop single, and half of that is the ending. The first half gives you the song. The second half gives you what the song means. Prince stops singing around the four-minute mark, and what follows is one of the greatest guitar solos ever recorded—not virtuosic in the showoff sense, just devastating, each note bending further into grief than the last, like he’s trying to bend the guitar into saying what the words couldn’t.
The lyrics are barely there. “I never meant to cause you any sorrow / I never meant to cause you any pain.” Apologies. Regret. A vague memory of something that went wrong between two people. He doesn’t tell you what it was. He trusts you to bring your own.
That’s the trick of this song. It’s a blank check. You write the amount.
I heard “Purple Rain” for the first time when I was too young to understand what purple rain even was. I thought it was a weather event. Later I learned Prince said it was about the apocalypse—purple sky at the end of the world, holding the person you love while everything ends. That reading is enormous and I believe it. I also don’t think it matters.
Because when the solo hits, you don’t need a reading. You need a room to yourself.
Prince died on April 21, 2016. For days afterward, cities lit their bridges and buildings purple. Niagara Falls. The Superdome. The Eiffel Tower. A color was no longer a color. A song had become a mourning ritual for a man most of the mourners had never met.
You can’t write that. You can only live long enough to earn it.
Eight minutes and forty-one seconds.
The longest three minutes of anyone’s life, and the shortest eight.
