Prince: The Songwriter Who Pulled the Bass Out of His Own Hit

Prince finished mixing "When Doves Cry" the night before Purple Rain's deadline and decided it still sounded like every other song on the radio: drums, bass, keyboards, all present and accounted for and, to him, boring. So he reached over and pulled the bass guitar out of the mix entirely, leaving one of the biggest pop hits of 1984 with no bassline at all. His engineer's reaction was disbelief. Prince's own comment to her, smiling, was, "Ain't nobody gonna believe I'd do this."

Nobody else on the charts that year was confident enough to remove the one element every hit song was supposed to have. That's close to the whole story of Prince as a songwriter: knowing exactly what the rules were, and treating them as optional.

A one-man band before he had a band

Prince Rogers Nelson was born in Minneapolis in 1958 and was writing and recording alone almost from the start of his career. His 1978 debut, For You, credited him as writer, producer, arranger, and performer of every instrument on the record, a claim that sounded like publicity spin and turned out to be close to literal. He played guitar, bass, keyboards, and drums well enough, on his own, to build entire albums without a band in the room, which meant the sound of a Prince record was never filtered through anyone else's interpretation before it reached tape.

Writing hits and then handing them to somebody else

Unusually for an artist this famous, some of Prince's best-known songs became famous in other people's voices. He wrote "Nothing Compares 2 U" in 1984, inspired partly by his housekeeper having to leave suddenly to be with her family, and gave it first to his side project the Family, who put out a version nobody much noticed. Six years later, Sinéad O'Connor recorded it, and her version turned into one of the defining ballads of the era, a song so thoroughly hers in the public imagination that plenty of people who love it have no idea Prince wrote every word. He did the same with "Manic Monday," handing it to the Bangles under the pseudonym "Christopher," and "I Feel for You," which became a hit for Chaka Khan. Prince famously discouraged other artists from covering his own recorded songs, reportedly worried a competing version would get credited as the original. Giving a song away before he'd ever released his own version sidestepped that problem entirely.

If you've got a song sitting unused because it doesn't fit your own sound, Prince's career is a case for handing it to whoever it does fit, rather than letting it sit in a drawer because your name isn't the one that's supposed to be on it.

Cutting the obvious thing out of the biggest song he had

"When Doves Cry" was written and recorded fast, in a single session at Sunset Sound in March 1984, after Purple Rain's director asked for something to fit a specific scene. Prince built the entire track alone, and the choice to strip the bass out at the very end wasn't a technical accident, it was a deliberate edit against his own finished arrangement, because the fuller version sounded too much like everything else already on the radio. His mix engineer, Susan Rogers, later put it simply: "Real genius knows when to show it off and when to just be simple." The song went to number one anyway, missing the one ingredient every other hit that year was built on.

A name he made unpronounceable on purpose

In the early 1990s, Prince went to war with his own record label, Warner Bros., over ownership of his master recordings and control over how much music he could release. He started appearing in public with the word "SLAVE" written on his cheek and, in 1993, changed his stage name to an unpronounceable symbol, becoming, in the press's shorthand, the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, rather than keep performing under a name a label he felt owned too much of him. The dispute didn't end until he left Warner Bros. outright in 1996. It's an extreme response, but it's also a direct extension of the same instinct behind pulling a bassline out of his own single: if the standard version of the deal didn't serve the work, he'd rather blow the deal up than accept it.

What's worth taking from his career

Prince was selected for the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2013 but wasn't formally inducted until 2024, eight years after his death, on the fortieth anniversary of Purple Rain, because the ceremony required an in-person appearance he was never able to make while he was alive. His catalog argues for two things most songwriters are told to avoid: giving away your best ideas when they belong somewhere else, and cutting the part of the song everyone would tell you to keep. Both take a level of trust in your own judgment that's hard to build and easy to lose.

If you've written something that doesn't belong in your own voice, or you're staring at an arrangement that's technically complete but not saying what you meant, go find your co-writer.

Sources: Guitar World: Why Prince Removed the Bassline from When Doves Cry, Wikipedia: When Doves Cry, Mental Floss: The Long, Contentious History of "Nothing Compares 2 U", Billboard: Prince Posthumously Inducted into Songwriters Hall of Fame, American Songwriter: Prince Changing His Name to a Symbol