PIONEERS
PRINCE
The Purple One is funk and pop royalty – a musical polymath who could play every instrument he needed and was entirely self‐produced
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Iremember kind of shutting down on that “Isong because it just seemed like a ‘wank,” Prince’s engineer Peggy ‘Mac’ McCreary told Sunset Sound Recorders. “Just like, ‘Oh my god, here we go’ – the raging guitar and the raging synths and everything. It seemed so overproduced to me.”
McCreary is discussing When Doves Cry, now celebrated as one of Prince’s greatest singles, but it might not have ended up that way. She was in the studio when it was being recorded, but admits that, as the number of parts grew and the arrangement became fuller, she “kind of shut down”.
Cut to the last night of mixing, though, and Prince had a change of heart.
“As the night went on, things started coming out… he kind of ‘unproduced it’, if you can possibly do that. And then the last thing he did was he punched that bass out and he smiled at me and he said ‘ain’t nobody gonna believe I’d do this’. And he did.”