FEATURE:
Groovelines
Prince – When Doves Cry
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THERE are a couple…
PHOTO CREDIT: Lynn Goldsmith
of reasons why I am including this particular song in Groovelines. We lost the genius Prince on 21st April, 2016. It was a tragic day where one of the world’s greatest and most influential artists left us. I was keen to remember him as we look to the eighth anniversary of his death. I am focusing on When Doves Cry, as it turns forty on 16th May. One of Prince’s most iconic and legendary tracks, it is from the Purple Rain album. That turns forty on 25th June. I wonder whether there will be a fortieth anniversary release of that album. Anyone who does not own the album should definitely buy it. There has not been an announcement as to whether there will be a new reissue or anything special. I hope that there is. The Purple Rain film was released in the U.K. on 27th July. Though not as acclaimed as other films starring musicians, it is definitely an important moment in Prince’s career. Maybe I will cover it closer to the fortieth anniversary. I want to stick for the moment with When Doves Cry. I am going to get to some reviews and acclaim for one of the greatest songs of the 1980s. I am going to start out with a feature from American Songwriter. They looked behind the meaning of one of Prince’s finest achievements. An absolutely towering and timeless song that is still played a lot to this day:
“When Prince died in 2016, he left a massive gap in the lives of his die-hard fans and casual listeners alike. From the omnipresent “Purple Rain” to the party anthem of the century “1999,” his songs were mainstays in pop culture. Though his music quickly made him an icon, the singer liked to keep people guessing, keeping tight-lipped on the deeper meaning behind his songs.
Upon hearing about his passing, social media erupted into a frenzy of tributes to the singer, including one poignant message from Whoopi Goldberg that read, “This is what it sounds like when doves cry.” Though the song is an obvious reference to his 1984 hit, “When Doves Cry,” it begged the question: exactly what did Prince mean when he wrote about crying doves?
Six years and many theories later, we’ve arrived at a conclusion that seems fitting. Let’s dive into it below.
Origins
“When Doves Cry” was written for Prince’s semi-autobiographical film, Purple Rain. In the film, the song plays under a montage after his character loses his girl (Apollonia) to his rival. The montage includes scenes of Prince’s tumultuous relationship with his father and intimate moments with Apollonia.
Just how much of the film is based on real-life remains a mystery, as Prince rarely gave interviews and didn’t talk much about his personal life. Either way, it seemed to resonate with much of the public as it became the No. 1 song of 1984 in the U.S.
“When Doves Cry” topped the charts for five weeks over the summer and kept Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing In The Dark” at a standstill at No. 2. Though Springsteen, a self-professed Prince fan, didn’t mind being kept at bay by the icon, saying, “Whenever I would catch one of his shows, I would always leave humbled.”
Meaning Behind the Lyrics
Mirroring the plot of the movie, the song touches on a crumbling love affair and Prince’s fear of becoming too much like his parents. The crying doves in question seem to point to the two lovers mourning the loss of their relationship.
At the beginning of the song, Prince asks Apollonia to picture a time when the two of them were happy together before moving on to a more melancholy scenario when their relationship began to falter.
Dig if you will the picture
Of you and I engaged in a kiss
The sweat of your body covers me
Can you my darling
Can you picture this?
Dream, if you can, a courtyard
An ocean of violets in bloom
Animals strike curious poses
They feel the heat
The heat between me and you
Prince starts to get introspective in the chorus, begging the all-too-familiar question “are we becoming my parents?” He then rolls around to the titular “crying doves” line, asking why the pair continue to scream at each other.
Though the couple seems to be heavily at odds with one another, given that doves are a universal symbol of peace it seems he is actually taking an optimist’s view, hoping the two can work out their differences.
Maybe I’m just too demanding
Maybe I’m just like my father, too bold
Maybe you’re just like my mother
She’s never satisfied
Why do we scream at each other?
This is what it sounds like
When doves cry
Production
Prince played all of the instruments on the track—a lead guitar, piano, synthesizers, and a Linn LM-1 drum machine.
A bass part is notably absent from the song, though he told Bass Player magazine, he hated to see it go. “Sometimes your brain kind of splits in two—your ego tells you one thing, and the rest of you says something else. You have to go with what you know is right.”
His trusty LM-1 drum machine (now on display at his estate—Paisley Park) is featured heavily in the song. To make the unique percussion sound, Prince used a recording of a cross-stick snare drum, tuned it down an octave to give it more of a knocking sound, and ran it through a guitar processor. In addition to his prowess on guitar, Prince is acknowledged as one of the greatest drum machine programmers of the era.
Peggy McCreary, Prince’s engineer on the song, told Billboard about the day it was recorded and the singer’s confidence that it would become a hit. “[Prince] took the bass out and he said, ‘There’s nobody that’s going to have the guts to do this.’ And he was smiling from ear to ear. He felt this was the best and he knew he had a hit song… so he decided to do something really daring. That’s what Prince was all about.”
She continued, “He would run through [a song] with just a piano and a vocal. And sometimes he’d do the drums and then the bass… The room was always set up and you had to be ready to do whatever he felt like doing. It was real spontaneous. You had to be there with him, which was the hard part and the exciting part. But when you’re exhausted, it’s hard to be excited. It was the longest I ever worked with anybody in my life. I worked around the clock, 24 hours. He said sometimes the only reason he went home was so I could sleep”.
Let’s move on to NME. In a feature that spotlighted the greatest Pop songs in history, they placed Prince’s When Doves Cry at number two. A great honour for a song that seems to pack as big an emotional punch now as it did upon its release. Produced by Prince, it has this ageless equality. Still fresh and exciting to this day:
“Born out of his unceasing drive to top what had come before and an almost unceasing ability to create, ‘When Doves Cry’ is a standout track – for him, for the 80s and for all time.
The film Purple Rain told the tale of Prince Rogers Nelson’s rags to riches ascent. It was a glossy Hollywood fantasy of course, but the nugget of truth came from the singer’s real life story. And it was his ruptured childhood – his father leaving the family home when he was a youngster- which was key to unlocking the inner character of Prince’s Kid character.
In the film, his relationship with Apollonia lies in contrast to his parents’ combative and destructive one. Here, ‘When Doves Cry’’s lines resonate deeply.
Maybe I’m just too demanding/Maybe I’m just like my father, too bold/
Maybe I’m just like my mother, she’s never satisfied/
When do we scream at each other?/This is what it sounds like when the doves cry
It was the yin to ‘Purple Rain’ (the song’s) yang. Complicatedly passionate and showing the inner workings of Prince’s character in a much more in-depth way than the clunky dialogue ever could.
But the track almost never made the final cut. Both the film and the album were completed, and ‘…Doves’ was a last minute addition.
There were many theories behind what Prince proposed for the album (including a double soundtrack album with songs by The Time, Apollonia 6 and a version that had the tracks ‘Father’s Song’ and ‘Wednesday’ instead of either ‘Take Me With U’ or ‘When Doves Cry’).
But the tracklist kept on changing because Prince was so prolific and kept on writing more and more songs.
In the instance of this track he wasn’t aided by his Revolution bandmates and hit the studio on his own to create a song which, on director’s orders, reflected the scene of parental tumult. Overnight Prince created two songs, one of which was ‘…Doves’.
Opinion is divided over who inspired the track. According to at least one of his biographers it was inspired by his relationship with Vanity 6/Apollonia 6 member Susan Moonsie.
However, the timeline fits better with Vanity, who played a significant role in Prince’s life before leaving his life during the production on the film due to disputes about money.
Aside from the lyrical raw emotion on display, one of the standout features of the song is its lack of bass parts. In an extremely rare interview, Prince told Bass Player magazine:
When Doves Cry’ is most distinctive because of its lack of a bass line. The song had one but it was pulled at the last minute. They were almost done editing the movie (and) ‘When Doves Cry’ was the last song to be mixed, and it just wasn’t sounding right.
Prince was listening to the mixes of the track when one of his singers, Jill Jones, came in. “It was just sounding too conventional, like every other song with drums and bass and keyboards. So I said, ‘If I could have it my way it would sound like this,’ and I pulled the bass out of the mix. She said, ‘Why don’t you have it your way?'”
“His way” meant bass free, which was an unconventional idea to say the least. But he stuck with his instincts:
Sometimes your brain kind of splits in two. Your ego tells you one thing, and the rest of you says something else. You have to go with what you know is right.
And it was so right. The track hit the top of the US Billboard charts, selling two million and going platinum. In the UK it hit the relatively humble placing of Number 10, but it and the snowball effect of Purple Rain meant that it put him firmly on the international map.
The influence of the song has lived on, long after it left the charts. It has been covered by Greg Dulli’s Twilight Singers, Razorlight, Patti Smith and Robyn.
The Swede summed up the song’s enduring influence, when she told Pitchfork: “Prince is king to me. As this half-naked, short black guy who looked like a girl in the 70s and 80s, he was talking about women in a way that was very unusual because he didn’t objectify them. He always puts himself in a vulnerable situation. And the songs have complex views of sexuality and male and female identities, which is very rare.”
Robyn had it right; a dazzling masterstroke from a musical enigma, ‘When Doves Cry’ is a waterfall of pure pop joy”.
There are a couple of other things I want to include regarding Prince’s When Doves Cry. Stereogum, for their The Number Ones feature, explored the first single released from 1984’s Purple Rain. A number one single in the U.S. and number four in the U.K., this gem of a song was laid down at Sunset Sound, Los Angeles. I would urge people who are familiar with When Doves Cry to also check out its U.S. B-side, 17 Days:
“Purple Rain was a big movie, but it was a bigger album. The Purple Rain soundtrack is a missile aimed right at the heart of pop music. It’s all of Prince’s predilections and perversions distilled into nine songs, offered up for mass adulation. Mass adulation is what it got. The Purple Rain soundtrack sold 13 million copies in the US alone. For a little while in the summer of 1984, Prince had the #1 single, album, and film in the United States, all at the same time. Nobody had ever done that before.
The song in question was “When Doves Cry,” which Billboard would later name the #1 single of 1984. It’s the last song that Prince wrote for Purple Rain. First-time director Albert Magnoli wanted something to soundtrack a montage. In the movie, Prince’s character had just lost his girl to Morris Day, so something had to play on the soundtrack while Prince rode around on his motorcycle, looking upset and flashing back on happier times. “When Doves Cry” was that something.
“When Doves Cry” is entirely a Prince creation. After getting his assignment from Magnoli, Prince turned around “When Doves Cry” in two days. (He wrote the song in a night, then spent one day recording and one day doing overdubs.) Prince plays every instrument on the song — the synths, the guitars, the Linn drum machine, all the vocals. He’d originally put a bassline on the song, too, but he took it out. He figured that the empty space on the song, the striking spareness of the finished work, would leave more of an impression than the bassline he’d come up with. He was right.
In some ways, “When Doves Cry” is a straight-up soundtrack work — a summary of the plot and the character’s feelings at the point in the movie where it plays. In other ways, “When Doves Cry” is opaque poetry, a hallucinatory swirl of panting come-ons and animal imagery. That means it’s classic Prince — half functional, half mysterious, able to do its work while still leaving your mind spinning.
Lyrically, “When Doves Cry” is a seduction and a breakup song at the same time. In the opening lines, Prince establishes the sexual chemistry between himself and the song’s target. It’s a force so great that even animals can sense it. But now that bond has been broken, and Prince’s narrator is struggling to understand how that could’ve happened. At first, he sounds accusatory: “How can you just leave me stranded alone in a world that’s so cold?” Then he’s off on some personal internal journey, thinking about the example of his own dysfunctional parents. (Prince is the only person on this planet who could make the phrase “maybe you’re just like my mother” sound sexy.)
“When Doves Cry” has no bridge and no real resolution. Instead, it turns into a wild vamp. Early on, it’s a heavy-breathing groove that belongs to no clear genre. The intro is a Van Halen-style shredding display. The drum machine echoes and booms like Phil Collins, but it’s off-kilter, an irregular heartbeat. Prince’s voice is a discordant drone, and then it’s a heavy purr. As the song progresses, that voice turns into the yearning falsetto coo of a sexually frustrated baby gospel singer. Prince yelps and howls and keens, and then his guitars and keyboards do the same thing. A pyrotechnic guitar-heroics display goes right into a frilly neoclassical keyboard solo. In the album version, this goes on for six minutes. That version is better, but even the shortened single edit gets its point across — especially if you see it with the video.
The video for “When Doves Cry,” which Prince directed himself, is perfect in its overwhelming sense of need. Very few people in history have ever made a camera quite so horny. In the delirious opening shot, that camera glides through wrought-iron doors, over an enormous bathroom door with flowers scattered over it, right up to the steaming bathtub where Prince reclines, all the while ignoring the actual doves that flap through the room. The camera pulls right up to Prince, holding his gaze as he turns and, smoldering, rises up from the tub to dramatically beckon. (You can almost sense the camera willing itself to keep eye contact, resisting the urge to look down.)
Later on, Prince crawls naked across that bathroom floor and then, off camera, gets dressed up in frilly and glittery golden-dandy gear so that he can head to band practice. All the while, we see clips from the movie. Usually, the movie clips in soundtrack tie-in videos are forced and clumsy. But all of Purple Rain looks like a music video, and all of it fits the song.
For most of the pop stars throughout history, a song like “When Doves Cry” — and a video scene as instantly memorable as that opening shot — would run the risk of overshadowing an entire career. For Prince, of course, that did not happen. Prince was only getting started. We will see him in this column many more times.
GRADE: 10/10”.
I am going to round up Wikipedia’s article about When Doves Cry. Before that, I would also point people in the direction of this feature regarding When Doves Cry. The legacy and reaction to this near-perfect song. One of the highlights from the flawless Purple Rain, I hope that people mark forty years of this classic song on 16th May. It is definitely one of my favourite Prince songs. When thinking about Prince and his best moments and songs, I often will put When Doves Cry near the top of the list:
“In its contemporary review of the song, Cash Box said that "featuring ethereal lyrics, a pounding backbeat and a sometimes ominous musical atmosphere, this single again proves Prince to be one of the most provocative and sophisticated artists in the business. ."
"When Doves Cry" was No. 1 in the US for five weeks, from July 7, 1984, to August 4, 1984, keeping Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark" from reaching the top spot. Because of tabulation differences, the song was announced as the year's No. 2 single on the American Top 40 year-end countdown (with "Say Say Say" at No. 1). The song was voted as the best single of the year in The Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics' poll. Billboard ranked it as the No. 1 year-end single of 1984. In 2016, after Prince's death, "When Doves Cry" re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 20, peaking at No. 8. It also ranked No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Black Singles chart for eight weeks (from June 30, to August 18, 1984), preventing Tina Turner's "What's Love Got to Do With It" from reaching the top spot for five of those weeks.
The B-side was the cult fan favorite "17 Days", which was originally intended for Apollonia 6's self-titled album. A 12-inch single issued in the UK included "17 Days" and two tracks from Prince's previous album, 1999: its title track and "D.M.S.R.". The entire title of "17 Days (the rain will come down, then U will have 2 choose, if U believe, look 2 the dawn and U shall never lose)" is now the longest-titled flip side of a Hot 100 No. 1, with 85 letters and/or numbers.
"When Doves Cry" became one of Prince's signature songs. Spin magazine ranked "When Doves" the No. 6 song of all time.[citation needed] In 2021, Rolling Stone ranked "When Doves Cry" No. 37 on its list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". In 2006, VH1's "The 100 Greatest Songs of the '80s" ranked the song at No. 5. On October 13, 2008, the song was voted No. 2 on Australian VH1's Top 10 Number One Pop Songs countdown. The "80 of the 80s" podcast ranks it as the No. 59 song of the decade. In 2016, Paste ranked the song number three on their list of the 50 greatest Prince songs, and in 2022, American Songwriter ranked the song number two on their list of the 10 greatest Prince songs.
"When Doves Cry" was sampled for use in MC Hammer's 1990 hit song, "Pray", one of the few samples of his songs legally sanctioned by Prince”.
On 25th June, Purple Rain turns forty. There is so much to uncover and explore when it comes to this album. On 21st April, it will be eight years since the loss of Prince. It will be a sad day, though it is also one where we remember him and all he gave to the music world. And culture and the wider world. When thinking about Prince’s greatest ten tracks, everyone surely puts When Doves Cry in there. It is a masterpiece! It has been a pleasure learning more about it…
FOR this Groovelines.