Prince: The Genius Who Played Every Note Himself

There are great singers, great songwriters, great guitarists, great showmen and great producers. Every so often, all of those arrive inside one person. Prince was that person. He could write a song, sing every part, play every instrument on the record, produce it, and then perform it live with a band so tight it sounded like one organism — and he did it for forty years, at a level of musicianship that left even his heroes shaking their heads. He was small, shy and almost unbearably gifted, and he spent his life proving that one human being could be an entire genre.

A Minneapolis Kid Who Could Play Anything

Prince Rogers Nelson was born on 7 June 1958 in Minneapolis, named after his father's jazz group, the Prince Rogers Trio. He grew up in a musical, fractured household, taught himself piano, guitar and drums as a boy, and by his late teens had a contract that let him produce his own records — almost unheard of for a new artist. The first album credit said it all: "produced, arranged, composed and performed by Prince." He played every instrument on it himself. He was nineteen.

1999 and the Purple Explosion

Through the early eighties he fused funk, rock, new wave, pop and R&B into something that became known as the Minneapolis sound — sleek, sexual, synth-driven and impossible to file. 1999 made him a star. Then Purple Rain made him a phenomenon.

Purple Rain: The Peak

The 1984 album, film and tour of Purple Rain turned Prince into one of the biggest artists on Earth. When Doves Cry, Let's Go Crazy and the towering title ballad showed a writer who could be playful, filthy, spiritual and heartbroken — often in the same song. He won an Academy Award for the score. For a stretch in the mid-eighties he, Michael Jackson and Madonna effectively ran popular music, and Prince was the one other musicians studied most closely.

The Shape-Shifter and the Symbol

Restless and prolific to the point of myth — he reportedly left hundreds of unreleased songs in a vault — Prince refused to stand still. In 1993, locked in a bitter dispute with his record label over ownership of his master recordings, he changed his name to an unpronounceable "Love Symbol" and appeared with the word SLAVE written on his cheek. It looked like eccentricity; it was actually one of the first high-profile fights for an artist's right to own their own work — a battle the whole industry is still having.

The Greatest Living Guitarist

People who only knew the hits sometimes forgot that Prince was, quietly, one of the greatest guitarists who ever lived. The proof is on film: his solo on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" at the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and above all his 2007 Super Bowl halftime show, where he played Purple Rain in an actual downpour — asked beforehand whether the rain was a problem, he is said to have replied, "Can you make it rain harder?" It remains the greatest halftime performance ever staged.

The Hidden Generosity

For someone so protective of his own image, Prince gave an extraordinary amount away. He wrote Nothing Compares 2 U, later a worldwide hit for Sinéad O'Connor; he wrote Manic Monday for The Bangles; he built the careers of Sheila E., The Time and others. Songs poured out of him faster than he could ever release them.

Paisley Park and the End

He retreated to Paisley Park, his studio compound in Minnesota, becoming ever more private — a vegetarian, a Jehovah's Witness, a man who controlled every detail of his art. On 21 April 2016 he was found dead there of an accidental overdose of fentanyl, taken for chronic hip pain. He was fifty-seven. It was, devastatingly, the same year the world lost David Bowie — two of music's great shape-shifters gone within months of each other.

Prince at Skeleton House

That shared loss is the heart of his place on Dead Reckoning. It is Prince who sings for Bowie — two androgynous, genre-melting, fiercely independent geniuses who each built their own universe and guarded it completely, saluting one another across the darkness of 2016. The pairing only deepens read alongside our David Bowie tribute; together they are the twin pillars of the album's theme. There's more in the Dead Reckoning concept and the album announcement.

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Prince played every note himself because no one else could play them the way he heard them. Nine years on, no one still can.