Pre-Release
- AUG 28, 2026
- 10 songs
- Purple Rain (Deluxe Expanded Edition) [2015 Paisley Park Remaster] · 1984
Essential Albums
- Prince didn’t waste any time in the 1980s. Even before the arrival of his 1986 film Under the Cherry Moon—which turned out to be a royal flop—he was already at work on new music, resulting in the double album that would become perhaps his most obsessed-about record of his career: Sign O’ The Times. Released in 1987, the album marked the end of Prince’s astonishing run with The Revolution, his famed backing band (though the group is credited here on the live jam “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night,” and members Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman are featured elsewhere). The 16 tracks that make up the original edition of Sign O’ The Times find Prince incorporating the various sounds he’d perfected during The Revolution era—including the psychedelic trippiness of 1985’s Around the World in a Day—along with the funk and R&B innovations he’d made on his own before Purple Rain turned him into a pop-rock supernova. Sign O’ The Times is, in essence, his magnum opus—at once a summary and celebration of everything Prince was capable of during the peak of his powers. And with the hit title tune—the album’s first single, and opening track—the Purple One became the Political One, tackling everything from drug addiction to nuclear war. On an album packed with lushly produced tracks, “Sign O’ The Times” is notably spare—so much so, you really hear the message in the music. It’s one of Prince’s boldest statements, and a spiritual successor to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” And he was just getting started. Sign O’ The Times also features such crucial cuts as “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” which he sings from the perspective of his female alter ego, Camille; it’s a slinky, slightly sinister piece of freaky funk. “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man,” meanwhile, is a burst of guitar-pop glitter that wouldn’t have been out of place on Purple Rain. And the album closer “Adore” is one of Prince’s all-time best ballads, one that finds him at the top of his game (and his falsetto). In between it all comes “U Got the Look,” Sign O’ The Times’ biggest single, and a bit of pop-rock perfection, with an eroticized Sheena Easton providing heck-a-slammin’ support.
- In 1985, less than six months after the end of the Purple Rain Tour and the release of his Around the World in a Day album, Prince began shooting his second movie, Under the Cherry Moon. Released in 1986—and featuring Prince serving as both star and director—the black-and-white film lacked the performance-showcase feel of 1984’s Purple Rain (and didn’t come near Purple’s box office or critical heights). But Under the Cherry Moon still had strong musical elements, with Prince playing Christopher Tracy, a piano player and gigolo in 1930s France. And the album it inspired, Parade, is less of a traditional soundtrack and more of a companion album, in both style and structure. The album’s first four tracks—“Christopher’s Tracy Parade,” “New Position,” “I Wonder U,” and “Under the Cherry Moon”—play more like evocative scene-setters than traditionally constructed pop songs, with each clocking in at less than three minutes. The same goes for the piano instrumental “Venus de Milo” and “Do U Lie?”—the latter a bit of jazzy, French-kissed whimsy that perfectly captures the period and Riviera locale. But listeners don’t need to gaze upon the Cherry Moon in order to take part in the Parade: There’s the party jam “Girls & Boys,” which references “the steps of Versailles” and drops some French; the funk-rocker “Anotherloverholenyohead,” which serves as the album’s answer to “When Doves Cry”; and the gorgeous “Sometimes It Snows in April,” a Joni Mitchell-esque elegy for Christopher Tracy that would prove to be even more poignant when Prince himself died in April 2016. But the two biggest hits from Parade—which was released three months before Under the Cherry Moon hit theatres—have no connection to the film. First up is “Mountains,” one of two tracks that Prince wrote with guitarist Wendy Melvoin and keyboardist Lisa Coleman of The Revolution (Parade would prove to be the third and final album in which Prince shared billing with his best-known backing band). Then, of course, there’s the stuttering “Kiss,” the smash single that became one of Prince’s several career chart-toppers, and reconfirmed his mid-1980s commercial clout. With a sexy staccato beat that’s as impossible to resist as Prince’s flirty falsetto, “Kiss” proved once again why the singer simply ruled our world.
- 100 Best Albums You can’t very well tell a story about a troubled artist whose difficult personality belies his musical genius without, you know, actual musical genius. In this sense, the soundtrack to Purple Rain began life with the highest degree of difficulty imaginable; the impossibility that its success could ever have been in doubt is the project’s greatest legacy. With half its tracklist comprising Top 10 singles, the soundtrack is what truly turned Prince Rogers Nelson from just big enough to get to star in a summer blockbuster based on his life to one of the most instantly recognizable and distinctive pop artists ever. This is no slight to the movie, which has its charms (shout-out Morris Day), as much as it’s a testament to Prince’s all-engulfing star power and genre-fluid/gender-fluid virtuosity—nine perfect, definitive pop-soul-dance-rock-R&B-funk-whatever-else songs that couldn’t help but swallow everything in their orbit. The brilliance of Purple Rain is how it stirs seemingly contradictory moods—lust, devotion, intimacy, alienation—into a brew where nothing can be separated from anything else. Prince makes trauma sound erotic (“When Doves Cry”) and salvation sound reckless (“Let’s Go Crazy”). His sexual escapades are spiritual, disorienting, and almost psychedelic (“Darling Nikki,” “Computer Blue”), while his spiritual journeys are grounded in the mechanics of a guitar solo (“Purple Rain”). The album broke records and brains: Tipper Gore’s overreaction to the image of Darling Nikki masturbating to a magazine begat a congressional witch hunt debating the morality of pop music. Prince often drew comparisons to Jimi Hendrix for the way he mixed music that felt Black and white, sacred and profane. The reality is that he had no precedent then and no comparison now.
- Heading into his fifth studio album in five years, Prince was already flexing his prolific powers—not just as a solo artist, but also as the mastermind behind several other Minneapolis groups, all of which allowed the Purple One to express his seemingly boundless creativity: In 1982 alone, Prince oversaw the release of Vanity 6’s self-titled debut album, played extensively on The Time’s sophomore hit What Time Is It?, and released the double-disc classic 1999—a visionary statement that, in many ways, was truly 17 years ahead of its time. Building on the mix of foreboding funk and blunt social statements he employed on 1980’s Dirty Mind and 1981’s Controversy, the future-shocked 1999 took Prince’s music—and message—to the masses, becoming his first album to land in the Top 10 of the Billboard Album charts. And this party manifesto spawned the singer’s biggest hits to date, including the apocalyptic title tune, the euphoric “Little Red Corvette,” and the giddy, bopping, synth-driven “Delirious.” The success of those three tracks—in particular “Little Red Corvette” and “Delirious”—would eventually land Prince his Purple Rain movie deal. Yet they’re just the opening tracks on this lengthy classic, which finds Prince’s genius in full flight. 1999 features the anthemic mantra of “D.M.S.R.,” the conscious soul of “Free,” the jazzy funk of “Lady Cab Driver,” and the libidinous lift-off of “International Lover.” But the album also found Prince evolving beyond his one-man-band beginnings, setting the stage for the Revolution era to come on Purple Rain, with Prince getting musical input from such skillful musicians as Lisa Coleman, Wendy Melvoin, Bobby Z., and Dez Dickerson. By the end of the millennium, “1999” would be played nonstop—and while it may have seemed in that moment the world had finally caught up to Prince, in truth, he was always a few years ahead of us.
- By the early 1980s, Prince was embracing his own increasing power—and provocation—as both a genre-busting artist and as a gender-bending cultural force. Dirty Mind, the singer’s bawdy punk-funk collection, had become an instant classic upon its release in 1980. His follow-up, 1981’s Controversy, finds Prince acknowledging his new-found infamy: “I just can’t believe all the things people say/Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay?” he sings on the title track. And while listeners had plenty of questions about Prince, he delighted in giving them few direct answers—an approach that would pay off throughout the decade, as the mysterious singer ascended the pop throne. Controversy—which features regal assists from Lisa Coleman, Dr. Fink, and Bobby Z., who’d rule alongside Prince as members of The Revolution—finds the singer pushing back against the reactionary political conservatism of the Reagan regime, whom he addresses directly in the punk protest of “Ronnie, Talk to Russia.” Meanwhile, the funk-pop propulsion of Controversy’s “Sexuality” and the slow-jam seduction of “Do Me, Baby”—the latter of which features nearly eight minutes of erotic enlightenment—let you know that His Royal Badness still very much had a dirty mind. The carnal delight of tracks like “Private Joy” and the raunchy romp “Jack U Off” makes it clear that, in some ways, Controversy is an unapologetically sexual sequel to its predecessor. But the album also finds Prince taking on politics (again, “Ronnie, Talk to Russia”) and religion (“Annie Christian”). And Prince has never been straight-up funkier than on “Let’s Work.” Ultimately, Controversy provides a euphoric escape from the unknown in uncertain times, and sets up Prince for the pop-altering triumph of 1999.
- Released in 1980, Dirty Mind finds Prince kicking off the most prolific period of his career—a revolutionary run in which he’d not only steer the careers of such Minneapolis acts as The Time, The Family, and Vanity/Apollonia 6, but also become a chart-topping, globe-conquering pop icon. Dirty Mind was his third album in as many years, and it found the barely-twentysomething singer declaring his musical (and sexual) maturity: If the bare-chested, feather-haired young artist on the cover of 1979’s Prince looked like a playful innocent, the bikini-briefed “Head”-master staring back from the cover of Dirty Mind seemed prime to pull off listener’s panties. No doubt: After teasing us with the frisky funk-pop of “Soft and Wet”—from his 1978 debut album, For You—and then turning up the temptation with hot Prince bops like “Sexy Dancer,” the foreplay was officially over with Dirty Mind. Kicking off with the slinky synth seduction of the title track—co-written by keyboardist Dr. Fink—Prince made his carnal intentions clear from the jump: “It doesn’t matter where we are/It doesn’t matter who’s around/It doesn’t matter, I just wanna lay ya down.” Don’t misunderstand him. After the punk-spiked indecency of “When You Were Mine”—one of the very best Prince songs to never become a hit—and the drown-in-your-own-orgasm debauchery of “Do It All Night,” Dirty Mind reaches its climax with the back-to-back bangers of “Head” and “Sister.” While the former is an explicit, insatiable ode to the joy of oral sex that remains one of Prince’s funkiest tracks—which is sure saying something—the latter is a punk-rock rave-up that dares to tackle the taboo topic of incest. Elsewhere on Dirty Mind, “Gotta Broken Heart Again” puts a folky spin on the R&B romanticism of Prince, while “Uptown” and album closer “Partyup” foresee the political and utopian visions of soon-to-come classics like Controversy and 1999.
Live Albums
Compilations
About Prince
Imagine if someone had told Prince there was no way to mix New Wave and psychedelia with funk and R&B. Or that a man couldn’t explore androgyny without risking his sex appeal. Imagine, really, telling Prince there were any conventional boundaries he had to respect—and then imagine how much groundbreaking art would’ve been lost if he’d listened. That includes 1984’s Purple Rain, which ranked at No. 4 on Apple Music’s 100 Best Albums, and 1986’s Parade, both made with his world-class backing band The Revolution. Beyond his ongoing status as a cultural icon, Prince (born Prince Rogers Nelson in Minneapolis in 1958) made a stack of stone-cold classics that still speak for themselves. There’s the lusty provocations of Dirty Mind and Controversy, the pure FM catnip of 1999, and the sweeping double-album ambition of Sign o’ the Times, which ranked at No. 51 on the aforementioned list. Right up until his death at his Paisley Park compound in 2016, Prince was continually reinventing himself on both record and stage. With more than 40 studio albums in his discography, his songbook is truly one of a kind.
- FROM
- Minneapolis, MN, United States
- BORN
- June 7, 1958
- GENRE
- R&B/Soul