Purple Rain

What you hear on “Purple Rain” is one take, recorded live at a benefit show at First Avenue in Minneapolis on August 3, 1983. No studio polish, no do-overs. The applause at the end is real, from people who didn’t yet know what they were watching.

He was 25. The song is eight minutes and forty-one seconds long, which is a long time for a pop single, and half of that is the ending. Prince stops singing around the four-minute mark, and what follows is the guitar solo. Not virtuosic in the showoff sense. Each note bends further than the last, like he’s trying to bend the guitar into saying what the words couldn’t.

The lyrics are barely there. I never meant to cause you any sorrow / I never meant to cause you any pain. Apologies. Regret. A vague memory of something that went wrong between two people. He doesn’t tell you what it was. He leaves room for you to bring your own.

I heard “Purple Rain” for the first time when I was too young to understand what purple rain even was. I thought it was a weather event. Later I learned Prince said it was about the apocalypse — purple sky at the end of the world, holding the person you love while everything ends. That reading is enormous and I believe it. I also don’t think it matters. When the solo hits, you don’t need a reading. You need a room to yourself.

Prince died on April 21, 2016. For days afterward, cities lit their bridges and buildings purple. Niagara Falls. The Superdome. The Eiffel Tower. A color stopped being a color. A song had become a way for people to grieve a man most of them had never met.

You can’t write that into a song. You can only live long enough that it happens.

One take, played once, in one room, on one night in August. He was 25, and it held all of that.