Prince recorded 'When Doves Cry' on March 1, 1984, at Sunset Sound in Hollywood, and he did it alone. He wrote and composed the song after all the other tracks were complete on Purple Rain. Director Albert Magnoli had asked him to come up with something for the montage scene where the Kid is riding around on his motorcycle, having just lost his girlfriend to Morris Day. Prince wrote the song that night. On March 1st, 1984, he started production at Sunset Sound. According to session logs, Prince entered the studio at 3:30 PM on March 2nd and left with a mixdown of 'When Doves Cry' at 7:30 the next morning. The song he carried out of that sixteen-hour session was missing something that no hit record in 1984 was supposed to be missing. That absence is the whole argument.
Prince played lead and backing vocals, electric guitar, Yamaha DX7, Oberheim OB-Xa, and Linn LM-1. As engineer Peggy McCreary recalls, 'He started the way he always did, with the drum machine, then the bass, then the piano, then this and that, and all of a sudden, he knew he had a hit, and he got real excited.' So excited that he drove over to Wendy and Lisa's house with a rough mix on a cassette, waking them up at four in the morning to hear it before heading back to the studio. The track at that point was full: drums, bass, synths, guitar, vocals. It had everything. Then Prince decided to take something away. Speaking to Bass Player in December 2005, Prince said: 'When Doves Cry was the last song on Purple Rain to be mixed, but it just wasn't sounding right — 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 guitar out of the mix. Singer Jill Jones said, why don't you have it your way? So I muted the bass track.'
McCreary was at the board when he did it. 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 her and said, 'ain't nobody gonna believe I'd do this.' He was right that nobody would believe it, and also right that it was the correct call. The bass is on the multi-track tape, but it was muted in the final mix. What that mute reveals is the architecture underneath: the song features a guitar solo intro and a Linn LM-1 drum machine, followed by a looped guttural vocal. In an era when pop, funk, and rock records were defined by heavy low end, this move gave the song a skeletal, almost eerie quality that made it instantly stand out on radio. The LM-1's kick and tom samples now had to carry the entire bottom of the track, which they do, and the effect is that the song seems to hover rather than stomp.
The instruments that remain earn their keep in specific ways. The guitar gets its cutting tone from a Boss OC-2 octave divider. Prince had the baroque synth solo planned out in his head, but he had to slow the tape down so he could play it at a more manageable tempo. Beyond the practical necessity, this move had a sonic benefit: speeding the tape back up gave the synth an unearthly timbre due to its harmonics being squeezed together. The LM-1 itself was not just switched on and left to tick. Roger Linn, the machine's creator, explained that the characteristic knocking sound came from a cross-stick snare drum recording that Prince tuned down about an octave or more. As Linn told Reverb in 2017, Prince 'didn't just select a stock beat and press play' but used the LM-1 'in unusual and creative ways — from his detuning the drums to no longer sound like drums, to the unusual beats he programmed, to how he featured it in the mix.' Every element that stayed in the song was shaped and reshaped. The bass, which was simply functional, had to go.
Brownmark, Prince's actual bass player in The Revolution, heard the finished single and had an understandable reaction. He recalled that Prince had just said, in a Rolling Stone article, that without him he'd strip bass from his music. 'Then the next thing you know, here comes 'When Doves Cry' with no bass!' Brownmark later reflected: 'It didn't mean that at all. Prince was always innovating, and it was just something new. It was a smart move. He's always been daring like that.' The Revolution played on the Purple Rain Tour, and during live performances, Brown Mark added bass lines to the song. The live version works fine. The recorded version works better without it, and the difference is instructive: the bass makes the song comfortable. Its absence makes it strange, and strange is what lasts.
Released on May 16, 1984, as the lead single from Purple Rain, 'When Doves Cry' marked Prince's first number-one hit on the Billboard Hot 100, where it topped the chart for five consecutive weeks starting July 7, 1984. Billboard ranked it as the number one year-end single of 1984. The song was voted best single of the year in the Village Voice Pazz and Jop critics' poll. It is ranked number 37 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and is included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. All of that from a song built on a mute button. Prince understood something that most producers learn too late: the most powerful move in an arrangement is often the one you decide not to make. The bass track still exists on the multitrack tape, perfectly recorded, completely right, and entirely beside the point.
