Prince
A singer, guitarist, songwriter, and producer, Prince produced his own albums, often played all or most of the instruments on them, and pioneered the Minneapolis sound. He sold over 150 million records worldwide. Purple Rain, recorded in part with his band the Revolution, held number one on the Billboard 200 for 24 weeks and was certified 13x Platinum by the RIAA in 1996, its score won the Academy Award for Original Song Score in 1985, and the Library of Congress has named the album to the National Recording Registry and the film to the National Film Registry. He performed at the Super Bowl halftime show in 2007, and Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (2020) ranks Purple Rain eighth. Paisley Park, the Chanhassen, Minnesota, complex where he created, recorded, and performed from 1987, welcomes fans today for tours, concerts, and festivals.
Born Prince Rogers Nelson on June 7, 1958, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he signed with Warner Bros. and wrote, produced, arranged, and played all 27 instruments on his 1978 debut, For You, sharing a writing credit only on its lead single, “Soft and Wet,” with Chris Moon.
Dirty Mind (1980) was a one-man record of hard funk and guitar pop, and 1999 (1982) became his first Top 10 album and sold over three million copies. Purple Rain, the soundtrack to his film of the same name, arrived in June 1984, and “Kiss” was a hit in 1986. The soundtrack to 1989’s Batman sent him back to the top of the charts, and in 1991 he formed the New Power Generation, whose first album with him, Diamonds and Pearls, was his biggest hit since 1985. He wrote and produced for the artists around him, masterminding albums for the Time and Sheila E. and handing hits to the Bangles and Sheena Easton.
Prince died on April 21, 2016. He won seven Grammy Awards, and 1999, Purple Rain, and Sign ‘O’ the Times have all been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004 and posthumously into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in Minneapolis on July 27, 2024, and the Recording Academy named him one of its 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award honorees. On the Billboard 200 dated May 14, 2016, he held 19 positions at once, the Guinness World Record for the most simultaneous albums on that chart. Rolling Stone’s 250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time (2023) places him fourteenth.
Paisley Park opened to the public in the autumn of 2016, and his vault has been releasing music since: the hits collection 4Ever that November, an expanded Purple Rain in 2017 with a disc of previously unreleased music, the archival Piano & A Microphone 1983 in 2018, and Originals in 2019, his own versions of 15 songs he gave to other artists, among them “Manic Monday,” “Jungle Love,” and “The Glamorous Life.” A deluxe edition of 1999, with two discs of unreleased material and a live show from 1982, followed that November.
