Kiss

Kiss began as a verse and a chorus on an acoustic demo that Prince gave to Mazarati, a funk band on his Paisley Park label, for their debut album. The engineer David Z worked on it with them at Sunset Sound while Prince recorded in the next studio. David Z told Mix it sounded like a folk song, and the group could not make it work. After a night David Z woke to find Prince had taken the song back, saying it was too good for them. Prince pulled the bass off, and the hi-hat track too, and filled the low end by running the kick drum through a reverb unit. The ah-wah-ah backing vocals were adapted from Brenda Lee's Sweet Nothin'. The mix, David Z said, took about five minutes.

Warner Bros. did not want to release it, and David Z recalled that the A&R man said it sounded like a demo. Prince insisted. It was issued on 5 February 1986 as the lead single from Parade, with Love or Money on the B-side, and spent two weeks at number one on the Hot 100 and reached number six in the United Kingdom. It won the Grammy for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. Rebecca Blake directed the video, shot on 13 February 1986. NME ranked it fourth on its list of the 150 greatest singles and voted it the best single of 1986. The Revolution's Brownmark says he co-wrote it with Prince, but he has not been credited.

Covers and live

Age of Chance recorded it for a John Peel session in June 1986 and released it as a single that November, and their version reached number two in Peel's 1986 Festive Fifty. The Art of Noise with Tom Jones took it to number five in the United Kingdom in 1988. Logged performances of it number 764, from 3 March 1986 at First Avenue to his final concert in Atlanta on 14 April 2016.