When Doves Cry

Prince wrote it after every other track on Purple Rain was finished. The film's director, Albert Magnoli, had asked him for a song to fit one segment, and by the next morning Prince had composed two, one of them this. The biographer Per Nilsen says it was inspired by his relationship with Susan Moonsie of Vanity 6. Prince played every instrument. There is no bass line. He said he had first recorded one, but after a conversation with the singer Jill Jones he decided the song was too conventional with it. What remains is a guitar introduction, a Linn LM-1 drum machine, a looped, guttural vocal, a long guitar and synthesizer solo and a classical-sounding keyboard finale. Matt Fink said in 2014 that Prince recorded that baroque synthesizer solo at half speed and an octave lower, then sped it up.

It was the lead single, issued on 16 May 1984 with 17 Days on the B-side. It spent five weeks at number one on the Hot 100 from 7 July 1984, was Billboard's top single of the year and led the Hot Black Singles chart for eight weeks. The Pazz & Jop poll named it the best single of 1984, and Rolling Stone placed it at number 37 on its 2021 list of the 500 greatest songs. In the video, white doves emerge from double doors to reveal Prince in a bathtub. Network executives thought it too explicit for television. After his death it returned to the Hot 100 and peaked at number eight.

Live and afterlife

On the Purple Rain Tour the stage held a claw-foot tub on a hydraulic lift. In rehearsal the lightweight fiberglass tub tipped over with Prince inside, and he took a tumble. Brown Mark added bass lines when the band played it live. Logged performances of the song number 548, from 21 May 1984 at the Carlton Celebrity Dinner Theater in Bloomington, Minnesota, to 21 March 2016 at the Theatre Maisonneuve in Montreal.

MC Hammer's 1990 hit Pray sampled it, one of the few samples of his songs that Prince legally sanctioned. In 1997 Quindon Tarver recorded a version for the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack, and Ginuwine covered it on his album The Bachelor. In 2025 it was licensed for film or television for the first time, in the finale of Stranger Things.