Who wrote song nothing compares to you

The Prince estate unveiled the musician’s original 1984 recording of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” pairing it with a video filled with previously unreleased rehearsal footage of Prince and the Revolution. Prince periodically performed “Nothing Compares 2 U” in concert – a live version appears on 1993’s The Hits/The B-Sides – but this marks the first time his studio version has been released.

“Nothing Compares 2 U” became a global hit for Sinéad O’Connor in 1990, but Prince originally wrote the tune for one of his side projects, the Family (the track appeared on the group’s 1985 debut to little fanfare). Prince’s version of the track captures a unique mix of styles: It simmers with the same potency as the power ballad O’Connor would later record, but packs more rock and roll punches, from fiery guitar riffs and a blazing saxophone solo to Prince’s electric vocal runs and wails.

Prince recorded “Nothing Compares 2 U” at the Flying Cloud Drive “Warehouse” in Eden Prairie, Minnesota with his longtime engineer Susan Rogers. Prince composed, arranged and performed the entire track, except the backing vocals, which were provided by Susannah Melvoin and Paul “St. Paul” Peterson. Eric Leeds played saxophone.

Prince’s version of “Nothing Compares 2 U” is available to stream and download through digital retailers. A seven-inch vinyl single will also be released May 25th, while a limited-edition picture disc will be available exclusively through the Prince “HtNRun” online store. 

The Prince-composed hit “Nothing Compares 2 U” is unquestionably Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor’s biggest song. To think of O’Connor is to remember the tear-streaked close-up of her face in the 1990 music video for the track.

In her recent memoir Rememberings, O’Connor reflected on the ballad, the fame it brought her, and the only person she says is invariably on her mind when she performs it.

Prince wrote ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’

Legendary songwriter and musician Prince composed the song that put O’Connor on the map. Rolling Stone described Prince’s version of the song, which he recorded in 1984, as ” a unique mix of styles: It simmers with the same potency as the power ballad O’Connor would later record, but packs more rock and roll punches, from fiery guitar riffs and a blazing saxophone solo to Prince’s electric vocal runs and wails.”

The Guardian reported that according to Prince’s sound engineer Susan Rogers, the song was written for his “young housekeeper,” who had left suddenly because of a death in her family. There was no romance between the singer and his employee but Rogers said Prince missed her just the same and the song came out of him “like a sneeze.”

“He wasn’t living with anyone, but he was a young man writing about domesticity,” Rogers was quoted as saying. “The line ‘all the flowers that you planted in my back yard went out and died’… it would have been [Prince’s housekeeper] Sandy who planted those flowers. ‘And I know that living with me baby is sometimes hard, but I’m willing to give it another try…’ There was no romantic relationship with Sandy. It’s not a pained ‘Help me, baby’ track. It’s: ‘You’re gone and I miss you.’”

Who O’Connor sings the song to…’always’

In her recently released memoir, O’Connor elaborates on the song that made her famous and the fame that she wasn’t ready to deal with as a woman in her early 20s with a young son.

“I wasn’t ready for the sort of success that came with [her 1990 album] I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” she wrote. “I did not know how to handle it. It did my head in. I didn’t know where I was; [I]wasn’t with my kid. I didn’t know who I was.”

RELATED: Sinéad O’Connor Got a ‘Check for a 1st-Class Ticket Back to Ireland’ From This Iconic ’90s Artist

As for the song itself, O’Connor wrote it “was a song I was always — and am always — singing to my mother. Every time I perform it, I feel it’s the only time I get to spend with my mother and that I’m talking with her again. It’s why I’ve cried on the line ‘All the flowers that you planted, Mama, in the backyard, all died when you went away.’ I love the song and never get fed up singing it.”

O’Connor’s childhood with her mother was a troubled one, as the singer has shared, marked by repeated abuse. Still, when her mother died when O’Connor was in her late teens, it was a blow to the artist.

The song is still an enormous hit

“Nothing Compares 2 U” currently boasts over 250 million views on YouTube.

“I’m quite happy with it,” O’Connor said in 2011. “It’s a great song. I still feel the song very strongly. I identify with it.”

About the iconic music video, which was primarily a head shot of the singer’s expressive face throughout, she revealed, “It wasn’t what we’d planned for the video. We had a whole other plan, so that’s just what happened accidentally and we decided to keep it. It wasn’t what we had planned at all.”

Who is the song about, why did Prince give it to the Family to record as an album track, and what did he really think of Sinéad O’Connor’s smash hit single?

Thu 19 Apr 2018 11.18 EDT

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Thirty four years ago, when Paul “St Paul” Peterson was the singer in the Family, a band Prince had assembled, he was sitting in his mother’s house in Minneapolis when he received a tape containing Prince’s recording of a song he wanted Peterson to learn for the album he was producing for the group. “I was told to learn Prince’s inflections, his emotions, and the melody line,” the singer remembers, describing how capturing the song’s themes of loss and abandonment meant he had to go “deep”. “So I thought about a girl called Julie, who broke my heart in high school.”

It was Nothing Compares 2 U. Prince’s recording went unreleased, the Family’s version became a barely heard album track, but Sinéad O’Connor’s smash 1990 reimagining let the world hear what is now acknowledged as one of Prince’s greatest songs. Today, as Prince’s more electronic, rockier original is finally made public, Peterson – who has been married to Julie for 28 years – is back in his mother’s house. He has just listened to the recording he last heard in 1984 and admits: “I’m freaking out here, man.”

Prince’s sound engineer, Susan Rogers, goes back further: she witnessed Nothing Compares 2 U’s birth. In summer 1984, Prince was working in the Flying Cloud Drive Warehouse – his huge rehearsal space before creating Paisley Park – and was on “a creative roll, cranking out a song a day”. He was also in a relationship with the Family’s Susannah Melvoin (who can be heard on backing vocals, alongside St Paul, on Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U). “It was clear that she was becoming more important than the other girls he’d dated,” Rogers says. “Simultaneously, his young housekeeper, Sandy Scipioni, had to leave suddenly to be with her family because her father died of a heart attack. Sandy ran Prince’s life. He kept asking, ‘When’s Sandy coming back?’”

One day, he went into a room with a notebook and, within an hour, emerged with the lyrics to Nothing Compares 2 U. Rogers, who witnessed many such bursts of creativity, remembers, “The song came out like a sneeze.” As usual, she rolled the tapes as Prince laid down instrument after instrument, mixing and overdubbing in the same session (Eric Leeds overdubbed the sax part three days later). Rogers felt the finished song was “exceptional, in his Top 10”, but has a compelling theory about why Prince didn’t release the song under his own name (a live duet with Rosie Gaines appeared years later, on the 1993 compilation, The Hits/The B-Sides).

“He wasn’t living with anyone, but he was a young man writing about domesticity. The line ‘all the flowers that you planted in my back yard went out and died’… it would have been Sandy who planted those flowers. ‘And I know that living with me baby is sometimes hard, but I’m willing to give it another try…’ There was no romantic relationship with Sandy. It’s not a pained ‘Help me, baby’ track. It’s: ‘You’re gone and I miss you,’ which is probably why he felt comfortable giving the song away to the Family. He released his material based on what he wanted us to know about him and, wonderful as it is, he didn’t want it to represent him.”

Rogers argues that in setting up his own label, Paisley Park, Prince had “bitten off more than he could chew” and was too busy running his own career to properly promote the Family, who he had signed. So when Peterson heard O’Connor’s version – and saw the famous tearful video on MTV – he first thought, “That should have been me,” but later loved it and told Prince he was pleased that [Prince would] get lots of money from her recording. “He went: ‘Money?! It’s not about money!’ He told me he didn’t like it [O’Connor’s version]. Unless he asked them, he didn’t like anyone covering his songs.”

“Prince was the most courageous person I ever met,” Rogers explains. “He realised he had to socially handicap himself to be the artist he wanted to be, and that to do that without being an asshole he had to be a complete enigma. My gut feeling is that everything he recorded should be released, so that people can understand where he came from and keep his memory alive.”

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Topics

• Sinéad O'Connor
• Pop and rock
• features

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