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I Wanna Be Your Lover: The Story Behind Prince’s First Hit Song
Warner Records
In Depth

I Wanna Be Your Lover: The Story Behind Prince’s First Hit Song

Finding a meeting point between disco and new wave, I Wanna Be Your Lover proved that Prince knew how to seduce the pop market.

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Prince’s first hit single, I Wanna Be Your Lover, marked the moment when his burgeoning songwriting talents matched his undeniable musicianship. Earning the up-and-coming star breakthrough TV exposure, the song also served notice that the R&B music of the 70s was about to be pushed aside for a whole new sound.

This is the story of I Wanna Be Your Lover, and how Prince made good on his early promise.

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The backstory: “I knew how to make hits by my second album”

Released in October 1978, Prince’s debut album, For You, had proven that the Minneapolis maverick knew his way around a studio, even if the record largely only scored with R&B fans. Reaching No.21 on Billboard’s Soul LPs chart, the album passed the mainstream pop audience by, leaving Prince determined to ensure that his follow-up would appeal to both markets.

Spending a fraction of the time recording his self-titled 1979 album than he did recording For You, Prince brought a radio-ready snappiness to a new batch of songs that included the classics-in-waiting I Feel For You, Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad? and Sexy Dancer. “I knew how to make hits by my second album,” he would later tell Rolling Stone, and, with I Wanna Be Your Lover, he had the single that would back that claim.

The recording: “His original ideas broke through”

Settling into Alpha Studios, in Burbank, California, during the spring of 1979, Prince, who’d been credited with playing 27 instruments on his debut album, manned a small arsenal of instruments for I Wanna Be Your Lover, with studio engineer Gary Brandt later noting how the young artist was already “very synchronised”, effortlessly finding a way to “fit himself into that track, knowing exactly what would come up”.

Anchoring the song with a drum-machine part, Prince laid a range of synthesisers and keyboards on top, plus bass and live drums. Adding electric and acoustic guitars, he built a textured groove that had enough disco elements to ensure the record would get club play, but he kept the arrangement sparse, weaving sounds in and out of the final mix in a way that not only maintained a freshness across the track’s near-six-minute running time, but also nodded to the burgeoning new-wave scene, whose taut rhythms Prince had learned to exploit if he wanted to avoid being pigeonholed as an R&B artist.

Lyrically, too, I Wanna Be Your Lover refined the approach he’d taken with For You. As later revealed by his onetime manager Alan Leeds, both this song and I Feel For You had been written with singer and multi-instrumentalist Patrice Rushen in mind.

Rushen had programmed some of the synths on For You, and, Leeds noted in the liner notes for Prince’s The Hits/The B-sides collection, the young hopeful “had a mad crush on her at the time”. With a coy kiss-off line in the chorus (“I wanna be the only one you come for”), the song managed to sound gently provocative while also, as sung in Prince’s trademark falsetto, innocently romantic, as Prince switches between despondency (“And I get discouraged/’Cause you treat me just like a child”) and unapologetic confidence in his abilities as a lover (“I wanna turn you on, turn you out/All night long, make you shout”).

A fan of Prince right from the release of his debut single, Soft And Wet, future Purple Rain studio engineer Susan Rogers would note just what a development I Wanna Be Your Lover was for the then 21-year-old artist. “That first record was craft-heavy,” she told this author, for the book Lives Of The Musicians: Prince “His original ideas broke through on the next record. You can hear on the Prince album: this kid can write.”

The release: “One of the most innovative songs ever”

Released as a single on 24 August 1979, a radio edit of I Wanna Be Your Lover – backed in the US by My Love Is Forever, and in the UK by Just As Long As We’re Together, both from For You – became the hit Prince had predicted. Sitting at the top of Billboard’s Hot Soul Singles chart for two weeks, it also settled comfortably at No.2 on the Hot Dance Club Play chart while peaking at No.11 on the Hot 100, ushering Prince into the mainstream. With Rolling Stone falling for “the most thrilling R&B falsetto since Smokey Robinson”, the rest of North America had begun to wonder what the young talent behind this new-wave-tinged funk looked like. On 9 January 1980, they’d see more than they expected.

Booked to appear on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, Prince left little to the imagination when he took to the stage in an open shirt and gold spandex leggings, the latter tight enough to reveal that he’d left his underwear in the dressing room. Flanked by his newly formed band, for their part looking like a gang of post-punk ragamuffins ready to face-off against any suavely attired disco ensemble, he performed I Wanna Be Your Lover and its planned follow-up single, Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?, forcing the baffled host to declare, “This is not the kind of music that comes from Minneapolis, Minnesota.”

Bad move. “That really gave me an attitude for the rest of the talk,” Prince later told Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter Jon Bream. In retaliation for the slight on his hometown, the naturally shy Prince, already navigating his first encounter with TV cameras and a studio audience, responded to Clark’s questions with falsehoods and hand gestures, his reluctance to engage leading the industry veteran to admit that it was “one of the most difficult interviews I’ve ever conducted, and I’ve done 10,000 musician interviews”.

For Prince, the music was there to do the talking for him. And an increasing number of people were ready to listen. I Wanna Be Your Lover “came out of the blue, proving to be one of the most innovative songs ever released”, Missy Elliott collaborator Timbaland told The Guardian almost 30 years after the single’s release. “It was the record that got me interested in music in the first place. To this day, I don’t really know how he created this unique sound.”

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