The Paul McCartney songs inspired by Prince: “He is probably my favourite modern act”
Any genre that any hopes to touch on in their career will be living in the shadow of Prince. Although it’s easy to put ‘The Purple One’ in the category of R&B, his flirtations with everything from rock to jazz to even bossa nova in places has made him one of the few artists who could honestly claim to have done it all by the time he passed away. Everyone after Prince may have indirectly pulled from his playbook, but even legends like Paul McCartney were taking inspiration where they could.
Compared to the stars of the 1960s, Prince felt like he rose to prominence about a decade too late. If he had been around during the time of the counterculture, there’s a good chance that he could have given everyone from Jimi Hendrix to The Rolling Stones a run for their money.
While he was already making his presence known out of Minneapolis, songs like ‘Purple Rain’ were designed to be anthems of the 1980s, blending the kind of heartland rock flavour with some kind of fairy dust that he had hidden in that purple coat. By the time the decade ended, Prince had already adopted the sounds of people like The Beatles on Sign O’ the Times as well.
When talking about Prince later, McCartney wasn’t seeing some hotshot kid… chances are he was seeing competition. During an interview at the end of the decade, McCartney said that he loved what Prince was doing, saying, “He is probably my favourite modern act. I went to see his concert at Wembley, it was good. (What I like) about Prince, he is an innovator, and he doesn’t go the way that everyone goes.”
While there’s a good chance that the same McCartney in his 40s couldn’t match the immediacy of Prince in his 20s, he did take a few pages from his playbook. After getting back on track with his classic sound after The Beatles Anthology, that meant going down the experimental rabbit hole with new pieces.
Looking back on his career, McCartney pointed to the songs ‘If You Wanna’ from Flaming Pie and ‘Hunt You Down’ from Egypt Station as descendants of Prince’s work. He explained on Twitter, “[He inspired] those two definitely. I was always a big fan, I went to see him in concert a few times and wrote to him saying how much I enjoyed his guitar playing particularly.”
Then again, maybe McCartney couldn’t help but see a vision of what he was like when looking at Prince. From The Beatles’ career up until the present, McCartney would always experiment with any kind of music that he could get his hands on, and Prince may as well have been the next generation of that mentality, constantly pushing himself to create something he had never heard.
Prince would even find time to pay tribute to The Beatles, turning in one of the single greatest live guitar solos of all time on a performance of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He may have just been looking to follow his muse, but what Prince accomplished doesn’t even seem human. The Beatles may have been geniuses, but are we sure that Prince was a musical alien walking the Earth?