Prince was alone in this room with this microphone when he recorded ‘Kiss’. Fortunately, he told engineer David Z about it, and he told Dan Delaney, who wrote a brilliant Mix magazine article about it:
1) ‘Kiss’ was originally a country song. Prince recorded it on cassette and gave it to a band he was developing. They were called Maserati. The tape was just a verse and chorus with Prince singing and playing acoustic guitar. Maserati weren’t impressed.
2) The band worked on the track for a day, trying to make it work. They still weren’t impressed.
3) Early the next morning, Prince came into the studio and listened to what they’d done. He recorded the electric guitar part and his vocal. Then he threw the band out of the studio and stripped off most of what they’d recorded.
4) Like ‘When Doves Cry’, ‘Kiss’ has no bass line. Instead, the kick drum from a Linn 9000 is put through a backwards reverb patch on an AMS RMX 16, an early digital reverb.
5) There are just nine tracks of music and vocals on the record. It didn’t take long to mix.
6) Prince recorded the vocal in Studio B control room at Paisley Park studios, on a Sennheiser MD441 microphone. Why? Because Stevie Nicks had recommended it to him.
7) The record company were horrified by the track, saying it was too minimal, with no bass and no reverb. Prince was so powerful at the time that he forced Warner Brothers to put the record out, and it went to Number One in the US. That convinced him he was always right, and less than a decade later, he was walking round with ‘Slave’ written on his face.
: 10:24 PM
