Prince - Kiss

Each month we take a look at a classic track or album and discuss it from a music production perspective, examining any innovations that took place during its recording. This month we take a look at 'Kiss' by Prince. Released in 1986, it was his third US no. 1 hit.

'Kiss' was originally conceived as a single for Mazarati – a band that Prince had signed to his own label – and it had a very different sound to the version that eventually became a hit. Producer David Z had worked with Prince before, and had been brought in by the artist to produce the Mazarati album. In an interview with Sound On Sound, Z describes being handed the demo of 'Kiss' that was intended for use by Mazarati; 'when we needed a single, Prince gave me this demo of him just playing straight chords on an acoustic guitar — one verse and one chorus — while singing in a normal pitch; not the falsetto that's on the finished record. To us, it sounded like a folk song and we were wondering what we could do with it. No way was it funky. Anyway, starting with a LinnDrum, I programmed the beat and began experimenting. Taking a hi-hat from the drum machine, I ran it through a delay unit and switched between input and output and in the middle. That created a very funky rhythm. Then I took an acoustic guitar, played these open chords and gated that to the hi-hat trigger. The result was a really unique rhythm that was unbelievably funky but also impossible to actually play...'

Having finished the track in one day, Z left the studio for the night. When he came back in the morning, 'Prince had already taken it off the machine, replaced the vocal with his own falsetto performance — which, I guess, he felt it needed — got rid of the bass part and added a James Brown 'Papa's Got A Brand New Bag' guitar lick'. Z asked him what was going on, to which Prince replied 'This is too good for you guys. I'm taking it back.'

The sparseness of the track is one of its major strengths. Removing the bass from a dance/pop track was almost unheard of, but it had been done before – on Prince's first US no. 1, 'When Doves Cry'. In the end there were only nine tracks of instruments and vocals on the final record. In a Mixonline interview David Z recalled that this low track count meant that the single only took about five minutes to mix!