Last year Rolling Stone magazine listed its 100 Best Movie Soundtracks list. It was interesting to scroll through. There were plenty of movies on the list that I have never seen. Sitting at the top of the list was Prince’s Purple Rain.

The soundtrack was loaded with hits: Let’s Go Crazy. I Would Die 4 U, Purple Rain and today’s featured song. According to Songfacts.com, the film is semi-autobiographical, but how much is based on real life remains a mystery, as Prince rarely gave interviews and didn’t talk about his personal life.

In the movie, When Doves Cry expresses his fear of becoming like his parents. When the doves cry, that’s his musical refuge – the barrage of keyboards in the chorus represents the doves crying. Besides writing and composing the track, Prince played all the instruments on the song.

I never noticed this before, but there is no bass on this song. Prince took out the bass track at the last minute to get a different sound, though he hated to see it go.

“Sometimes your brain kind of splits in two – your ego tells you one thing, and the rest of you says something else. You have to go with what you know is right,” he told Bass Player magazine.

Prince used his trusty LM-1 drum machine (now on display at Paisley Park) on this track to create the unique percussion. It was ntroduced in 1980 by Roger Linn, the LM-1 was the first programmable drum machine that sampled real drums.

To make the sound, Prince used a recording of a cross-stick snare drum, where you hold the tip onto the drum head and slap the stick against the rim of the drum. He then tuned it down an octave to give it more of a knocking sound, and ran it through a guitar processor.

Fun fact: Although there is no bass in the song and the percussion part is played entirely by drum machine, Prince’s drummer and bass player from his band The Revolution still appear in the video “playing” along on their instruments.