Prince wrote “Nothing Compares 2 U” in July 1984 at the Flying Cloud Drive warehouse in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, the rehearsal and recording space he used before Paisley Park existed. The Prince Estate’s official discography says he cut the first version there with only engineer Susan Rogers present. In Duane Tudahl’s book Prince and the Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions, which the estate quotes, Rogers remembered him walking off to a back bedroom with his notebook and singing the finished lyric as soon as he came back out. Six years later, Sinéad O’Connor took the song to Number 1 around the world. The official piano-vocal score is on MuseScore if you want to follow along with the chords discussed below.
Who Prince Wrote “Nothing Compares 2 U” About
Prince never explained the song publicly, and the people around him tell different stories. In a 2018 interview with The Guardian, republished by The Irish Times, Rogers said Prince was getting serious with Susannah Melvoin, a singer in his side project the Family, at the same moment his housekeeper, Sandy Scipioni, left suddenly after her father died of a heart attack. Rogers remembered Prince asking over and over when Scipioni was coming back. A 2012 Sound on Sound feature tells it differently, saying Prince wrote the song for the Family after one of its members split up with his girlfriend.
Prince handed the song to the Family, and it appeared on their only album in 1985. Per the estate, the band’s version was reworked from the warehouse tape. Prince’s lead vocal came off, St. Paul Peterson sang lead with Melvoin alongside him, Eric Leeds played saxophone and Clare Fischer scored a string orchestration. Leeds and the two singers are on Prince’s original take too: Billboard’s report on the 2018 release credits Leeds’s sax and backing vocals from Melvoin and Peterson on the 1984 track. The Family’s version was never released as a single, and Stereogum notes that it went nowhere.
What Sinéad O’Connor Changed
O’Connor recorded her version for her second album, “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got”, and it came out as a single in 1990. Her arrangement strips away the Family’s R&B setting completely. Stereogum’s Number Ones column describes the result as a desperate dirge wrapped in synth strings and hazy wordless backing vocals.
Nellee Hooper, who had worked with Soul II Soul, started the sessions and brought in Japanese drummer and programmer Gota Yashiki. In the Sound on Sound piece, Yashiki says he built the backing track on an Atari running Notator with an Akai S1100 sampler. When the programmed hi-hat and cello part weren’t gelling, he played the hi-hat live and the cello from a keyboard. Hooper left after a falling-out with O’Connor, and engineer Chris Birkett finished the record, tightening the drum timing and adding simple downbeat piano chords.
Birkett says O’Connor got the vocal in one take and double-tracked it straight away. Mixing was harder. She banned compression on her voice and sang with a reversed mic technique, standing back for quiet lines and moving in close to belt, so Birkett rode the SSL automation syllable by syllable. The album credits O’Connor as producer, with Hooper listed on this track. Birkett told Sound on Sound he received co-production royalties but no credit, and Yashiki’s programmed strings went uncredited as well.
Having a woman sing the lyric also shifted its meaning. O’Connor later said on VH1’s 100 Greatest Songs of the ’90s that the tears in John Maybury’s video came from thinking about her complicated relationship with her late mother, as Sound on Sound recounts. Sung by a man, the verse addressed to “mama” reads easily as a pet name for a lover. Her performance invited listeners to hear a child grieving a parent instead.
Birkett credits that video with rescuing the single, which he says the BBC had dropped. It went on to top the charts in more than a dozen countries, by the estate’s count, including a four-week run at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, and it earned three Grammy nominations, Record of the Year among them.
Prince’s Response
Prince reclaimed the song onstage. His live duet with Rosie Gaines appeared on “The Hits/The B-Sides” in 1993, and the estate notes it stayed in his sets for decades. Peterson told The Guardian in the same 2018 interview that Prince disliked O’Connor’s cover. O’Connor’s 2021 memoir, Rememberings, describes a meeting at Prince’s Los Angeles home after her single became a hit that she says turned violent, as Billboard recounts. In April 2018, two years after Prince’s death, the estate released his 1984 recording for the first time, Billboard reported.
The estate stayed cool toward O’Connor’s version afterward. In 2022, it refused to license her recording for Kathryn Ferguson’s documentary Nothing Compares, and Prince’s half-sister Sharon Nelson told Billboard she didn’t feel O’Connor deserved to use the song.
The Chords of “Nothing Compares 2 U”: A Borrowed E♭
The official arrangement is in F major at a slow 60 beats per minute. It follows O’Connor’s recording, down to her opening line of “fifteen days,” where Prince sang “thirteen,” a change CBS News noted. The verses circle a simple loop: F, C/E, Dm7 and a suspended C chord (written Gm7/C) that leads back to F. C/E is a C chord with E in the bass, which lets the bass walk down one step at a time from F to E to D.
The chorus brings in the one chord from outside the key. The F major scale uses E natural, so the E♭ chord under the title line is borrowed from F minor, the parallel minor key. Musicians call it ♭VII (“flat seven”). From E♭, the chorus moves to B♭ and comes to rest on C, so it never settles on F. The score’s final chord is E♭ as well.
