“Delirious” by Prince

"Delirious" sits third on 1999, the fifth Prince album, out on Warner Bros. in October 1982, and it's the one-man band at his most playful. He wrote, arranged and produced it at Sunset Sound and the credits hand him every instrument: the Linn drum machine loop and synth bass that open it, the synthesizer hook, the guitar, the finger snaps and a rubbery bass that gives it a rockabilly bounce, a trick he'd tried on "Jack U Off" from Controversy. Lisa Coleman joins him on backing vocals.

Underneath, it's a plain 12-bar blues about a beautiful woman driving him out of his mind, spiked with car and racing innuendo just discreet enough to dodge the censors, and it stops dead on a baby cooing. As the album's third single it reached number eight in the US in the fall of 1983, his second top 10 hit.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.