“Sign O The Times” by Prince

"Sign o' the Times" is the title song of Prince's 1987 album on Paisley Park, and it very nearly ended up somewhere else: it had been meant for two albums slated for 1986, Dream Factory and Crystal Ball, both of which were shelved.

Prince did it all himself, every voice and every instrument, and he pared it down to the bone. A cold, clicking drum machine, a few sampled stabs and a coiled electric guitar are about all there is, and the empty space is the point. This is funk stripped to a whisper, spare and grave, with Prince sounding less like a party host than a man reading the evening news with the lights off.

It was an immediate hit: an R&B chart-topper, a number three pop hit on the Billboard Hot 100 and a number 10 in Britain, and it sold 200,000 copies in the United States by that July. The critics were just as taken: the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop poll named it the best single of 1987, the second time Prince had won that prize, and Rolling Stone later ranked it number 304 among the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The single's sleeve shows Cat Glover hiding her face behind a black heart.

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