Music

The Culture Corner: 40 years of Prince's 'Purple Rain'

XPN | By Raina Douris,

Published July 24, 2024 at 3:21 PM EDT

Prince's <em>Purple Rain</em> — Prince's *Purple Rain*

Forty years ago this summer, Prince scored his first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200. Purple Rain, the soundtrack to his hugely successful film, also earned him a couple of Grammy Awards and an Oscar for best original song score.

In this session, World Cafe correspondent John Morrison talks about the album, and film, that raised Prince's career to another level and helped build his mythology.

"It's kind of like a messy, not-so-sympathetic story. It leaves me wondering how much of it is true and how much of it is fiction," Morrison says.

He also talks about how there's another timeline, where the titular song isn't even a Prince song at all.

"Prince originally wrote 'Purple Rain' as a country ballad for Stevie Nicks to sing," he says.

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Kimberly Junod. The web story was created by Miguel Perez. Our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.

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Music World Cafe

Raina Douris

Raina Douris, an award-winning radio personality from Toronto, Ontario, comes to World Cafe from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), where she was host and writer for the daily live, national morning program Mornings on CBC Music. She was also involved with Canada's highest music honors: hosting the Polaris Music Prize Gala from 2017 to 2019, as well as serving on the jury for both that award and the Juno Awards. Douris has also served as guest host and interviewer for various CBC Music and CBC Radio programs, and red carpet host and interviewer for the Juno Awards and Canadian Country Music Association Awards, as well as a panelist for such renowned CBC programs as Metro Morning, q and CBC News.

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Kimberly Junod

World Cafe senior producer Kimberly Junod has been a part of the World Cafe team since 2001, when she started as the show's first line producer. In 2011 Kimberly launched (and continues to helm) World Cafe's Sense of Place series that includes social media, broadcast and video elements to take listeners across the U.S. and abroad with an intimate look at local music scenes. She was thrilled to be part of the team that received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award for excellence in music programming. In the time she has spent at World Cafe, Kimberly has produced and edited thousands of interviews and recorded several hundred bands for the program, as well as supervised the show's production staff. She has also taught sound to young women (at Girl's Rock Philly) and adults (as an "Ask an Engineer" at WYNC's Werk It! Women's Podcast Festival).

See stories by Kimberly Junod