About the Book
Purple Rain is a song, an album, and a film – each one a commercial success and cultural milestone. How did this semi-autobiographical musical master-piece that blurred R&B, pop, dance, and rock sounds come to alter the record-ing landscape and become an enduring touchstone for successive generations of fans? Purple Rain is widely considered to be among the most important albums in music history and often named the best soundtrack of all time. It sold over a million copies in its first week and blasted to #1 on the charts, where it would remain for a full six months and eventually sell over 20 million copies world-wide. It spun off three huge hit singles, won Grammys and an Oscar, and took Prince from pop star to legend. Acclaimed music journalist Alan Light takes a timely look at the making and incredible popularizing of this once seemingly impossible project. With impeccable research and in-depth interviews with people who witnessed Prince's audacious vision becoming a reality, Light re-veals how a rising but not yet established artist from the midwest of America was able not only to get Purple Rain made, but deliver on his promise to con-quer the world.
About the Author
Alan Light has been one of America’s leading music journalists for the past twenty years. He was a writer at Rolling Stone, founding music editor and editor-in-chief of Vibe, and editor-in-chief of Spin maga-zine. He has been a contributor to The New Yorker, GQ, Entertain-ment Weekly, Elle, and Mother Jones. He is the author of The Skills to Pay the Bills, an oral history of the Beastie Boys; The Holy or the Bro-ken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of “Hallelujah”; and cowriter of the New York Times bestselling memoir by Gregg Allman, My Cross to Bear.