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Sun 28 June 2026 21:45, UK
There surely aren’t many other musicians in the history of rock and roll who command the same amount of respect and admiration as Prince has always managed to.
His singular approach to creating music that fused genres effortlessly has been admired by many other musicians from a variety of different backgrounds, but rarely has it ever been matched by anyone since he first began to create a name for himself in the late 1970s. Capable of playing virtually any instrument he touched, Prince was the sort of person that other musicians feared, making themselves feel inferior not just to his levels of talent, but also the exacting amount of precision with which he applied it.
However, while many people have always respected Prince, he always managed to make himself a far harder character to read, with his thoughts and opinions on other players very rarely ever shared due to the fact that he operated alone for vast portions of his career. The people who managed to jam or collaborate with Prince were part of an elite group, and were also lauded as being among the best, and while you might think that Prince ought to be grateful for the opportunity to play alongside you, the reality was almost always the inverse.
You had to be special to even make it into Prince’s consciousness, let alone his inner circle, and so if he were to pass a positive judgment on others, it ought to be treated as a compliment of the highest order. That doesn’t mean that everyone Prince wanted to work with was fortunate enough to have done so, and given his reputation for moving mysteriously, the possibility of collaboration wasn’t something you could wait on happening; it would simply either happen or not.
While Prince may well have written many songs for other artists, he didn’t necessarily get to spend an extended amount of time with them or perform said songs alongside them. One notable example of this happening is his work alongside Celine Dion, whom he wrote for but never managed to perform with, despite wanting to.
During an interview with Hello in 1996, it transpired that by pure coincidence, Prince and Dion were both staying at the same hotel, and when questioned as to whether he would love to take their collaborative relationship onto the stage, he responded with an unusual amount of enthusiasm.
“I had no idea that she was here,” the elusive multi-instrumentalist exclaimed. “I like her a lot and even wrote a song, ‘With This Tear’, for her once. It’s on one of her albums and is really beautiful. I’d love to play and sing with her in a show one day.”
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The track, which was also produced by Prince after he’d been impressed with her 1990 rendition of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, led to him developing a fandom of the Canadian vocalist, and he would undoubtedly have wanted to make further connections with someone who possessed such raw talent.
While a shared live performance between the two never did transpire, probably as a result of Prince’s tendency to retreat back into the studio and enjoy the comfort of his own privacy, it would almost certainly have been astounding had it taken place.
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