He played all 27 instruments on his debut album. He was 19. The record label wanted him to pick one thing. He picked everything. For You came out in 1978, and the credits listed Prince Rogers Nelson as the sole performer, producer, arranger, and songwriter on every track. The label had never seen anyone do that. They'd never see anyone do it again.

Minneapolis made him. A mixed-race kid whose parents were both musicians -- his father a jazz pianist, his mother a singer -- growing up in a city that was too cold and too isolated to care about what was happening in New York or Los Angeles. He built his own scene. The Minneapolis Sound: synthesizers, drum machines, rock guitars, and a funk bassline that never stopped. Dirty Mind. Controversy. 1999. Little Red Corvette was the song that crossed him over, a Black artist on MTV when MTV barely played Black artists. Then Purple Rain -- the album, the film, the tour -- made him the biggest artist on the planet.

He wrote songs for everyone. Nothing Compares 2 U for Sinead O'Connor. Manic Monday for the Bangles. I Feel for You for Chaka Khan. Glamorous Life for Sheila E. The vault at Paisley Park has enough unreleased material for an album a year until sometime in the 22nd century. He changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol because Warner Bros. owned the name "Prince" and he wanted his freedom. He wrote SLAVE on his face and toured with the word painted on his cheek. He fought the industry and won. He fought it again and lost. He released music on the internet before anyone understood what the internet was for.

He died alone in an elevator at Paisley Park on April 21, 2016, from an accidental overdose of fentanyl-laced pills. He was 57. He had been taking opioids for years to manage the pain from hip surgery and decades of performing in heels. The autopsy revealed he weighed 112 pounds. The man who filled stadiums, who played guitar behind his head, who made Purple Rain and Kiss and When Doves Cry, died inside his own kingdom, and nobody knew he was dying. The vault is still locked. "Dearly beloved," he said at the start of Let's Go Crazy, "we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life."

He was a Jehovah's Witness, a vegan, a basketball fanatic, and a genius who could walk into a room, pick up any instrument, and within minutes be doing something nobody in the room had heard before. His guitar solo on While My Guitar Gently Weeps at the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction -- the one where he walked offstage and tossed the guitar into the air and it never came down -- is three minutes of a man proving he could outplay anyone he shared a stage with. The list of people he shared a stage with is very long. The list of people who outplayed him is empty.