Purple Rain

<p>The song is a eulogy for a relationship that was never going to survive the people in it. Prince wrote it as his masterpiece, a six-minute epic that moves from a gentle piano introduction to a guitar solo that sounds like a man tearing down his own house. The purple rain is not rain. It is the end of something, the release that comes when holding on becomes more painful than letting go. Prince dedicated it to the city of Minneapolis, to the communities that shaped him, and to anyone who has ever had to say goodbye to something they loved because loving it was destroying them.</p> <p>That same eulogy gets a gospel reclamation from Aretha Franklin on her 2014 album *Aretha Franklin Sings the Great Diva Classics*. Where Prince's original is a rock epic ... his guitar screaming through the final minutes, the emotion raw and unfiltered ... Aretha approaches the song from a completely different angle. The tempo slows. The arrangement is built around organ and choir. Aretha's voice does not try to match Prince's intensity. She finds a different intensity, one rooted in the gospel tradition that underlies all of her work. Where Prince was crying out, Aretha is testifying, carrying the song from personal grief to communal experience. The purple rain becomes not just one man's heartbreak but a shared moment of release, the sound of a congregation letting go of everything that has been holding them back. Prince wrote the song. Aretha baptized it.</p>