Prince’s first hit single, I Wanna Be Your Lover, marked the moment when his burgeoning songwriting talents matched his undeniable musicianship. Earning the up-and-coming star breakthrough TV exposure, the song also served notice that the R&B music of the 70s was about to be pushed aside for a whole new sound.
This is the story of I Wanna Be Your Lover, and how Prince made good on his early promise.
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The backstory: “I knew how to make hits by my second album”
Released in October 1978, Prince’s debut album, For You, had proven that the Minneapolis maverick knew his way around a studio, even if the record largely only scored with R&B fans. Reaching No.21 on Billboard’s Soul LPs chart, the album passed the mainstream pop audience by, leaving Prince determined to ensure that his follow-up would appeal to both markets.
Spending a fraction of the time recording his self-titled 1979 album than he did recording For You, Prince brought a radio-ready snappiness to a new batch of songs that included the classics-in-waiting I Feel For You, Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad? and Sexy Dancer. “I knew how to make hits by my second album,” he would later tell Rolling Stone, and, with I Wanna Be Your Lover, he had the single that would back that claim.
The recording: “His original ideas broke through”
Settling into Alpha Studios, in Burbank, California, during the spring of 1979, Prince, who’d been credited with playing 27 instruments on his debut album, manned a small arsenal of instruments for I Wanna Be Your Lover, with studio engineer Gary Brandt later noting how the young artist was already “very synchronised”, effortlessly finding a way to “fit himself into that track, knowing exactly what would come up”.
Anchoring the song with a drum-machine part, Prince laid a range of synthesisers and keyboards on top, plus bass and live drums. Adding electric and acoustic guitars, he built a textured groove that had enough disco elements to ensure the record would get club play, but he kept the arrangement sparse, weaving sounds in and out of the final mix in a way that not only maintained a freshness across the track’s near-six-minute running time, but also nodded to the burgeoning new-wave scene, whose taut rhythms Prince had learned to exploit if he wanted to avoid being pigeonholed as an R&B artist.
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Lyrically, too, I Wanna Be Your Lover refined the approach he’d taken with For You. As later revealed by his onetime manager Alan Leeds, both this song and I Feel For You had been written with singer and multi-instrumentalist Patrice Rushen in mind.
Rushen had programmed some of the synths on For You, and, Leeds noted in the liner notes for Prince’s The Hits/The B-sides collection, the young hopeful “had a mad crush on her at the time”. With a coy kiss-off line in the chorus (“I wanna be the only one you come for”), the song managed to sound gently provocative while also, as sung in Prince’s trademark falsetto, innocently romantic, as Prince switches between despondency (“And I get discouraged/’Cause you treat me just like a child”) and unapologetic confidence in his abilities as a lover (“I wanna turn you on, turn you out/All night long, make you shout”).
