Soft And Wet: The Story Behind Prince’s Debut Single

The demo: “Nobody believed I could play all the instruments”

One of a clutch of songs that Prince collected on a demo tape, this first pass at Soft And Wet was built on a suitably squelchy synths and assured guitar as Prince sang in his trademark falsetto of a lover who “came too quick and… left too soon”, throwing in Larry Graham-like interjections and double-tracking his own vocals with all the confidence of someone who knew he had a destiny-changing song on his hands.

A trip to New York City to shop the demo around proved fruitless (“I got two offers,” Prince would later tell New York Rocker magazine. “The only problem there was I didn’t have a cat in there fighting for me, to get me artistic control over the production end of it”), but back in Minneapolis Prince met just the man he needed: Owen Husney. “First of all, nobody believed I could play all the instruments,” Prince later recalled of incredulous record-label heads – and even Husney himself – who would hear Prince’s recordings and assume they were the work of a full band. But after Warner Bros offered him a three-album deal, plus a guaranteed co-production role in the studio, Prince signed with the label and settled in at the Record Plant, in Sausalito, on the outskirts of San Francisco, to record his debut album, For You, in a gruelling three-month search for perfection at the end of 1977.

The recording: “I created a different kind of horn section by multi-tracking a synthesiser and some guitar lines”

Living with Husney, Husney’s then wife, Britt, and Warner Bros’ co-producer of choice, Tommy Vicari, in a shared house overlooking the San Francisco Bay, Prince pulled 14-hour shifts in the studio, often finishing at 5am and eventually emerging a self-proclaimed “physical wreck”. He exhausted Vicari, too, whose role was reduced as the sessions wore on, Prince gleaning all he could from the experienced producer before pushing him aside and taking over the controls himself.

In its final recorded version, Soft And Wet delivered on all the early promise of the demo, the original squelchy soundbed replaced by a sleek post-disco construction, Prince deploying an arsenal of cutting-edge equipment to ensure his debut single would frame him as an artist leading the charge into the new decade (he would credit himself with playing a total of 27 instruments on For You, with Polymoog, Oberheim 4-voice and ARP Soloist synths among the nine appearing on Soft And Wet alone). Recording everything himself, Prince would later reveal to The Minneapolis Tribune his ingenuity in ensuring the song remained recognisably funky, even as he began to map out a new trajectory for funk music: “By not using horns on this record, I could make an album that would sound different right away. I created a different kind of horn section by multi-tracking a synthesiser and some guitar lines.”

Lyrically, too, he had developed the song further, building on Chris Moon’s demure foundations to make a bold declaration right from the off: “Hey, lover, I got a sugarcane/That I want to lose in you, baby can you stand the pain?” Acknowledging the “many things that you do to me”, Prince ensures that, by the end of three sweaty minutes, both parties in Soft And Wet are left well and truly wrung out.

The release: “He was streets into the future”

Tasked with getting such explicit material on the air, Warner Bros staffer Marylou Badeaux, then working in the department that promoted new releases to Black radio stations, recalled that Prince “found it damned funny that people would get all riled up about these things”. But Soft And Wet’s lyrical content wasn’t the only challenge the label faced in seeking airplay. In a segregated music industry, where white artists were marketed to white audiences, and Black artists were marketed to Black audiences, Prince had demanded that the label treat him as an artist who could – and soon would – appeal to both.

“They didn’t know how to handle it,” Badeaux said of mainstream pop radio’s reaction to Soft And Wet. However, she explained in Lives Of The Musicians: Prince, the Black stations had an equally tricky time getting their head around Prince’s post-disco funk: “It didn’t fit within their conception of what R&B music was. The sound was very different from what he was coming up with. He was streets into the future.”

Released on 7 June 1978, Soft And Wet not only marked Prince’s 20th birthday, but it also gave him his first taste of success. Though the pop market never quite managed to comprehend what it heard (the song made it to No.91 on the Billboard Hot 100), Black audiences understood this was the sound of a major talent in the making, and sent the song to No.12 on the Hot Soul Singles chart. With the largely acoustic album track So Blue issued as its B-side – Prince sounding one part lovelorn balladeer, one part sensitive Joni Mitchell acolyte – the fledgling star was already asserting himself as a genre-straddling virtuoso.

Confident in the studio, Prince was less comfortable with interviewees set on asking him probing questions about his personal life. Having exposed two sides of himself with Soft And Wet and So Blue – the sexual provocateur set on pushing boundaries, and the vulnerable romantic dealing with heartbreak – he felt his art was more than capable of doing the talking for him. “If people would just listen to the music,” he told Marylou Badeaux, “they’d know where my head’s at.”

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