Prince’s Hidden Role in Madonna’s Album 'Like a Prayer'
Uncredited brilliance from His Royal Purpleness
Welcome to the Sunday edition.
I know it’s the Lord’s Day, but instead of hitting you with a sermon I’m going to take Madonna’s advice from 1986 and say: “Papa Don’t Preach.”
That’s from the album True Blue (1986), but today I want to talk about a couple of deep cuts from her 1989 triumph, Like a Prayer.
And although I won’t be talking about the King of Kings, I will talk about a different kind of higher power and his name is Prince.
Specifically, I came to drop gospel on his contribution to one of the album’s least likely tracks.
Honestly, if I ever get access to a time machine, I’m going straight to the early ’90s so I can barely make a living wage writing punchy one-liners for MTV VJs. Apparently, I would have killed it.
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Madonna’s album Like A Prayer is not just a masterpiece, but a masterpiece with Prince’s tiny little fingerprints all over it.
I was driving the other day, listening to Madonna’s album Like A Prayer for the first time when I got three songs in, and said out loud, “Son of a bitch, did this app just glitch me over to a Prince cut?”
Not just because of the voice — which was, yes, unmistakably Prince — but the whole vibe: the clipped Linn drums, the synths that sound like they’re waiting to seduce a vampire, the sudden urge to make out with a background singer.
I was on the freeway going about 85—unless you’re a cop in which case 65—in traffic, so I didn’t want to pick up my phone and mess around with Spotify. In any case I couldn’t be too mad; I love Prince. Seeing the His Royal Badness play all his hits live at Madison Square Garden was one of the best, most exhausting concert experiences of my life.
Then with the next song, we switched back to Madonna and that’s when I figured it out. While Like a Prayer is one of Madonna’s great albums and a singular contribution to the canon of Western pop history, it’s also got a killer low-key Prince collab.
That collaboration? It’s called Love Song. It’s the third track on the album, and it’s so ’80s that Michael J. Fox burst out of my speakers and tried to sell me a Pepsi Light.
I have to admit that while I like Madonna, I’m what I call a “Greatest Hits Fan” — someone who grew up with Like A Virgin and Open Your Heart and can immediately recognize La Isla Bonita when it plays on the supermarket overhead playlist*.
But I never owned Madonna’s albums growing up. Back in my day, you had to pay money for music — you couldn’t just send Spotify $9.99/month for the right to skip from The Clancy Brothers to Kendrick calling Drake a pedo in the same algorithm-generated playlist.
People developed musical clans. Punk kids and metalheads bonded over their shared love of sniffing glue, but heaven help you if they caught you listening to Boyz II Men**. Disco queens, rap gods, classic rock loyalists — each tribe had its rules. Crossing genres was heresy***.
In the ’80s, you could be a Madonna fan or a Cyndi Lauper fan, but not both****. And since Cyndi was proof you could be from Queens and still cool—and she was friends with Pee Wee Herman, very important when I was a preteen—it was the obvious choice. Plus, Madonna clearly really really wanted to dominate pop culture, which made born contrarian me root for Lauper.
That said, I also liked Madonna. But my record collection had True Colors (a masterpiece), not True Blue (also a masterpiece).
It turns out that not only did Prince co-write and co-produce Love Song, he played almost all the instruments, recorded most of the tracks at Paisley Park, and sang uncredited backup vocals.
There’s a short-but-wild closer called Act of Contrition, built from a reversed version of the Like a Prayer instrumental — and that swirling, backwards guitar you hear is pure Prince.
Speaking of short-but-wild: that’s also pure Prince.
Prince was known to have been an incredibly prolific songwriter and musician in the ’80s. He gave away hits to Sinead O’Connor, The Bangles, Vanity 6, and Sheila E., often producing or playing on tracks without taking credit. All of this is pop culture canon now.
But I was still very happily surprised to find him on Like A Prayer — writing, producing, playing, harmonizing, and even getting reversed into oblivion.
* And I call that playlist “You Are Old.” The next time someone asks, “Who hurt you?” I’m going to answer, “The person who played Pearl Jam while I was shopping for strawberry jam.”
** They weren’t just R&B - they were nerds which was a crime until the late ‘90s.
*** Unless you were Anthrax and Public Enemy, or Run DMC and Aerosmith - acts that were cool but also kinda lame.
**** Yes, I know you liked them both. You were mommy’s special music nerd. Bravo.
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