Nothing Compares 2 U

Prince wrote and recorded “Nothing Compares 2 U” in a matter of hours in 1985, then handed it off to The Family, a short-lived Minneapolis side project built around his own Paisley Park sound. Their self-titled album had its admirers among Prince completists, but the song itself registered as little more than a deep cut – a fully-formed hit sitting unnoticed on a record nobody outside his fanbase was buying.

Sinéad O’Connor found it five years later and rebuilt it around almost nothing: a single, largely unadorned vocal, a sparse arrangement that refuses every opportunity to turn the song into a ballad showpiece, and a music video built on one static, unbroken close-up of her face that lets a single visible tear do more emotional work than most artists manage with a full bridge. Where Prince’s original is a competent album track, O’Connor’s is a complete reinvention – the same chord changes and the same words, reorganized around her own flat, direct delivery until the song stops sounding like anyone’s b-side and starts sounding like it could only ever have been hers.

It became the song O’Connor is still best known for, decades into a career defined by much harder-edged, more confrontational work – a strange legacy for an artist who spent much of her life pushing against being reduced to one performance, built on a song she didn’t write but unmistakably made her own.

Greatest of All Time. The clearest proof in modern pop that a song’s writer and a song’s owner don’t have to be the same person.

Hero image: “Nothing Compares 2 U” single cover art, Chrysalis Records. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.