Hi. I’m Scott Woods and I’m here to deliver a thread for day 8 of the song-by-song breakdown of #Prince’s album “Come”. I was invited to talk exclusively about the song “Solo” and why you need to stop whatever you’re doing and listen to it right now.
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First, the song.

Prince “Solo”

“Come” is ultimately an album #Prince did not give much attention upon its release. Thanks to a row with Warner Bros. at the time, there is a bit of the “fuck you” to it. It is not a full-bore “Chaos and Disorder” middle finger, but it’s up there.

It was an album he dogged out on its release, focused as he was on getting to The Gold Experience the following year.

Prince's music is largely personal. Even when he is not interrogating his own actions, he is processing how he feels about whatever he's singing about. A lot of artists do that, but he does it instead of talking to people.

“Come” (LP) is a deep dive into the kind of grief laden emotional landscape he would flirt with on other albums, with loss and grief taking center stage here. It is both symbolic and confessional.

There is a lot of heartache on this album, and “Solo” is the king of pain on this venture. It is the saddest, most vulnerable song of the collection. It has a lone vocal track, no background singing, no layering. There is no bass line, no drums, no established time signature.

It is essentially #Prince playing a harp patch and the occasional thunderstorm sound effect. The music is so disconnected from Prince’s voice tonally, so ornamental, that it is wholly possible that the track was recorded acapella and all other musical elements added later.

Prince’s voice is the only thing happening in the song no musical element enters the fray until 1:02. If the harp and thunder effects were removed, the song would be virtually unchanged.

It is, shall we say, on brand.

Prince had done this kind of freestyle arrangement as early as 1985 on “Condition of the Heart”, but in that song capped his wanderlust with a rhythmic progression, pulling the nose of the plane up with a "proper" arrangement for the second half.

He would do so again around the edges of 1988’s “Lovesexy” LP, but mostly as interlude dust.

He would go all in on Ingrid Chavez’s debut album, “May 19,1992”, an album upon which he sprinkled music around Chavez’s poetry (recorded originally in 1987, reworked by Prince in 1991) for several tunes.

Suffice it to say, Prince had an appreciation for poetry, though his tastes could be debated by most working poets (myself included). It’s interesting that someone so good at poetry would be so hit or miss in choosing the work of others to hold up, but that’s another thread.

The lyrics for “Solo” consist of a poem by multi-genre writer Henry David Hwang. This is one of the extremely rare instances in which we can point confirm Prince asking someone to provide lyrics to something he intended to record for himself.

Prince had certainly been known to take the occasional song wholesale (Do Me Baby, Jungle Love), re-purpose others (Soul Sanctuary), and take an unbidden lyric and turn it into a song (The Arms of Orion, Somebody’s Somebody), but commissioning lyrics was something else entirely.

This was Prince, a formidable poet in his own right, differing to the abilities of someone else’s lyrical pen. It is an act so rare in his catalog that it borders on unique (save for “Hide the Bone”. Also depends on where you come down on “La La La, He He He”.)

Prince saw Hwang’s Broadway play “M. Butterfly” in 1989, the year after it debuted. It manages to be both a confounding and completely understandable choice of entertainment for Prince, given its homoerotic plot. Was he put off by it? Did he enjoy it?

Did he dig that Hwang had himself severely remixed the play out of a previous musical work, the 1904 Puccini/Illica opera Madama Butterfly?

Was this just more of Prince’s creative magpie tendencies at work, his Pollock-like accumulation of inspirations and muses thrown on the all of his imagination to see what stuck?

Perhaps the recurring themes of otherness in Hwang’s work spoke to Prince. He certainly would have been able to relate to the epic power and racial struggles of many of Hwang’s characters in the post "M Butterfly" explosion, especially in the midst of a row with Warner Bros.

We’ll likely never know.

What we do know is that 4 years later in 1983, Prince reached out to Hwang about collaborating on a musical.

Hwang met the superstar at Prince’s penthouse at Manhattan's Riga Royal Hotel and discussed the potential project. By the end of their meeting Prince had gotten Hwang to agree to writing a script and, as an aside, Prince asked for a poem to use as a spoken song interlude.

Hwang, a Prince fan since Dirty Mind, wrote this of the exchange on the now-shuttered website YOMYOMF (a/k/a You Offend ME, You Offend My FAMILY):

"[Prince said he’d] like me to write a poem for him. About loss. The way you feel when you’ve lost someone you love."
...

"And you know they’re never coming back. And that, for the rest of your life, you’re going to be alone. He wants to do a song that suddenly breaks into a spoken word interlude."
...

"He rolls his eyes, “They’re gonna say, ‘The boy’s really lost it this time.’” … I write a poem about Love and Loss. Fax it to Paisley Park. A few days later, I get another cassette. A new song. Incorporating my poem."
...

"It’s called “Solo.” Hey, I’ve written a song. With Prince. Just like that."

"The musical doesn’t end up working out, and Prince and I have never had reason to speak again. But a year later, I got a call from the woman at Paisley Park."
...

"Just wanted to let you know that the album is coming out. It will include ‘Solo.’ We’re thinking it’s probably also going to be the B-side of the first single. I’m glad because it’s one of my favorite tracks.”
(Hwang)

So that’s how “Solo” happened.

The whole exchange reminds me of one of my favorite singers of all time, Umm Kulthum (often stylized as Oum Kalthoum).

She was perhaps the most famous Egyptian singer of the 20th century and one of the most famous Middle Eastern singers of all time. Kulthum firmly subscribed to the tradition of commissioning poems for lyrical content, usually from notable poets of the day.

Here is her most famous song, “Enta Omri”. I debated between giving you a short clip with English translation of the lyrics/poem, or giving you a full version of a performance. I opted for both.

The shorter translated clip

Yes, this is over an hour long. Kulthum would sing a song for hours if the crowd was feeling it. When she debuted “Enta Omri” live, it was over 2 hours long, crowds driven to musical and spiritual ecstasy.

(Before anyone starts getting ideas about Prince taking notes from Umm Kulthum, pause. The temptation to draw a line from his interest in Egyptian history and iconography in the early 90s is strong, but almost assuredly had nothing to do with him asking Hwang for a poem.
...

... It’s just important to point out that things that Prince does are often pioneering, but not necessarily without precedent in the history of music. “Pioneer” has never meant “invent”.)

Let’s look at the poem/lyric for "Solo":

"So low, the curb looks like a skyscraper
So high, the stars are under me
So quiet, I can hear the blood rushing through my veins
So low, I feel like I'm going insane
The angels, they watch in wonder
When you made love to me
Through the rain and the thunder
...

You cried in ecstasy
And you were so kind
I felt sorry for all creation
Because at the time, no one was lucky
No one was lucky, no one was lucky as me
And now you're gone and I just want to be still
...

So silent, I'll just let my senses sleep
It's gonna be so hard to hear my voice
If I ever learn once more to speak
I'm so lost, no one can find me
And I've been looking for so long
But now I'm done
I'm so low, solo, my name is No One"

YAWN.
As poems go, there isn’t much here that you won’t find at your local open mic. There are some interesting construction decisions – rhyme comes and goes, there’s a little word play at the end, highly image count throughout.

It’s almost clever, but not outstanding s poems go. I imagine if Hwang had taken more time to write it, we’d have gotten something completely different. In 1993 he was not yet the librettist he would become in the 2000s.

Prince asking Hwang for lyrics isn't very left field when you consider that he was always angling to write a musical, and Come is basically an album made from showtune bones.

That in mind, “Solo” carries a different weight than the rest of the record. It's one of those tunes you see in a musical that slow things down, but not too much, since its going to have a soaring moment that brings the house down.

“Solo” is a showstopper in the way a prison shank is a conversation: it sneaks up on you. Solo is one of those Prince songs in which he uses almost every note in his vocal range, which really cranks up the resonance of the lyrics.

Here is a song about being left utterly alone, so alone that all that is left is the person left behind, as if an entire universe of sorrow has collapsed into the this one lonely body. Conversely, only every sound that body can emit can do the sorrow justice.

Prince pours (almost) every note he can out of his body, an exorcism of his grief that leaves him without a body, without substance, effectively becoming “No one.”
“Solo” is one of the most stunning displays of Prince’s vocal prowess in his entire catalog.

After much juggling, “Solo” becomes the eighth track on the album. It was the b-side of the album’s first single, “Letitgo”. It was performed at least once live in 1994 in Paris, but no reliable record of it beyond that.

I like to think that the song was too personal for him, drew too deep from the well of his experience to be shuffled into regular playlists alongside the hits.

“Solo” is not a normal song. You can’t just bump it unless you want your day to stop. Here is a list of approved activities one may partake in during a playing of “Solo”:

- Drink
- Muse
- Meditate
- Cry
- Break up sex
- Drive aimlessly

Whatever you do, don't just listen to it.

Well, there you go. I don’t even like this record, but I LOVE “Solo”. I hope you dug it. There are 2 more threads coming to round out the album, courtesy of @NightEthereal and @polishedsolid covering “Letitgo and “Orgasm” respectively.
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