Prince’s first hit single, “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” marked the moment when his burgeoning talent as a songwriter coincided with his undeniable musicianship. The song not only gave the rising star TV exposure, but also signaled that ’70s R&B music was giving way to a whole new sound.
This is the story of “I Wanna Be Your Lover” and how Prince kept his early promise.
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The backstory: “I already knew how to make hits with my second album”
Prince’s debut album, released in October 1978, For youhad proven that the loner from Minneapolis knew his way around the studio, even though the record was mainly well received by R&B fans. It reached number 21 on BillboardAlthough the album failed to pass mainstream pop audiences on the 2012 Soul LP charts, Prince was determined to please both markets with his follow-up.
He spent a fraction of the time recording his 1979 self-titled album than recording For youPrince brought a radio-friendly zing to a new set of songs, including the upcoming classics I Feel For You, Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad? and Sexy Dancer. “By my second album, I already knew how to make hits,” he later said. Rolling Stoneand with I Wanna Be Your Lover he had the single that underpinned this claim.
The recording: “His original ideas prevailed”
When Prince settled into Alpha Studios in Burbank, California, in the spring of 1979, he used a small arsenal of instruments for “I Wanna Be Your Lover.” He had played 27 instruments on his debut album. Studio engineer Gary Brandt later noted that the young artist was already “very in sync” and had effortlessly found a way to “fit into the track and know exactly what was coming.”
Prince anchored the song with a drum machine part and layered a series of synths and keyboards over it, along with bass and live drums. By adding electric and acoustic guitars, he built a textured groove that contained enough disco elements to ensure the record would get played in clubs, but he kept the arrangement sparse, weaving sounds in and out of the final mix in a way that not only maintained freshness across the track’s nearly six minutes, but also nodded to the burgeoning new wave scene, whose tight rhythms Prince had learned to exploit when he wanted to avoid being labeled an R&B artist.
In terms of content, I Wanna Be Your Lover also refined the approach he had taken with For you. As his former manager Alan Leeds later revealed, both this song and “I Feel For You” were written with singer and multi-instrumentalist Patrice Rushen in mind.
Rushen had programmed some of the synthesizers on For youand Leeds noted in the liner notes for Prince’s The Hits/The B-Sides Collection, the young hopeful “had a huge crush on her at the time.” With a coy farewell line in the chorus (“I wanna be the only one you come for”), the song managed to sound gently provocative while also, sung in Prince’s trademark falsetto voice, innocently romantic, as Prince alternates between desperation (“And I get discouraged/’Cause you treating me just like a child”) and uncompromising confidence in his abilities as a lover (“I wanna turn you on, turn you out/All night long, make you shout”).
