![]() Even masked alt-metal dudes know the power of a classic-meets-college rock canon, and it’s a notable bit of eulogizing to reinforce the idea that Prince feels like he belongs as much in there as he does in pop and R&B. Taylor’s spent a lot of time and effort breaking out from his dark-and-brooding Midwest hesher rep to try and foreground his Renaissance-man bonafides, and leading off his set with it not only cut straight to the heart of a music-lover’s immediate thoughts, it fit with a set that also included influence-nod covers of R.E.M., Creedence Clearwater Revival, Buzzcocks, Van Morrison, and the Cure. If you are Corey Taylor, Iowa-born frontman and songwriter for Slipknot and Stone Sour, and you are scheduled for a solo acoustic concert at First Avenue that winds up falling on the actual day Prince died, what are you going to do - not cover “Purple Rain” on the stage the man made famous? That it works fairly well, even if he doesn’t try reproducing that searing guitar solo coda, hints at something deeper. Here are 10 live performances, all from the past 12 months, that do just that. Guns, Daughtry, or Rascal Flatts - it’s still worth looking into what it means when artists grieve and give voice to their fans’ grieving, all while doing their best to stay true to both themselves and the source material. But while there are some versions floating out there that seem like they’re too awkward to address - we’ll spare you any exposure to the live versions recorded by L.A. When a wave of cover versions arrives in the form of a collective eulogy, it’s easy to put the whys and hows under the microscope of course everyone would gravitate toward the perfect confluence of sentiment, recognizability, and adaptability. But over the last year, that’s what countless musicians did, starting the very night Prince died and not letting up yet. ![]() It seems like an intimidating thing to give yourself to, especially if you’re using it to pay funereal respects to the man who wrote and recorded it. Then again, every musician should hope to write a song they could be “reduced” to that’s as versatile yet inseparable from their identity as “Purple Rain” - a pop song with a gospel-soul heart pumping a hard rock power-ballad bloodstream, a love song that contains heartbreak and hope, goodbye and see-you-again all at once, a guitar performance bested in its indelible power only by the singer himself. Prince was far more than just “Purple Rain.” He could write an amazing ballad with the best of them, but his career was always such a multifaceted, long-running, constantly shifting thing that prioritizing one of his songs as definitive, even the title track to a debut movie and a soundtrack that went 22 times platinum, feels reductive.
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