Hear Me Out: ‘Sometimes It Snows In April’ is better than ‘Purple Rain’
There are only a precious few songs that are able to stop time the way that ‘Purple Rain’ does whenever someone throws it on.
Prince was a God-given talent, and while he worked every single room until it was as hot as it could be whenever he played, his magnum opus is that one moment where it feels like everything goes into slow motion and all that exists in the world is you and that guitar part. The whole thing feels like watching a musical miracle play out in real time, so what if I told you that it wasn’t even the best ballad of its kind that Prince ever made?
Granted, that comes with a lot of qualifiers. ‘The Purple One’ is forever going to be associated with his trademark song, and there isn’t a soul on this Earth that would disagree, right? Well, yes, but if you’re talking about a song that captures the right emotion perfectly, ‘Sometimes It Snows in April’ does actually go the extra mile when talking about the feelings of loss and breaking things off with an old partner.
Then again, these are very different circumstances depending on which movie you watch. Admittedly, Purple Rain is a much better movie than Under the Cherry Moon, but when you’re listening to the song in isolation, the whole thing feels like a straight breakup song if you look at the lyrics. Prince didn’t want to cause his other half any sorrow, and even if they have to move on, they will always have those nights laughing in the purple rain as the greatest guitar solo of all time plays beneath them.
But ‘Sometimes It Snows in April’ is the kind of song that doesn’t really offer that sense of closure in the same way. In the context of the movie, Christopher Tracy is fatally shot by an officer and ends up passing away in the arms of his friend, Tricky. The whole thing doesn’t seem to have the same dramatic heft that you would see out of Prince’s other movies, but as the postscript for the entire movie, the song hits on a feeling that ‘Purple Rain’ really isn’t able to touch on: emptiness.
The characters in Prince’s masterpiece are always content to have loved and lost rather than not having had anything at all, but when looking at the chorus of this tune, you can tell that the singer isn’t quite ready to move on. They were working towards something special with Tracy, but even as they walk through life from day to day, they know that all good things were never meant to last.
And if I can get technical for a second, ‘April’ is a much better encapsulation of that feeling thanks to the chords it’s using. There’s no one that was looking out for the musical construction of ‘Purple Rain’ when they first heard it, but on the line ‘sometimes I wish that life was never-ending’, there’s a crunchy chord that really describes the entire song to a tee. Sometimes people are dead set on following their dreams, but that chord is dark reality setting in when you know that the love of your life is gone.
While saying something like this is enough to be considered blasphemy, the real turning point for this song came when listening to D’Angelo sing the tune in tribute to Prince after he passed away. That final verse of the song was already an absolute gut punch, but hearing the line about wondering whether they will be reunited with ‘my Tracy again’ is enough to give me goosebumps as I’m writing this out. We’d all like to think that we can reach a point where all of our dreams are fulfilled, but we’ll all have to wait until that fateful day when we all get to the other side.
So, as I’m trying to stop any tears from hitting my keyboard, I will raise you this one last question about ‘Purple Rain’ and ‘Sometimes It Snows in April’. The first one will forever be immortalised as the perfect example of what Prince could do when he was still here, but what’s important at this point: a song that celebrates his life, or a song that reminds us of what might happen when we can hear that beautiful voice again?
