“Nothing Compares 2 U” by Prince Rogers Nelson

In 1990, Irish singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor exploded onto the American music scene with her music video “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Eschewing the sort of flashy exuberance that characterized MTV’s hits at the time, the video was starkly intimate, featuring a near-continuous shot of O’Connor’s face as she lamented:

It’s been seven hours and thirteen days since you took your love away

I go out every night and sleep all day since you took your love away

Since you’ve been gone, I can do whatever I want, I can see whomever I choose

I can eat my dinner in a fancy restaurant, but nothing can take away these blues

The song earned O’Connor an enduring status as a ’90s alt-rock icon. Perhaps because of this, few people realize that “Nothing Compares 2 U” was actually written by the man who defined the ’80s: Prince Rogers Nelson.

Credit: World’s Direction

Prince wrote the song in 1985 for The Family, a band he was producing at the time. The track failed to top the charts, however, and Prince didn’t seem interested in reclaiming it when the band faded into obscurity. While he never publicly commented on O’Connor’s version or its success, it was well known that Prince generally disapproved of covers, and O’Connor herself claims they once came to blows over it.

In 1993, after O’Connor catapulted the song back into the public ear, Prince recorded “Nothing Compares 2 U” as a live duet with Rosie Gaines. Another recording of the song was released after the artist’s death in 2016.

Prince’s and O’Connor’s versions could hardly be more different. Hers is mournful and ethereal; it aches. His has no less emotion, but its passion is steeped in a sort of defiant bravado. If her version is raw, fresh grief, his is the reckless, too-soon march back into the heat of life, the seizing of joy in the face of despair.

When O’Connor recorded “Nothing Compares 2 U,” she connected with the sense of grief and longing in the lyrics. The young singer had lost her mother five years earlier in a car accident. The music video shows her shedding tears toward the end of the song after singing these lines:

All the flowers that you planted, Mama, in the backyard

They all died when you went away

I know that living you with you, baby, was sometimes hard

But I’m willing to give it another try

“Mama” could have simply been a pet name like “baby,” of course; most people assume that Prince wrote the song about a lover. But some of the singer’s friends say it was about a different kind of love altogether: Prince wrote the lyrics while his beloved housekeeper was on a leave of absence. For someone as wildly famous and yet deeply private as Prince, the woman with whom he shared his most ordinary, familiar moments may indeed have held an important place in his heart.

Whomever the singer may be grieving, and whichever version you choose, “Nothing Compares 2 U” beautifully captures the pain of returning to an altered world after a great loss.