Songwriting
In "When Doves Cry," Prince uses several metaphors for purity to justify his anguish over his troubled relationship. Amusingly and controversially, he evokes both Christian ideas of purity and less...
Music
"When Doves Cry" might be called an eccentric song, in the way that it combines and rejects different musical conventions to create a sound that is totally accessible and catchy but also very strip...
Setting
"When Doves Cry" was hugely successful as a single, but it was also written for a movie, so in that sense it is set inside the movie world of Purple Rain. Purple Rain is a quasi-autobiographical re...