Prince wrote 'Nothing Compares 2 U' and taped a solo demo on July 15, 1984 — six years before Sinéad O'Connor took it to No. 1.

The ballad the world knows as Sinéad O'Connor's was written by Prince, who taped a solo demo of it on July 15, 1984, nearly six years before her cover topped the charts.

The most famous heartbreak song of 1990 was written by a man who never released it as a single under his own name. Prince wrote "Nothing Compares 2 U" and recorded a solo studio demo of it on July 15, 1984. The public first heard the song more than a year later, in August 1985, sung not by Prince but by a short-lived Paisley Park side project called The Family. Sinéad O'Connor's version — the one that reached No. 1 — came almost six years after Prince first put it on tape.

How Prince's song became Sinéad O'Connor's hit

According to the Prince Estate's official discography, Prince recorded the song alone at his Eden Prairie warehouse studio in July 1984, working with engineer Susan Rogers. That demo stayed in the vault. It wasn't officially released until 2018, two years after Prince's death.

What listeners actually got in the 1980s was The Family's rendition. Prince wrote most of the songs on the group's debut, which Paisley Park released on August 19, 1985, and their album carried the first version of "Nothing Compares 2 U" the public could buy. As Rolling Stone noted in 2018, the track "became a Number One hit five years later when Sinéad O'Connor covered it." At the time of its original release, the song was not issued as a single and drew little notice — one album cut among many by a band that broke up almost immediately.

O'Connor changed that. Her cover topped the US Billboard Hot 100 on the chart dated April 21, 1990, and held the No. 1 spot for four weeks, according to Billboard's own year-end record of the era. The Wikipedia entry for The Family's album puts the timeline plainly: the song "became more widely known five years later when a cover by Sinéad O'Connor was released."

Why the 1984 date matters

The precise date — July 15, 1984 — anchors the song's authorship in a way the charts never could. It places the writing and first recording firmly in Prince's most prolific stretch, the run around *Purple Rain*, when he was generating far more material than any one release could hold. Songs were handed off to protégés and side projects precisely because Prince couldn't ship them all himself. The Family existed largely as a vehicle for that overflow.

The concrete detail that survives is Susan Rogers, the engineer in the room. Rogers, who later became a professor of music cognition, has spoken in interviews about Prince's warehouse studio and the flood of recordings made there in that period. It was an unglamorous space in a Minneapolis suburb, not a marquee facility — and yet a song that would define a decade's worth of radio ballads was cut there in a single day, by one man, alone.

The seam worth arguing over is a question of authorship versus ownership. Prince wrote the words and music; the copyright and songwriting credit are his, verifiable through U.S. Copyright Office registration rather than press accounts. But the *performance* the world fell in love with — the near-whispered verses, the single tear in O'Connor's video — belongs to someone else entirely. When Prince finally released his own 1984 solo take in 2018, it landed as a curiosity: the original of a song most people had only ever heard secondhand.

So who does "Nothing Compares 2 U" belong to? The paperwork says Prince. The public memory says O'Connor. Both are, in their way, verified — and that gap between authorship and the version that actually moved people is the part that stays open.