A creaky chair, three players, and no strings on the album
On 21 April 1985, at Sunset Sound Studio 3 in Hollywood, Prince, Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman tracked Sometimes It Snows in April. Engineer Susan Rogers dimmed the room and lit candles. Lisa sat at the piano. Wendy sat beside her with a guitar. Rogers heard the chair creak, got up to swap it, and Prince told her to leave it. The take stayed live.
The song had been sitting unfinished for years. Prince Vault traces a sketch possibly as far back as 1977, but the record people know starts that afternoon. Prince sings. Lisa plays piano and harmony. Wendy plays guitar and harmony. Nobody else is on the Parade version. The writing credit is Prince, Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman, printed on the album as Prince and the Revolution.
Parade, billed as music from Under the Cherry Moon, came out on 31 March 1986 on Paisley Park and Warner Bros. Sometimes It Snows in April closes the album at 6:48. The lyric follows Christopher Tracy, the gigolo Prince plays in the film, after he is shot. The title was already public. On 2 April 1985, manager Steve Fargnoli told the press Prince was retiring from the stage. Asked what he would do, Prince said he was going to look for the ladder. Asked what that meant, he said sometimes it snows in April. Around the World in a Day, which includes The Ladder, came out on 22 April 1985, the day after this session.
He didn’t normally do that. We lit candles, the lights were dimmed. Lisa was on piano, with Wendy right next to her. We realized that the chair Wendy was sitting in was really creaky. I went out to change it, and Prince said, no, leave it, I want it like that. It was done live, in a darkened room.
(Susan Rogers, Uncut)
Clare Fischer arranged and recorded an orchestra for the song on 27 July 1985 at Monterey Sound Studios in Glendale. Prince heard it and kept the album cut bare. The orchestrated version is the one in the movie: one minute and eighteen seconds at the end of Under the Cherry Moon. It was never issued as a single in 1986, so it had no chart life of its own while Kiss and Mountains did the promotional work.
He sang it live from the first known date, 7 June 1985 at the Prom Center in St. Paul, through 14 April 2016 at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, show two, a week before he died. The session date and the day of his death are the same, thirty-one years apart. In the days after 21 April 2016 the old album track sold enough to chart without a new single: number 14 in France, 63 in the Netherlands, 64 in Switzerland, 69 in Austria, and 193 on the UK singles chart. D’Angelo sang it on The Tonight Show with the duo Princess. The version people bought was still the one with the chair left in.
