Last year, we celebrated the birth of Prince Rogers Nelson with two songs from his extensive catalog.

But Prince’s talents were so immeasurable that even songs other artists wrote became his own.

“Crimson and Clover,” the sweet, dreamy little melody by Tommy James & the Shondells is something entirely different in Prince’s hands. With his reputation for being over the top, it’s unsurprising that he actually delivers a two-for-one here, interspersing The Troggs’ “Wild Thing” throughout. And as Prince was also known to do, he blisters the guitar lines of both songs, turning a romantic ballad and a campy sing-a-long into a single, smoking hot Prince Rogers Nelson masterpiece.

Prince released “Crimson and Clover” on “LOtUSFLOW3R,” his THIRTY-THIRD studio album. By then he was exploring other artists, his own music style, and his spirituality too. You’ll see that reflected in all of LOtUSFLOW3R’S videos, but “Crimson and Clover” is like a WinAmp visualizer on LSD and MDMA turned up to 10. The original song was already filed under the “psychedelic rock/pop” genre, but trippy fractals, motion within silhouettes, and the entire spectrum of visible color bring Prince’s “Crimson and Clover” right to the edge of sensory overload. That might explain why it was during his LOtUSFLOW3R publicity tour that Prince revealed he was born epileptic and had seizures throughout his childhood until the day he knew he was healed of them “because an angel told [him] so.”

Touched by angelic forces or simply an imaginative child, Prince’s presence as a musician was indeed divine, and if there’s a Heaven, I hope his version of “Crimson and Clover” is on God’s playlist too.

(Sorry, Tommy James.)

𝗛𝗘𝗔𝗥 𝗦𝗢𝗨𝗡𝗗 𝗜𝗡 𝗖𝗢𝗟𝗢𝗥 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟭 | 𝗪𝗔𝗧𝗖𝗛 𝗦𝗢𝗨𝗡𝗗 𝗜𝗡 𝗖𝗢𝗟𝗢𝗥 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟭