10 Greatest One Man Band Albums

Prince was never a musician who needed a ton of bells and whistles to get his point across. Even though the Revolution played a pivotal role in getting his profile off the ground, just having the Purple One alone in a room with a piano or guitar is enough to create brilliance from the word go. Or in the case of his self-titled album, you just give him a studio and let him run wild.

Compared to the usual '80s classics coming out around this time, most of Prince's early albums were created solely by himself, playing every single instrument up until using background singers on albums like Controversy and Dirty Mind. Before then, this record is exactly what the cover art implies, as Prince reveals himself to be a jack of all trades in terms of musical genres, going from heartbroken ballads to some of the funkiest grooves imaginable without even batting an eye.

While something like that may seem incoherent on the surface, each of these songs find a unique home under the Prince aesthetic, with I Wanna Be Your Lover being one of the first amazing ballads he would ever compose. As far as the '80s pop market was concerned, this was the sound of a musical god making his claim to pop's throne. Not bad for a kid who had just turned 21.