Side Note

This is what it sounds like when doves sing

Prince in

Prince in "When Doves Cry"

You’ve heard “When Doves Cry,” but have you heard them on the track? Today, 23 of Prince’s more unavailable albums, as well as a new anthology spanning the Prince Anthology 1995-2010 set, were released across all major streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. (Previously, they’d been Tidal exclusives.) One of those released albums is 2002’s One Nite Alone…, a soulful, jazzy stripped down album that features him singing and playing piano... as well as the credited “ambient singing” of his two pet doves Divinity and Majesty.

It’s hard to pick their voices out for most of One Nite Alone…, which was originally only released to NPG Music Club members, but about five seconds into “Objects in the Mirror” you can hear a faint hoot in the background. Is that Divinity? Majesty? The wind? Listen and decide for yourself. While you do, keep in mind that One Nite Alone…, which features a bird’s nest filled with eggs on its cover, was the avian duo’s first and last release. An unsourced blurb on Discogs claims: “Engineer Femi Jiya had microphones set up all over the atrium, and picked up unidentified noises, which they realised were the two doves sleeping in their cages. Femi offered to re-record the tracks, but Prince insisted they were left on.” We choose to believe this is true.

Following Prince’s 2016 death, Divinity and Majesty, who lived in his Paisley Park studio, stopped singing. (Doves can live more than 20 years in captivity.) “After he passed, they weren’t talking,” Prince’s sister Tyka Nelson told the Today show in 2016. Majesty reportedly died in January 2017 at age 25. Divinity now lives alone in a cage next to a pair of replacement doves, also named Divinity and Majesty. Check out the original duo’s work on streaming platforms now.