The Voice Season 25 winner took on Prince’s hit and nailed it.
Asher HaVon chose an appropriately rainy song for his concert in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In Prince’s the hometown, The Voice Season 25 winner performed the late musician’s signature song “Purple Rain” from his album of the same name. He even improvised a line to give a shout-out to a pink-haired fan in the crowd.
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His silky-smooth vocals paired well with the song and satisfied even the biggest Prince fans. “Perfection…you honored PRINCE perfectly, he [would] be proud,” commented one viewer on TikTok. Added another, “Prince is looking down on you with a smile. You did him proud.”
In his time since winning The Voice, HaVon has performed the “Star Spangled Banner” at the U.S. gymnastics Olympics trials and was a guest on The Kelly Clarkson Show. He also opened up to GLAAD about being on Team Reba as the first openly LGBTQ artist to win the show.
“Reba created such a safe place for me to come in and be my authentic self,” he said. “It was so easy to let down walls that I had built over the years.”
About “Purple Rain” by Prince
The track is a moody love song about an anguished relationship. Purple Rain isn’t just the name of a song and an album, it’s also the title of a 1984 movie that Prince wrote, loosely based on his own life. They were all hits and catapulted the musician to a new level of fame and acclaim, with the album selling more than 20 million copies, according to The Guardian.
And it was almost a Stevie Nicks duet.
Prince speaks onstage at the 42nd NAACP Image Awards held at The Shrine Auditorium on March 4, 2011 in Los Angeles, California; Asher HaVon wins The Voice during the Live Finale Part 2, Season 25 Episode 17B. Photo: Kevin Winter/Getty Images for NAACP Image Awards; Tyler Golden/NBC
How “Little Red Corvette” led to “Stand Back,” which led to “Purple Rain”
In the 1980s, Nicks and Prince were acquaintances and collaborators, and Nicks was listening to his hit “Little Red Corvette,” appropriately, in her car. She began to compose her own lyrics to the melody and called the rocker to tell him about it.
Back in the early 1980s, Nicks and Prince were friends and musical collaborators. One day when she was driving in Los Angeles, she started humming along to his “Little Red Corvette” on the radio and pulled over to write down words she was composing. When she went to record the song a few hours later, she called Prince.
“Don’t even ask me how I found his number but I did. I told him: ‘I’m recording this song and I wrote it to “Little Red Corvette” and I’m giving you 50 percent of it and I want to know if you’d like to come play on it on one of the next three nights.’ He was there in an hour, and he was there for about an hour and a half. And we became friends,” she told the Star Tribune.
That song became “Stand Back,” and the pair were eager to collaborate again. Prince sent Nicks a melody and invited her to pen some lyrics, recalled Nicks, explaining, “It was so overwhelming, that 10-minute track, that I listened to it and I just got scared. I called him back and said, ‘I can’t do it. I wish I could. It’s too much for me.’ I’m so glad that I didn’t, because he wrote it, and it became ‘Purple Rain.'”
