The Family

Prince side project · Paisley Park, 1985

The Family were one of the first acts signed to Prince’s Paisley Park label, formed in 1984 around St. Paul Peterson and Susannah Melvoin. Their only album, released in 1985, carried the first recording of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ — buried as an album track, never a single. The band dissolved almost immediately and later reformed as fDeluxe; it is a quiet irony of pop history that they cut one of the era’s most famous ballads first, and almost nobody knows it.

Who recorded it

Songs The Family recorded first

Nothing Compares 2 U

Recorded it first — now often credited to Sinéad O’Connor

Did they really say it?

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