Take Me With U

Take Me With U: Prince, Apollonia, and the Tender Heart of Purple Rain

In 1984 and 1985, Prince was conducting something close to total pop domination. The Purple Rain album and accompanying film had elevated him from major artist to genuine cultural phenomenon, and the singles spooling off that project were arriving with the regularity and force of a well-managed military campaign. Into that charged commercial environment came a record that surprised people: a ballad so delicate, so stripped of the electric swagger that defined Prince's best-known work, that it almost seemed to come from another artist entirely. Take Me With U was the quiet center of a very loud hurricane.

The Purple Rain Project in Full Flower

By the time Take Me With U entered the charts, Purple Rain had already produced multiple massive hits. The album was selling at rates that would eventually put its lifetime tally in the tens of millions of copies worldwide, and Prince was navigating the peculiar pressure of trying to sustain an extraordinarily successful creative moment without simply repeating it. The film had established Apollonia Kotero as both his romantic co-star and a figure in his musical orbit; her participation in the duet gave the song a biographical texture that the film's audience would read as genuine, even while the professional calculations behind any major release operated in parallel.

The Sound of Restraint

What makes Take Me With U remarkable within Prince's catalog is precisely what it withholds. The production is spare by his standards: piano, gentle acoustic textures, a vocal arrangement that places his voice and Apollonia's in an intimate, conversational register rather than the layered grandeur he typically favored. The restraint is itself a kind of mastery; making a record that sounds this simple required the same absolute technical control as making one that sounds maximally complex. The song's emotional effect depends entirely on that simplicity holding, and it does.

Climbing the Hot 100

The record debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on February 9, 1985, entering at position 61. Over the following weeks it climbed steadily, reaching its peak of number 25 on March 23, 1985. The chart run extended to twelve weeks total, a sustained presence that reflected the depth of the album's audience rather than a quick radio explosion. Twelve weeks on the chart was a genuine achievement for a ballad competing against a pop landscape that was simultaneously producing some of the decade's most flamboyant chart-toppers.

Apollonia and the Duet Tradition

The duet format carries specific romantic implications that Prince understood and exploited with characteristic precision. A male-female duet in 1985 was a declaration as much as a musical choice: it positioned both voices as participants in the emotional transaction the song described rather than one performer narrating something the other merely witnessed. Apollonia's voice, warm and unaffected against Prince's more refined instrument, contributed a naturalness that the song required. The chemistry between the two voices is audible, and that audibility was the record's most valuable asset.

The Quiet Counterpoint to Thunder

For listeners who had been electrified by the more aggressive material on Purple Rain, Take Me With U offered proof that the same artist could command attention through gentleness. It remains one of the most effective demonstrations in pop history of what controlled restraint can achieve. If you've only heard the louder sides of the album, press play on this one and discover the other half of what that year was about.

“Take Me With U” — Prince And The Revolution Duet With Apollonia's singular moment on the 1980s charts.