Prince Finally Pops The Big Question: 365 Prince Songs in a Year
To celebrate the incredibly prolific, influential and diverse body of work left behind by Prince, we will be exploring a different song of his each day for an entire year with the series 365 Prince Songs in a Year.
The news that Prince had gotten married to Mayte Garcia was startling to all. After all, he had a reputation for having one of the most prodigious sexual appetites in the music industry, with a seemingly endless list of conquests. If there was one person who could never be tied down, it was Prince.
And yet Garcia, a dancer who had worked with Prince since the Diamonds and Pearls tour, changed all that. While Prince was famously guarded about his life, he offered a glimpse into his mindset regarding his decision to marry Mayte in "The Holy River," a track from 1996's Emancipation.
The lyrics suggest that it was part of his ever-evolving spiritual journey. All of his running around had, by this time in his life, left him with a hollow feeling. "You surrounded yourself with all the wrong faces / Spending your time in all the wrong places," he sings, using the second person to suggest that he was referring to his previous beliefs, adding, "Relationships based on the physical are over and done / They're over and done / You'd rather have fun / With only one, with only one."
Prince found the answer in God: "And then it hit you like a fist on a wall / Who gave you life when there was none at all?" Then he switches to the first person, where he stays for the rest of the song: "And the voice inside says tonight the truth will be told / And this time I was listening, hear me." (The song's official video dramatizes the entire story. It hasn't found its way to his quickly expanding YouTube page yet, but can be viewed here.)
Having been shown the way, Prince proposes to Mayte, who accepts, changing Prince's tears from those of sorrow to those of joy. The couple married on Valentine's Day 1996, but their wedded bliss would soon change. That October, she gave birth to their son, Amiir, but he would die six days later from Pfeiffer syndrome, a rare genetic condition where bones in the skull are fused prematurely.
In her 2017 book, The Most Beautiful, Garcia revealed that, a year after Amiir's death, she and Prince had tried to have another child, but she miscarried. The two tragedies had an irreversible effect on their marriage, and they divorced in 2000.