In the summer of 1990, during the European leg of his Nude Tour, Prince played 12 sold-out shows at London's Wembley Arena. Learning that Kate Bush was to be in attendance at one of the shows, Prince arranged for a note to be passed along expressing his admiration for her work. And in doing so, the seeds were sown for one of the most intriguing musical collaborations of the decade.
The following year, Bush got in contact with Prince at Paisley Park and asked if he would play guitar and add vocals to a new song, Why Should I Love You?, that she'd been recording at Abbey Road. When Prince's engineer Michael Koppelman asked Bush if she'd be coming to Minneapolis to work on the song, Bush told him 'No', but promised to send over the tapes from Abbey Road so that Prince could add his contributions.
"We'd spoken but we hadn't met," she told Musician magazine. "It was like working with a musical penpal."
"I think he's so talented," Bush told Melody Maker in 1993, saying that the idea of collaborating via sending tapes back and forth appealed to her sense of humour. "It was a bit of a whim, I was writing the song and I thought, Who'd be nice to play guitar?"
"There was, of course, no disco on it before Prince got his hands on it," Michael Koppelman stated in 1995. "We essentially created a new song on a new piece of tape and then flew all of Kate's tracks back on top of it. Prince stacked a bunch of keys, guitars, basses, etc, on it and then went to sing background vocals."
