Sheila E. and Prince had a rocky relationship during their time together. At one point the pair were said to be engaged after Prince mouthed "Marry me," across a stage to her.
Although things were never end game for the duo, their love life, starting as bandmates and developing into something more, is a sweet tale.
Sheila - who will today be honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame - met Prince at a concert in the late 1970s and went on to develop a working friendship with the music icon, eventually landing backing vocals on his hit track Purple Rain.
The now 65-year-old made a name for herself, released songs like The Glamorous Life and The Belle of St. Mark and her and her band had even scored a series of Grammy nominations in 1984.
The band later became Prince's opening act on his Purple Rain tour, where the pair's romance started to blossom.
Sheila grew to admire Prince and admitted that they had "“worked together most of our lives," on hundreds of unreleased songs.
She told The Guardian: "He was inspired by the people he hung around and that’s what was so cool, he didn’t hang around the same type of people all the time. The point of growing as an artist and as a person is opening yourself up to other things."
Although she was dubious about getting romantic with a musician, she later became "obsessed" with the star.
“I came from a time of trying to stay away from sleeping with people that you work with,” she said in an interview. "But then we couldn’t resist each other.”
Prince was also involved with other woman at the time, which had left Sheila feeling scorned. She expressed that she didn't like the idea of "sharing each other" and wanted a long and healthy relationship akin to her parents', who had been married for over six decades.
Prince's former publicist Howard Bloom revealed to the New York Post in 2020 that Sheila was "obsessed with Prince and with having his children. She wanted to own Prince . . . But it was the 1980s and Prince had [plenty of] women.”
“Sheila would call me crying,” he added. “I would try explaining to her that there is no way she can get Prince to fall in love with her and worship every cell in her body the way she worships every cell in his. He was a satyr.”
Sheila then claimed that he’d once asked her to marry him but she was unsure whether it was the right idea for them at the time.
“We just grew apart,” she confessed. “I loved everything that we did together but we were at a place where it didn’t feel right to either of us.”
Before his untimely death in 2016, Prince and Sheila reported "never stopped jamming" in the studio until "a couple of years before he passed."
She's since said that she's "mad" that he's not around anymore. “I’m angry at him, and I’m thinking: ‘What could I have done?’”
