NEW YORK (AP) – It was during a musical high – a rhapsodic rendition of “Purple Rain” – that Prince turned to his drummer, Sheila E., and asked her to marry him.
“In the midst of that song, you sometimes forget where you are,” Sheila E., a former percussionist and vocalist with Prince whose real name is Sheila Escovedo, said in an interview Friday from Minneapolis, where she’d flown upon hearing of Prince’s death.
“You’re playing and you close your eyes and you don’t realize that there are other people in the room. I opened my eyes and at that same moment he turned around because musically we had hit a place where we were at a high, and he proposed to me.”
The 58-year-old musician said she was coping with the loss of her former fiance – the two never married, but had a long collaboration – by trying to remember some of the more amusing times with Prince.
“Thirty-eight years of him and I being together, there’s just so many memories good and bad,” she said. “It’s a pit in my stomach and I’m sad and then (I) try to think of something that made me laugh so I can stop hurting.”