It's hard to believe this song is from 1976. There's a maturity in writing ( especially musically ) that most composers never achieve in their lifetimes. Did his father help in this? What is the song about? I can't get this melody out of my head so I play a jazz version on piano which helps me work out how it evolved in his mind or how later songs he wrote came about. It intrigues me for other reasons too.

This is the only comment on this I can find but I don't agree with it.
“Nightingale,” another track recorded in the Anderson basement in early-to-mid 1976, is perhaps the clearest early evidence of the “soft rock” influence on Prince’s songcraft. It’s certainly the least identifiably “Black” of any of the songs we’ve discussed so far: the acoustic guitar progression is pure folk-pop, without the pronounced funk and blues elements found in “Rock Me, Lover” and “Don’t You Wanna Ride?”, respectively–though Prince’s falsetto vocal embellishments retain an unmistakable soulfulness, once again calling to mind Chaka Khan’s influence. It’s probably just the folkie arrangement and bird-related title, but I’m also reminded a bit of the Beatles’ Paul McCartney-penned 1968 song “Blackbird“; but while “Blackbird” was a (somewhat strained) metaphor for the African American Civil Rights movement, “Nightingale” seems to be literally just about a bird.


The lyrics are evocative, if again a little on the juvenile side: Prince’s character sings directly to the titular nightingale, whose voice he hears “calling out [his] name” in the night. More than anything, the song channels an ineffable loneliness; it’s easy to picture a 17-year-old Prince Nelson lying alone on his bed in the basement, listening to the birds sing and plucking out a delicate accompaniment on his guitar. The second verse, in particular, suggests that the speaker feels a closer kinship to his songbird friend than to other people: “Nightingale, though you are different than me / I feel the same / Blues come with the rain.” Finally, on the soaring bridge, he makes his feelings of isolation explicit, comparing the walls of his room to “prison walls” and avowing that the bird’s beautiful song “overcomes the pain.”

So yes, a little juvenile–it reads for all the world like the kind of Keatsian poem that would have gotten Prince an “A+” in ninth-grade English class–but poignant nonetheless. As he and his songwriting both matured, Prince would of course do much more impressive things with the soft rock influences he discovered on KQRS. But “Nightingale” shows that, at the very least, he was a quick and promising study.
[Edited 8/31/20 14:39pm]