So I'm driving down the highway tonight and it's finally a little chilly out, so I've got the heat on and the windows cracked a little, so there's cool air, but I'm warm. Smoking a cigarette. And I'm driving down the highway, and there's hardly any traffic, and I'm blowing along through the dark at about 75 or so (120 for the Canucks ), and I turn on the radio (yep, not the satellite or the MP3 player, just the old-fashioned FM for a change ), and Duran Duran's Rio comes on. Now I was never a Duran Duran fan when I was a kid back in the Eighties. Wasn't my thing. But nowadays I have a sort of nostalgic appreciation for all sorts of swill I never gave a second look back then. So I turn it up and cruise along and I'm listening to the words, maybe for the first time in my life. Sure, I've heard the song a thousand times before, but I'm not sure I've ever really paid attention to the words. Her name is Rio and she dances on the sand Just like that river twists across a dusty land And when she shines she really shows you all she can So, her name is Rio, and she's like...the Rio Grande? She's like...a mosquito-infested ditch? I mean seriously; the Rio Grande? It's got an ambitious name, but clearly Simon Le Bon has never actually seen our historic little irrigation canal. Canal? No, sorry. It's a ditch. lol But anyway, then Prince's When Doves Cry came on, and I thought, Now there's a song that I spurned in my younger days; but Prince was a poet through-and-through. Still is, I suppose. So some pop cotton cruising home down the highway tonight....
Ahhh, you know I don't think I've heard any other versions. Did Prince re-do it for that, or did somebody cover it? Googling....