35 Years Ago: Mayte Turns the Tables With ‘The Most Beautiful Boy in the World’
A gender twist on one of Prince's most popular songs, Mayte Garcia's "The Most Beautiful Boy in the World" arrived on July 22, 1994. The track was the lead single from her debut (and only) album, Child of the Sun.
Garcia began her career as a dancer, catching Prince’s eye after sending him a video tape of her performing. She would join his backing band, the New Power Generation, before later becoming romantically involved with Prince. The two were dating at the time of her album’s release and would marry less than a year later.
In her 2017 memoir, The Most Beautiful: My Life With Prince, Garcia recalled that the initial spark for her album happened during a performance alongside Prince in Spain.
"After a long, crazy concert of amazing songs, dances and love, he was preparing for the encore while I went out and worked the crowd, tossing out tambourines and saying hi to fans," she wrote. "They started chanting 'Mayte! Mayte! Mayte!' and they didn't stop, even when he came back out on stage. After a minute or so, (Prince) looked at them, looked at me, and then leaned in to shout over the noise: 'You need to do an album.'"
Despite her initial protests, within weeks, the couple were working on her debut LP. It would be released in late 1995 on Prince's NPG imprint in Europe and the UK, though it was not formally released in the U.S.
Although the 12-track album, which also included a remix of the Commodores funk hit, "Brick House," called "House of Brick (Brick House)," failed to hit commercially or critically, in her memoir, Garcia wrote that working on the project was "actually a lot of fun."
As for that specific song, Garcia confessed that Prince's original version of "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" wasn't specifically about her, as most people had assumed. Instead, it was about his love for women in general.
“I know of three women, besides me, who believe it was written specifically for them,” Garcia acknowledged in her memoir. “I hope every woman who hears it thinks it was written specifically for her. Because it was.”