Love Symbol

HISTORY OF THE GLYPH & LOVE SYMBOL GUITAR

Prince was so thrilled by the quality of the sound that from the Auerswald guitar, he is said to have re-recorded all of the guitar tracks of his album Sign o’ the Times with this new guitar.

In 1993, Prince became embroiled in a contract dispute with his label, Warner Brothers, which sought to limit his prolific output to suit the pace of the marketing department. To reclaim his artistic independence, he changed his name to [symbol] and began appearing in concerts with the word “slave” written across his face in protest of the industry. As part of his new identity as the artist formerly known as Prince, he had instrument maker Jerry Auerswald design and build this guitar in the shape of his eponymous symbol. Prince used variations and copies of this instrument in live performances, including at the 2007 Super Bowl halftime show.

The Prince glyph — iconic, inscrutable, unpronounceable — was created in fine-tip Sharpie by a 24-year-old freelance artist.

Few people know her name. Even Prince used to call her “that girl.”

But the symbol that Lizz Frey first jotted in loose lines on a scrap of sketch paper back in 1992 has been reproduced countless times and in countless media — in newsprint, album covers and pulsing purple stage lights — since becoming synonymous with the artist himself.

The glyph started as a design for the 1992 single “7.”

“He said please make a beautiful seven,” Frey said. “I drew it by hand,” she said of the sketch, which she has held onto to this day.

When he saw it, “He changed his mind and said we’ll use it for the entire album. Then he drew a circle with a cross over it, and said that’s what he wanted.”

Frey next sat at a computer with Mitch Monson of the Minneapolis firm HDMG design, who scanned in her image, refining its lines to her specifications.

And that was the birth of the androgynous male-female glyph, which Prince called the “Love Symbol” and which became his name from 1993 until 2000, to the torment of untold typesetters and his record label Warner Bros.

“He said to me, ‘You have to understand, this symbol is very important,’ ” she remembered.

Even Prince couldn’t pronounce his new name.

“He said, ‘The pronunciation exists on a different level of existence,’ ” Frey recalled.

The content in this page is for demonstrative purposes only.