Songfacts®:

• This jaunty glam song about the wages of stardom comes with multiple allusions to the actual Prince.
  
  Once upon a time, there was a prince
  He tried to save the world with funk rock riffs
  
  Rivers Cuomo told Entertainment Weekly that he didn't set out to write a song about The Purple One, however as he was working on the track and listening to it every day, he "just couldn't help but be reminded of him and his story."
  
  Cuomo added that he has been a big Prince fan from around the age of 20, and he "just started tweaking the lyrics to make some Prince references."
• English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1818 sonnet Ozymandias is about how the legacies of rulers with their pretensions to greatness are fated to fade into oblivion. Cuomo told Entertainment Weekly that he was thinking about that poem when he wrote this song.
  
  "I probably read that in ninth grade," he said. "I think it's been a recurring theme in Weezer, from album one: the pointlessness and vanity of creative effort, in my case. Everything will be forgotten."
• "The Prince Who Wanted Everything" is part of Weezer's Black Album. By this time, it was hard for the band to get radio play, so they looked to non-traditional means of promotion. This led to a partnership with Fortnite, which just before the album was released, created an island called "Weezer World" within the game where songs from the album played and Weezer iconography was everywhere. This was a great way for the band to reach a younger audience.
  
  In 20024, Weezer teamed with Fortnite again for an island called "Sweat(er) City," a play on their fist single, "Undone - The Sweater Song."