It’s been over a week since the passing of Prince, and the wound is still too fresh. In the days since he died, his legend has only grown, with tons of celebrities and fellow musicians coming out of the woodwork to pay their respects to his genius and to tell tales of the larger than life man.
One piece of the Prince mythos was his alleged vault at the heart of his estate, Paisley Park. Prince was extremely prolific, with his former recording engineer Susan Rogers claiming on Good Morning America that “We could put out more work in a month than most people could do in a year or more.” It’s not that Prince wasn’t releasing an extraordinary amount of music — he did release 39 albums and a number of additional musical projects as well — he just wanted to maintain a purity of creative vision. His longtime collaborator and main engineer David Z said that Prince was always hyper aware of what actually got released, saying:
“He did great stuff [but] he’d say: ‘That’s what they want from me. I don’t want to put it out.’ He wanted to be more obscure, I guess.”
Well, according to multiple sources, the vault has been opened. ABC News reports that Bremer Trust, the Minnesota company that manufactured the vault, was given the authority by Prince’s estate to drill into the vault, to which only Prince had the code. According to reports, there was so much unreleased music within that an album could come out every year for the next century with completely new material.
Whether or not fans will ever actually get to hear these unreleased tracks remains to be seen (they probably will, because money), but it’s comforting to know that they’re out there, like a final gift from Prince himself.
(Via ABC News)
