Everyone knows that Prince was sitting on a simply astronomical amount of his own material, but it looks like even our wildest guesses as to how much unreleased music resides in Paisley Park were too conservative. In a previously unpublished interview with Rolling Stone, The Purple One revealed that he has several albums’ worth of material with the Revolution, as well as unheard full-lengths from The Time and Vanity 6.
Via the interview, which Rolling Stone will publish in full in their next issue:
“Are there full unreleased albums?
Yeah, I like time capsule stuff. I have a couple Revolution albums in the vault and two Time albums, one Vanity 6 album … and tons of stuff recorded in different periods. But so much gets recorded that you don’t have time to compile everything. In the future you could put all the best stuff from one particular time period together and then you can release it. It’d just be like if we found a Sly and the Family Stone album and they saved their best stuff. If that’s even possible!”
Of course, the Revolution tidbit is juicy. But there might be another Ice Cream Castles in there, as well. My mind can barely comprehend a song that knocks “Jungle Love” and “The Bird” off the throne.
Prince also said that he believes much of his hidden material is better than the stuff he released.
“I’ve never said this before, but I didn’t always give the record companies the best song. There are songs in the vault that no one’s ever heard. There are several vaults; it’s not just one vault.”
Prince told the magazine that he was thinking of releasing them when he no longer wanted to “speak in the present tense.” A very Prince-ly way of saying “when I run out of new ideas.” Of course, because he’s Prince, that never happened. In the interview, he goes on to say that he doesn’t really plan to retire from music and that he doesn’t think about death.
Check out the whole thing over at Rolling Stone.
