100 secret albums: Inside Prince’s secret vault of unreleased music
There are few things in music more legendary or rumoured about than Prince‘s vault. It has been said that there are 100 albums worth of songs in the vault, with one particular tale suggesting that over 8,000 songs lie in the late star’s secret song stash. The Paisley Park vault is a mystery to everyone but those entrusted with guarding the legacy of a musician, the like of which we are unlikely to experience again.
Prince was the one to name it the vault, in fact, it’s more of a warehouse underneath the place that he lived and worked. When he died in 2016, Prince left no children, no long-term partner, and no last will and testament. His entire estate entered into a legal struggle that continues to this day, with a bank managing all access to his finances – and, more importantly, his archive of unreleased work.
Of course, a bank has no business managing music, so it entrusted Troy Carter, a former Spotify executive and Lady Gaga’s ex-manager, to take over its contents. Carter began relocating the vault’s contents to a more fitting place for such musical archiving, a climate-controlled storage facility in Los Angeles ominously named Iron Mountain.
It’s said that the unreleased music is recorded in its near entirety by Prince himself. He is rumoured to have played every instrument, sang every line and written an unholy amount of tracks for one man. It’s a testament to his skill, unparalleled as it remains. It’s clear that Prince was one of the greatest guitarists ever to exist, but what isn’t as obvious is how many secrets Prince was keeping behind locked doors.
Last year, as if the clouds parted ways, Paisley Park held Celebration. Marking seven years since the icons passing, the estate opened its doors to celebrate a number that held huge significance in the life of man himself. During the event, two songs were revealed: ‘7 (E Flat Version)’ and ‘All A Share Together Now’. The latter, a fabulously jazzy, bass-led song that wouldn’t sound out of place on The Rainbow Children album touches on the shared history of humanity, reaching across borders and time to find the unity long searched for, never gained. The former, a version of Prince’s track ‘7’ from his 14th album, transposed to the key E flat. The lower version highlights just how versatile Prince really was, it feels funkier somehow, the same song but almost gospel, the lyrics seem more prominent, more tangible.
Carter acknowledges the great task before him as the guardian of Prince’s legacy, telling Jon Wertheim of 60 Minutes, “Whenever we can find things that the fans haven’t heard, it’s like a victory”. The victory is one hard fought by Prince himself. In 1993, Prince entered into a battle with his record label to own the masters of his music, he dropped his name, using only a symbol and displayed the word “slave” across his face to highlight the plight of a working black artist who’s work is not their own. Eventually, Prince won the battle, but the war to monetise and share his music has only just begun.
If there truly are 8,000 unreleased songs in Prince’s vault, his estate could release one track per day from the day he died, April 21, 2016, and we would have every Prince song released by March 17th, 2038. If the estate were to start that work from October 1st, 2024, we could get a new Prince song every single day until August 27, 2046. That’s nearly 22 years of a never-heard-before Prince recording every day. It is an incredible amount of work for one artist, almost unbelievable. Then again, he was Prince.
