The mysterious unreleased album Prince recorded as his female alter-ego
Even in the firm grip of a stringent record label, Prince never really cared much for artistic boundaries. In fact, he built his entire career on the opposite, staring conformity in the face until it broke under his unrelenting gaze. Once, he wrote an entire record from the perspective of a female alter-ego called Camille, his only reason for not going the whole nine yards being a glaring red light from others about what he should and shouldn’t do.
Before his legendary Sign O’ The Times, Prince tested the parameters of his own creativity with sounds, ideas, and appearances that ventured beyond the realm of expectation. Most knew and understood the vitality of his own unpredictability, mainly with his overt sexualisation and ability to push his own flamboyance in ways that challenged mainstream audiences.
With this new alter-ego, however, Prince wanted to create something that sounded so unique and distinctive that it didn’t need to be attached to his name whatsoever, a view that pushed him to champion the new material as a standalone piece. The record, which he would aptly title Camille, not only contained songs from the perspective of his female alias but saw him writing and recording with an entirely new aura, altering his vocal delivery in ways that sounded categorically un-Prince.
Part of this was to capture the register of a female version of him, but it also captured the mystique of his artistic spirituality, coming together after the abandonment of his planned LP Dream Factory in a boundless creative haze that saw him instructing Warner Brothers of his desire to break the mould completely. In this case, this took shape in the form of him telling the label he wanted to release an album without his image on the cover or his name attached to the project, which, if nothing else, likely resulted in quirked eyebrows and reluctant grunts.
Camille likely wasn’t intended to be such a pivotal abyss of enigma, but the fact that it seemed to be the result of a mildly disgruntled star in a battle to reclaim his creative freedom only added to its enduring question marks, manifesting his commitment to defiance in a world that longed to box him in. On top of this, however, was a strange development: the musician choosing to shelve his passion project entirely just weeks before its intended release without much reasoning as to why.
The most obvious would be the reaction within the label and the implications of someone as successful as Prince releasing something that wasn’t as associated with him as his usual material. However, after some perceived back-and-forth behind the scenes, and another plan for a potential triple album called Crystal Ball, he eventually released Sign O’ The Times, using some of the songs from Camille to bolster its tracklisting.
As for the remaining tracks, some were released as part of later albums, including ‘Scarlet Pussy’ and ‘Cosmic Day’, with remnants of Camille infiltrating his psyche in ways he perhaps didn’t anticipate before he ditched the idea entirely, deciding that the entire thing was “evil”. Shunning the inspiration from Camille and his desire to recreate this through another unreleased record called The Black Album, any lasting desire to nurture his female alter-ego became tainted, and suddenly, he was filled with the overwhelming desire to leave it well enough alone.
As he later explained: “I was very angry a lot of the time back then, and that was reflected in that album. I suddenly realised that we can die at any moment, and we’d be judged by the last thing we left behind.”
