All right, so I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is, according to CNN, there are supposedly thousands of unreleased Prince songs out there, and the bad news is that we may never get to hear them. I know. It's a real mixed bag, especially when we're still reeling from the tragedy of Prince's unexpected death. Apparently, throughout his life and career, Prince's output was immense, much higher than most of us even realized, and, for every track or album he put out, he squirreled away a few more in the basement of Paisley Park, his studio, which came to be termed "The Vault" because of the massive amount of unreleased material it contained. And, seriously, I'm not exaggerating with words like "massive" and "thousands." But will fans get to hear Prince's unreleased music?
Brent Fischer, a composer who started working on orchestrations with Prince all the way back in 1985, estimated in an interview with The Guardian in 2015 that we've never heard the majority of the music Prince has created, saying, "I think over 70 percent of the music we’ve worked on for Prince is yet to come out. There are a lot of songs that were sent to us clearly with the idea that they would never be released." And considering this is a dude who has released 39 studio albums, totaling right around a thousand songs, it's insane to think we've only scratched the surface. And then even more insane to imagine never getting to experience all that oddball goodness waiting right under the ground at Paisley Park. But we also can't completely rule it out yet.
There's still a chance that new Prince music and/or new Prince albums will be released posthumously; it really all comes down to trying to figure out what Prince intended to happen to the collection after his death, and whether his estate will honor his intentions one way or the other. Prince has given us very conflicting information about the material entombed in the Vault. In 2012, he vowed to choose some of the best material — "every good thing in the vault" — and release it all in 2013, but that moment never came around. And then, in the completely opposite direction, Prince's manager Alan Leeds spoke to The Guardian in that same 2015 interview, revealing that Prince had told him he ultimately wanted to burn everything in the vault.
So since we don't have a clear indication one way or the other, I'm going to sit here with my fingers tightly crossed, hoping that Prince left more specific instructions, and that they including letting us listen to everything and all of it forever.
Image: Giphy
