PRINCE - Timeless

On April 21, 2016 we lost forever one of the greatest geniuses of contemporary music. Prince Roger Nelson would have had so much more to share with the world, even though he gave his best in the unforgettable run of albums recorded throughout the Eighties. What followed was a lot of self-celebration, a compositional bulimia that kept producing the occasional genuinely successful work, without ever again reaching the heights that made him famous. Despite a hyper-prolific career, there are tons of recordings, demos, rough cuts, even entire albums, kept under close guard in his personal archives - a treasure trove comparable in scale perhaps only to the artistic legacy of Frank Zappa, though we'll never know the exact numbers.
In the year marking ten years since his passing, here's a collection of ten "unreleased" tracks spanning the entire career of the Minneapolis Prince, though some of them - even though never released in the versions included here - aren't exactly news, at least not for fans. That's the case with the not-entirely-convincing "Tick Tick Bang", a non-definitive take (dating back to the "Controversy" sessions, 1981) of the track that - re-recorded, more effectively arranged and with a different lyric - would end up in 1990 on "Graffiti Bridge", both on the album and in the film. For the die-hards, the song features an uncredited sample of Jimi Hendrix's "Little Miss Lover", which appeared in 1969 on Jimi Hendrix's "Axis: Bold As Love".

At the two opposite ends of "Timeless" sit the two most significant songs in the collection, representing the beginning and the epilogue of Prince's artistic journey. "I Am You" is an unreleased track from 1977, dating back to the "For You" sessions, a sprightly piece of funk that Prince played during the first two concerts of his solo career, in January 1979, but which was never included on any album. Some elements would later be used to complete other songs written by Prince, the rare "I Don't Wanna Stop" from 1980, and "I Don't Wanna Leave You", released by The Time in 1982.
At the other end we find "How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore", a live piano-and-voice recording captured during Prince's final live performance, on April 14, 2016 in Atlanta, just a week before his death. "How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore", originally the b-side of the "1999" single, was also covered by other artists, including Alicia Keys, who included it on her 2001 debut album "Songs In A Minor" (which sold over twelve million copies worldwide), under the slightly altered title "How Come You Don't Call Me".  

In between there are eight more songs, arranged in strict chronological order, touching on some of the musical genres Prince explored throughout his career, from the ultra-glossy ballad "With This Tear" (written for Celine Dion, who included it on her self-titled 1992 album) to the rock-oriented forays of "The Guilty Ones", recorded in 2007. The lively "Calabama" is the title track of a mysterious album that never saw the light of day, the electro-funk "Heaven" was meant to be part of a musical that never got made ("The Dawn"), "I Wonder" is an intriguing unreleased track from 1989, and "Bestest Friend" is the most recent find, recorded in 2012.
The management overseeing Prince's archives and musical legacy has recently announced that new projects are on the way: an expanded edition of "3121", an ambitious project built around "Parade", live recordings, a couple of musicals, one of them inspired by "Purple Rain", and perhaps even a biopic bound for movie theaters. Meanwhile, the massive digitization of all the material kept in the vault is underway: it will take years to complete the process, and perhaps not even a whole lifetime would be enough to listen to it all — but is that really so essential?

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04/09/2026