Prince reportedly had a secret vault filled with thousands of unreleased songs

Hidden stash of unreleased Prince songs reportedly exists.

(Image credit: Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

published 21 April 2016

Prince may be gone, but his music is immortal. And, thanks to a mythical vault beneath his studio in Minneapolis, there could still be hundreds if not thousands of Prince songs that have yet to see the light of day.

The rumors of Prince's unreleased music vault have been swirling since at least the 1990s, when The New York Times reported a backlog "at least a thousand" tunes deep. "I think over 70 percent of the music we've worked on for Prince is yet to come out," composer Brent Fischer recently told The Guardian.

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Alan Leeds, Prince's former manager and president of his Paisley Park label, says the leaks were likely Prince’s fault, and might even have been deliberate. "We actually organized a federal investigation but we never got it down to one source. Prince gave the combination to the vault door to way too many of the staff at Paisley, in my opinion. He was careless. I remember driving Prince to the airport and on the way back I saw there were tapes in the glove compartment, tapes under the [sun] visor, tapes in the back seat. He would ride around listening to his unreleased music and just leave things all over the place." [The Guardian]

While Prince once told a friend he planned to burn everything in the vault at some point, as of his death on Thursday it appears that hasn't been done. Still, those hoping for the vault to be cracked might be biting off more than they can chew. "I don't think you'll ever get to hear everything in the vault because you'd have to sit down for 10 years. There is just too much to go through," Prince's childhood friend and bass player Sonny Thompson said.

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.

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