Brand new Prince music is 'coming soon,' his estate says


Prince is said to have recorded enough unpublicized music to fill 100 albums. But there is hope for eager listeners yet: Troy Carter, an estate adviser for the Purple One, told Variety on Friday that "there will be unreleased Prince music coming soon."
The contents of Prince's "vault" are the stuff of legend, and bootlegs of some of his scrapped albums are beloved by fans. Before his fatal fentanyl overdose in April 2016, Prince "was a guy who practically lived in a recording studio," Carter said. "I heard some music the other night that was pretty mind-blowing, and we're getting some stuff mixed right now."
Carter, however, would not give Variety many other details about the upcoming release. This begs the questions: Which Prince era would a new release draw from, and who would release the music? Prince was signed to Warner Bros. Records until 1996, and Variety notes that a legal dispute over the ownership of Prince's post-Warner Bros. recordings "has made many [record labels] gun-shy" and reluctant to release his music.
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As such, Variety says "it seems possible that the material Carter is talking about comes from Prince's Warner Bros. era." So if you're hankering for some Sign o' the Times Rain, it may be time to party like it's 1999.
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Kelly O'Meara Morales is a staff writer at The Week. He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and studied Middle Eastern history and nonfiction writing amongst other esoteric subjects. When not compulsively checking Twitter, he writes and records music, subsists on tacos, and watches basketball.
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