An officially sanctioned, new Prince album will be released in September. The news comes on the heels of the second anniversary of Prince’s death and the release of his long-unheard original 1984 version of “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Prince estate entertainment adviser Troy Carter, gave a long and detailed interview to Variety and spoke in depth about the future of Prince’s thousands of hours of unheard music.
Carter explained how the estate has gotten to the point of actually releasing material from the vault, revealing, “The last year was really about information collecting: meeting with various partners, meeting with the heirs and (estate executor) Comerica and figuring out what partners we need to bring on to help execute that vision. First and foremost, it was about organizing the vault and finding out what music exists, what footage exists, photos, personal notes, letters. Prince basically saved everything, so there are decades of music and video and artifacts, but it takes long time to go through each one of those and research the historical context: where is this from, who did he collaborate with, where was it recorded, what year, was it the final version?”
When asked if the new album will span the decades or fit in with a specific era, Carter said: “This will be more time-specific. Michael Howe, who’s been working with us on the archive, has done a tremendous job of finding some special pieces of work, and one of the pieces that he found, all of us fell in love with it and decided this was special enough for fans to hear. So we’re putting the final touches on it — it’ll come in the fall.”
He went on to explain the amount of material in the vault: “Prince recorded and rehearsed and performed constantly, and he taped everything, so once you think you’ve gotten close (to finding everything), you find new things. The vault was just one room and that room ran over into multiple rooms, and this was (mostly) before digitization so you have hard drives, and tapes and things like that. So we’re still in the process, and the fun part of my job is finding new things — every week I’m getting a new call about something special. Just two weeks ago we were doing a tape transfer and in one of the two-inch boxes we found the original lyrics to ‘Kiss’! It’s amazing, the things that are starting to surface.”
Troy Carter went on to say, that amazingly, Prince is still a part of the creative process: “He wrote down his thoughts and plans and how he ran his business, so he pretty much left a blueprint of how things should go. So listening to the music, the demos, seeing some of his notes and tape notes, you really get an idea of how his mind worked, and I’m honored to get a glimpse of his process. A little bit of what you saw in the ‘Nothing Compares. . .’ video — those were rehearsal tapes, so just seeing him work in rehearsal as if it was Madison Square Garden, performing for his bandmates like there were 100,000 people there, that was a beautiful process to watch.”
Along with Bob Dylan and the Beatles, Prince remains one of the most bootlegged performers in all of rock history — a fact that caused him tremendous grief during his career: “A lot of my ‘so called’ fans, they actually thrive off the fact that it’s stolen property. The best thing you can do is go back and get those mixes again and fix them up the way you always saw them completed, and then, y’know, reissue ’em.”
