With the passing of Prince, many longtime fans are wondering just how deep his catalog of unreleased music really stretches. While The Purple One certainly maintained his archives with close scrutiny, investigative reports have only scratched the surface of this treasure trove.
The BBC News put together a documentary called Hunting For The Vault, with tidbits from engineers, managers, collaborators and more. According to filmmaker Mobeen Azhar, “there is enough unreleased studio material for him to put out an album a year for the next 100 years.” You can watch a clip from the documentary below:
Azhar recently spoke to the NY Daily News about what he knows of the mysterious vault. “There’s a wealth of material in there,” he said. “He had entire promotional videos for songs that were never released, and also two feature length movies that are in the vault, as well.”
Not only that, but the recording of every live show is kept in the vault as well. Prince’s former tour manager, Alan Leeds, said “You could do a box set of 10 CDs of live concerts from the various eras of his career.”
Apparently the Vault was started by Prince’s first manager, Susan Rogers, during the early 1980s. “I wanted us to have everything he’d ever recorded. I called up the studios he’d been using and said: ‘Have you got any Prince tapes?’ This is his legacy. We need to protect these things.”
“It has a bank vault door. It’s really, really thick. It has the wheel on it, just like you’d see in a bank vault… When I left in ’87, it was nearly full, so I can’t imagine what they’ve done [since]. It was just row after row after row of everything we did.”
So what happens to all of this unreleased music in the absence of Prince? That remains a mystery, though we can only hope that someone as calculated as Prince had a plan in mind for the world after his death. It would be a tragedy to have this glorious musical collection go unheard by the public.
“Knowing that Prince likes to be in control of every aspect of everything he does, I would hope and I would imagine that he has entrusted it all to someone,” said Azhar. “But whether we will be hearing any new albums coming out soon, I just don’t know.”
[Via NY Daily News]