Nearly a decade after Prince’s death, his most mythic creation isn’t an album, a concert, or a performance, it’s the vault. A real, physical room that has come to symbolise the sheer scale of his genius, and his equally obsessive secrecy.
The vault, once buried in the heart of Paisley Park, reportedly holds thousands of unreleased songs, possibly enough for 100 albums’ worth of material. That staggering figure comes from those who knew him best: collaborators, engineers, and friends who spent decades watching him record at an inhuman pace, only to move on before a track even cooled on the tape.
“He released about 40 studio albums,” author John McKie told The Mirror. “But there is probably a minimum of 100 albums unreleased, not including live shows.” McKie, who interviewed dozens of Prince’s closest collaborators for his biography, says even bandmate Morris Hayes once recalled Prince claiming “there is stuff in [the vault] that’s better than Purple Rain.”
The material was originally stored in the vault beneath Paisley Park, but in 2017, concerns over preservation led to its relocation to a secure facility in Los Angeles. That act alone underscored how precious, and fragile, the collection is.
What remains contentious, even now, is what Prince wanted done with it. During his life, he suggested the music was for his children. After his death, his sister Tyka Nelson, who inherited a sixth of his estate, said otherwise. “It was always Prince’s plan to release those songs,” she told The Sun in 2017. “I want what Prince wants... So as soon as we can release it, don’t worry, we sure will.”
Nelson’s conviction has driven a steady stream of releases from the archive. In 2021, Welcome 2 America, recorded in 2010 but shelved at the time, emerged as the first full album from the vault. “I won’t get off this planet until he gets every single solitary thing he worked so hard for and preserved for all of the world to hear,” she later told Rolling Stone.
Still, even with Welcome 2 America and other archival projects, fans have barely scratched the surface. Thousands of tapes, demos, live cuts, and experiments reportedly remain sealed away, fragments of the mind of a man who created faster than he could release.
For now, the vault endures as the final act of Prince’s mystery: a labyrinth of unreleased brilliance, waiting for the world to catch up to him one last time.
