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May 02, 2016 Prince By Christopher Roberts

Prince passed away at his home on April 21 but he left no will and no living children (in 1996 he has a son who died of Pfeiffer syndrome a week after being born), and was also not married at the time of his death. That leaves various relatives, including his sister Tyka Nelson and his five half-siblings to sort out and divide his estate. Bremer Trust have been appointed administrator of Prince’s estate and as ABC News reports, they have now drilled open Prince’s vault at his Paisley Park estate. Prince was the only one who had the code to the fault, hence why it had to be forcibly opened. The vault is said to contain enough unreleased music to release a new Prince album every year for the next 100 years.

Prince’s previous sound engineer Susan Rogers spoke to Good Morning America (and was in the past interviewed by The Guardian prior to Prince’s passing) about the vault and has said that much of the material predates 1984’s Purple Rain and confirmed the sheer volume of unreleased material. In fact, she was the one who started the vault. “I joined Prince in 1983 when he was preparing to do Purple Rain,” Rogers told The Guardian in an article on the vault in March, 2015. “I realized it would be smart for me to get his tapes together in one place. I was aware there were a lot of pieces missing. It became an obsession. 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’s an actual bank vault, with a thick door. It’s in the basement of Paisley Park. When I left in 87, it was nearly full. Row after row of everything we’d done. I can’t imagine what they’ve done since then.”

Prince commented on the vault during an appearance on ABC’s The View in 2012, saying prophetically that “one day, someone will release them. I don’t know that I’ll get to release them. There’s just so many.” It seems likely that there will now be decades of “new” Prince albums in store.

(Via Consequence of Sound)