Photo: Press
Prince’s former sound engineer has confirmed that not only is there actually a vault of Prince’s unreleased music, but that she is the one who started the vault in the first place.
Speaking with the BBC, Susan Rogers, who served as Prince’s recording engineer from 1983 to 1987, said that when she began working for him, she had “a little bit of downtime”. He was preparing to make his film Purple Rain and, because she was a new employee, he wasn’t quite sure what to do with her after she had prepared the equipment. So, Rogers realised it would be smart for her to gather all of his tapes and to keep them in one place.
Once she noticed that a lot of the tapes were missing, she started calling recording studios Prince had worked at and began collecting the masters. “It became a little bit of an obsession,” she admits. In case there were ever a tornado or a flood, she wanted to have everything Prince had ever recorded stored in the vault. “This is his legacy,” she says, “we need to protect these things”.
Rogers says that the Paisley Park vault – which is an actual bank vault, big wheel and all – was nearly full when she left in 1987, so she “can’t imagine what they’ve done” since.
According to Brent Fischer, a composer who has collaborated with Prince since the 80s, over 70% of the music she has worked on with him has yet to be released. “There are lot of songs that were sent to us clearly with the idea that they would never be released. They were almost comical songs that he would work out with his horn players. There was lot of wild horn parts and experimentation with samples."
As to what the future holds for the vault, Prince’s former manager Alan Leeds says that during a conversation he had with the Purple One in the early 90s, Prince said he would "just burn everything" one day. But with the amount of times Prince has teased fans with promises of sharing previously unreleased music, burning the vault’s collection seems (hopefully) unlikely.
