You may not be aware of this, but Kevin Smith once worked with Prince on a documentary that was famously put in the “vault.” Although Smith’s anecdotes were pretty jarring, this was the one bit of information that stuck with me. Apparently, Prince has a vault with a shit ton of unreleased material. Movies, music videos, records, you name it. All in the vault.
“I joined Prince in 1983 when he was preparing to do Purple Rain. 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.” — Susan Rogers, Prince’s former sound engineer.
The vault is real. Read the entire piece at The Guardian.