Prince’s Vault Opens With 10 Unheard Tracks

I was privileged to have seen Prince live at the Gorge in 1997. My lasting memory of that night was seeing him rip it on guitar. I lived in Seattle at the time. After the show, I stayed in a hotel in East Wenatchee, where Fred Meyer now stands. I remember waking up and walking to the car, looking out across Wenatchee and seeing the jagged rock formations of Saddle Rock, not knowing that this beautiful valley would in ten years' time become my home.

Now, ten years after his passing in 2016, Price's family released nearly four decades of work on one album.

The Prince Estate dropped "Timeless" at midnight, ten previously unreleased tracks pulled from the vault and arranged to trace his entire career — 1977 to 2016, teenage prodigy to final recorded performance. It's the first posthumous release the estate has structured this way, deliberately spanning every creative era rather than focusing on one period or sound.

The oldest track, "I Am You," was recorded in 1977 at Sound 80 in Minneapolis. Prince only performed it live twice, both nights at the Capri Theater in January 1979 — his very first public shows.

A Song Almost Lost to Celine Dion

One track carries a stranger backstory than most. "With This Tear," recorded solo at Paisley Park in November 1991, was originally written for someone else entirely. Prince gave it to Celine Dion, who included it on her 1992 self-titled album. The version on "Timeless" is the one he kept for himself, and it's easy to hear why he almost let it go — the kind of song built for a different voice, until you actually hear it in his.

"The Guilty Ones," recorded in October 2007 at Paisley Park with engineer Ian Boxill, rounds out the collection's later years, featuring backing vocals from Marva King and Shelby J.

(Photo by Chelsea Lauren/Getty Images for NPG Records 2015)

Ten Years Later, Still Full of Surprises

The album lands squarely on the tenth anniversary of Prince's death — he passed in April 2016 at 57 — and it's only the fourth full collection of vault material released since. Chris James, one of Prince's former sound engineers, remastered every track and sequenced them in the order they were originally conceived.

For fans across the Wenatchee Valley who grew up on "Purple Rain" and "1999," "Timeless" offers something rarer than a greatest-hits repackage: genuine unheard material, arriving a full decade after anyone assumed the vault had given up its best surprises.

Here is the "Timeless" tracklist:

1. "I Am You" (1977)
2. "Tick Tick Bang" (1981)
3. "Heaven" (1985)
4. "I Wonder" (1989)
5. "With This Tear" (1991)
6. "Stone" (1995)
7. "Calabama" (2003)
8. "The Guilty Ones" (2007)
9. "Bestest Friend" (2012)
10. "How Come You Don't Call Me Anymore?" (Live – 2016)