First Posthumous Prince Releases Announced

Ever since the enigmatic and prolific pop icon Prince died earlier this year, one of the subjects of keen speculation has been about what will happen to the contents of his legendary ‘Vault’ of unreleased material.

Almost precisely six months since the Purple One passed away, it has been announced that the first of the masses of officially unreleased songs will see the light of day, with a new greatest hits package from Warner Bros. plus an expanded re-issue of 1984 album Purple Rain scheduled for the coming months.

For die-hard Prince fans, the big news is a re-mastered and expanded re-issue of Purple Rain, whose second disc will include previously unreleased tracks. However, Warner Bros. has not detailed precisely which songs it will include, and the press release merely stated that it would be out in early 2017 and based on plans that had already been agreed before Prince’s death in April.

Although shows from that era have been widely bootlegged and have included known tracks like ‘Electric Intercourse’, ‘Father's Song’, ‘All Day, All Night’ and ‘Possessed’, they’ve not been collected in one place officially.

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On a possibly more cynical level, that will be trailed by a new greatest hits compilation, titled Prince 4Ever, which is coming out on November 22nd. Consisting solely of material released while he was under contract with Warner Bros (meaning no songs beyond 1996), it will consist of 40 tracks including one previously unreleased song, ‘Moonbeam Levels’.

That track, recorded for the album 1999 but eventually left off the finished album, has been doing the round on the internet and can be found on YouTube.

The compilation itself doesn’t fundamentally cover much new ground that isn’t already available on other Prince ‘best of’ packages. The other 39 include big hitters like ‘When Doves Cry’, ‘Raspberry Beret’, ‘Little Red Corvette’ and ‘Kiss’, as well as a decent clutch of album highlight cuts.

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