More than a decade after he recorded it and nearly five years after his death, the music of Prince is still vibrant and relevant. 60 MINUTES cameras went to Paisley Park where the late artist kept a vault of unreleased music. They got a preview of songs from the album "Welcome 2 America" which comes out this summer. The music will be played on 60 MINUTES Sunday for the first time on television. The album's lyrics deal with racial inequality and social justice and speak to the current Black Lives Matters movement. Jon Wertheim reports from Chanhassen, Minnesota just outside Minneapolis on the next edition of 60MINUTES Sunday April 11 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.
Shelby J., a vocalist who worked with Prince, tells Wertheim, "The injustice inequality, Prince knew about that firsthand, you know, growing up as a black man. He knew what that was. And he could write about it and he could sing about it," she says. "When you got Breonna Taylor, you got Ahmaud Arbery, you got the George Floyd going on, it's like we are the movement is happening. I think that the world is ready to absorb what he's saying on this album. I mean it's right on time. You know, right on time," says the singer.
Prince died in 2016 from an accidental overdose of painkillers. He was 57. He sold more albums that year than any other living musician. He was known for his five number-one hits, including the rock classic "Purple Rain." In addition to the 39 studio albums he released - roughly one every year - he recorded a near constant stream of music that ended up in the vault at Paisley Park. Shelby J. says Prince would compose music at all hours. She would often be called in to sing on the recordings in the middle of the night. "It was nothing strange about getting that call at 2:30 a.m. and he got inspired. And he wants to record something," she recalls. She would be asleep when the phone rang. "He's, like, 'You want to sing? Feel like singing?' And I'm, like, 'Yeah, Prince. I feel like singing.' He's, like, 'How soon can you get here?'"
Asked how much good material was recorded and never released, Morris Hayes, Prince's longtime keyboardist and musical director, says, "That was all the time... I'd never seen anybody that had that much work inside of them. It's just this unending stream of just music."
The Prince Estate called Troy Carter, a former manager of Lady Gaga and a Spotify executive, to sort out the collection of unreleased music and unlock it's value. "The Prince Vault is just, like-- this legendary thing. So my first visit to Paisley, of course it's the first place that I wanted to go was to-- to see the vault," says Carter "It's literally a vault," he laughs. "It's a room full of shelves floor to ceiling, with tapes. You have recorded music a video archive. Then you have a written archive...just looking at the penmanship, the drawings that he would do," he recalls to Wertheim.
Carter has high hopes for mining more of this material for Prince's legions of fans. "The fans think they've heard everything. So whenever we can find things that the fans haven't heard is like a victory," Carter says.
Watch a clip from the episode here.
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