Other than the need for an ocasional break and some reasonable interludes of fallow brain time, I’ve never had sustained trouble with composition, even when wracked with anxiety and depression. I don’t have much experience of writer’s block. Or, perhaps, my brain chemistry has been allowed to curate such a vault for too long without oversight. I bring this up, because it turns out I have been filling a tiny Prince vault of my own. Then, in 2016, Prince passed away and the existence of his unreleased song vault was confirmed to the world (as of this writing, it’s still being catalogued, and to the best of my knowledge its true size and scope have not been revealed).

Was it quirky disinformation, an exaggeration, a misunderstanding? I assumed it must have been something of that nature when I first heard the story- even for Prince, a man whose eccentricity could barely be measured by the metrics of planet Earth, it seemed too much. Smith didn’t know quite how to take this.

One of them let slip that Prince had spent years writing and recording an entire body of hidden work- entire albums and cycles of music videos, all fully professionally produced, all locked straight away into Prince’s vault unreleased, for reasons of Prince’s own. Although no actual project emerged from that strange brief interlude, Smith was able to spend some time talking with various members of Prince’s staff. A Lynchline Subscribers-Only Update That I Just Made Public, ActuallyĪbout ten years ago, I watched a video of filmmaker Kevin Smith discussing the time he was invited to Paisley Park to participate in an extremely loosely-defined collaboration with the late Prince.

The Thorn of Emberlain by Scott Lynch