EIGHT YEARS AGO, I decided to start researching the life of Prince Rogers Nelson. He'd been a guiding light a decade before, when I'd moved away from the bro-ish small town where I grew up, and served as an inspiration while I explored my sexuality and gender identity. I'd been progressively getting deeper into his catalog as the years went by, and in my mind I planned simply to follow out this long-held fascination, make a little zine about what I learned along the way, and move on. But this seemingly fun project soon became all-consuming and only questionably fun. Soon all the books on my bedside table were Prince biographies, and whole weeks of my life went by where the only music I put on was written or produced by Prince. In short: I quickly found that Prince required dedication.
Depending on how you count it, Prince released at least 39 full-length albums in his lifetime—many of which were double and triple albums. He had upward of a couple of dozen (again, depending on how you count it) protégé projects. And he had the Vault: a legendary stockpile of unreleased (but often bootlegged) material enclosed in an actual bank vault in the basement of his Paisley Park home. The hits barely scratched the surface of his catalog. Some of his greatest songs were B-sides (“Erotic City,”“She's Always in My Hair,”“I Luv U in Me”) and album tracks (“Lady Cab Driver,”“Paisley Park,”“Adore”). His best songs of the ’90s were hidden on sprawling, self-indulgent albums. His best album of the new millennium wasn't one of the hyped-up commercial albums, but a fan club-only album called The Chocolate Invasion. Finding these gems took slogging through an incredibly hit-and-miss catalog where discount-bin hair metal and smooth jazz were fused together far too often.
While not all (or even most) of his albums were great, each album was, as Hilton Als wrote, “reflective of the current permutation of his musical mind.” This is why we as fans forgave Prince for all his musical missteps: The misses were all sincere attempts to capture the place he was at as an artist. He knew how to make a hit and presumably could have done so at any moment, but instead he followed the muse until it led to something he'd never done before. Prince summed this up best in a 1985 interview with Rolling Stone, when he said, “If I do something that I think belongs to someone else or sounds like someone else, I do something else."