Five years after Prince’s disappearance, the exploration of his treasure chest continues and the release of an unreleased album, Welcome 2 America, is scheduled for July 30, said Legacy Recordings, a Sony label.
The title track will be broadcast as a scout on streaming platforms from Thursday, April 8. We can hear Prince declaiming, in spoken and sung, that America is “a land of freedom (but also) a home for the slave “.
The album, which dates from 2010, is taken from “The Vault”, the legendary vault of the “Kid of Minneapolis”, nestled in his domain-place of creation-studio in Paisley Park. It is a cave of fantasies where sleep an indeterminate number of nuggets (demos, albums finished or not, live recordings, collaborations etc).
Prince (who died on April 21, 2016 at the age of 57) skillfully maintained the legend around his hidden treasures during his lifetime, through his nebulous statements to the press. “I haven’t always given labels the best song. There are songs in the Vault that no one has ever heard (…) tons of stuff recorded during different time periods.”, he launched to Rolling Stone in 2014.
Over the past two years, the reference albums, 1999 and Sign o’ the times had in particular been reissued (at Warner) in river versions enriched with copious unpublished (around sixty for Sign o’ the times). Regarding this novelty, the American channel CBS was able to listen exclusively to the 12 tracks of Welcome 2 America and will devote his show to it 60 minutes, Sunday April 11.
To shed some light on the album’s theme and keep fans going, Legacy Recordings released a prophetic statement from Prince in 2010: “The world is straining because of disinformation. George Orwell’s vision for the future is here. We owe it to ourselves to remain steadfast in our faith through the difficult times that lie ahead.“.
The deluxe boxed version will include the album and an unreleased full concert by Prince, accompanied by his famous band, New Power Generation, performed at the Forum in Los Angeles on April 28, 2011. Shortly after completing this mystery album, Prince put on in fact, an eponymous tour is underway, “Welcome 2 America“.
The video concert will show Prince with the 2011 version of New Power Generation, a variable geometry formation. At the start of this tour, Prince had warned: “Bring your friends, bring your kids, and something to cool your feet, because it’s gonna be funky“.
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