Prince's Timeless: nine old songs and one real find
Ten vault tracks sequenced by recording date, 1977 to 2016. Only "Bestest Friend," cut in 2012, appears to be a song no one has had before.
BY JOLT Staff · AUG 29 2026 · 4 min readTimeless holds ten Prince songs that could not be bought until August 28, 2026, and you have heard nine of them before. The collection is out on Legacy Recordings and credited to NPG Records, and it runs from a 1977 tape made a year before For You to a live recording from 2016, the year he died. Exactly one track, "Bestest Friend," cut in 2012, appears to be the one song here nobody has had. The rest have circulated among collectors for years, several of them through other artists' versions.
Prince Rogers Nelson signed with Warner Bros. at eighteen and released For You two years later. Dirty Mind, Controversy and 1999 arrived by 1982. In 1984 Purple Rain made him the first singer to have a number one film, album and single in the US at the same time, and Sign o' the Times, three years on, is still his best. The contract fight with Warner ran through the nineties and cost him his name: he performed as an unpronounceable symbol from 1993 until he took it back in 2000. He kept releasing records after that, 39 of them in his lifetime, and left far more behind than he put out. He died at Paisley Park on April 21, 2016, of an accidental overdose, at 57. Welcome 2 America, the previous posthumous release, came in 2021, and this follows it.
Timeless is sequenced by recording date, first tape first, and that is the only idea in the packaging. Chris James, who worked with Prince on Art Official Age and Hit n Run Phase Two, mixed and mastered it. Charles F. Spicer Jr., James and L. Londell McMillan are the compilation producers. It is out on streaming, CD and two vinyl pressings, black and purple marble. "With This Tear" led, chosen to mark ten years since his death, with a video montage reaching back to 1958. The album was announced on June 4 with "Stone," and listening parties ran at Paisley Park through June 7. "The Guilty Ones" got a video too.
In order it plays like a discography, which is both the trouble and the only point. "I Am You" opens on a 1977 session, a Minneapolis teenager recording before anyone had a reason to care. "Tick Tick Bang" turned up later on the Graffiti Bridge soundtrack in 1990, so this cut precedes it. "Heaven" was written as an answer to "Hello," the B-side of "Raspberry Beret," and meant for The Dawn, a film Prince never made. "I Wonder" was set aside for Crystal Ball Volume II, another idea that went nowhere. "With This Tear" was cut a month after Diamonds and Pearls and given to Celine Dion, who recorded it for her 1992 album. The closer, "How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore," started life as the B-side to "1999" and ends the record live, from 2016.
"Bestest Friend" is the exception. Recorded in 2012, it is a lush, heavily orchestrated midtempo soul ballad with big, sleek horns and a guitar line that argues back at them. Four and a half minutes, and it holds every one. It is the only song here that sounds finished, and it would have been enormous live.
Two things hold the record back. The first is the selection: nine of these ten songs have been around for years, and none of them changes the story. Timeless is a stopgap. The running order makes it worse. Chronological sequencing is an archivist's choice, not a listener's, and setting the 1977 tape beside the Graffiti Bridge-era cut serves the timeline at the songs' expense. The second is "Calabama." Spicer said the album would carry no overdubs or rerecordings. The credits then named horn players Adrian Crutchfield and Lynn Grissett, who did not play with Prince until 2012, on a song recorded in 2003. A third horn player, Greg Boyer, posted that the three of them cut their parts months before release, and Spicer followed with a correction. A vault release runs on trust, and this one spends some.
It is for the completist: someone who wants the 1977 tape, the credits page, and the argument about what should have been picked instead. Everyone else gets one song. If you own the Hit n Run records, this sits beside them without disturbing much. If you wanted a new Prince album, nine known quantities will not be it. Play "Bestest Friend" and leave the rest.
That is a 2.5. The mix is clean, the mastering gives the older tapes room, and "Bestest Friend" is a real find. One song does not carry ten. The other nine have been out there for years, and another pressing will not change that.
