Timeless: Prince's one new song carries a familiar collection

Timeless is not the great lost Prince album. It is a 10-track vault digest, and most of it is familiar to anyone who has spent time with the bootleg side of the internet. That is not automatically a knock. Official releases of circulating material can be useful entry points. What makes this one matter is a single song: 'Bestest Friend,' recorded in 2012 and previously unheard.

Released August 28 on Legacy Recordings, the collection runs just under 42 minutes across 10 tracks. The announcement frames it as a span from Prince's earliest moments in 1977 to his death in 2016, though the tracklist itself does not date individual songs in the available listing. That makes the historical sweep a promise, not a track-by-track map. The set includes the known live version of 'How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore' as the closer, and the rest are rare or unreleased studio takes.

The reason to press play is 'Bestest Friend.' Prince recorded it in 2012, and it is described as a lush, heavily orchestrated midtempo soul ballad. That is the only entirely new material in the set. Everything else has been circulating for years, which gives the collection a split identity: a discovery for casual fans, a familiar artifact for the tape-trading crowd. The live closer and the studio leftovers should please both groups, but they will have heard most of this before.

The flaw is less in the songs than in the claim. Calling a collection like this 'rare and previously unreleased' is accurate but undercut by the reality that most of it got out. There is also no announced context, no detailed liner notes or session dates in the available material, so the record does not make its own archival case. At 42 minutes, it cannot cover 39 years of work, and the title Timeless asks a lot of a slim batch of leftovers.

As an official door into Prince's career corners, Timeless is efficient. As a haul for the fans who already have these tracks, it is essentially one song. That one song is the story, and the description makes it worth investigating. The collection is not essential and it is not a career statement. It is a careful, minor footnote, with one bright addition.

The tracklist

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