Phew! Two posts, 30-some records in, and hundreds of songs later, we’re still only at the year 1999 in the career of Prince, but the nice part about this section is that there’s probably a lot here that most people have either never heard or never even knew existed due to Internet-only releases or simply poor sales. This period is worth a shot, though, as there’s still some great material in the man’s blood.
The Vault … Old Friends 4 Sale (1999)
The Vault is probably Prince’s weakest record, but it’s hard to blame him completely for this one. Part of the deal to get out of his Warner Bros. contract was that they could release an album of vault material when they wanted, and they chose to do this only a few months before Arista was planning on releasing his new record. Ten songs and only 40 minutes, with 25 of those minutes totally boring, leads to a complete throwaway. There’s a note on the record that says “intended 4 private use only,” which says a lot about these tracks. These weren’t the gems that supposedly exist in the vault, these were extras that Warner Brothers decided to throw out there in what seemed to simply be a move to steal his thunder before the new music came out — a “screw with us and we’ll screw with you” type of deal. The only nice part about the record was that most of the songs were not the tracks that had been bootlegged up to this point, so at least the majority of it was music that die-hards hadn’t yet heard.
