Levi Seacer Jr., Prince’s right-hand man during the late 1980s and early 1990s, has spoken out about the ridiculous amount of music the iconic rock star had stored in his famous “Vault”.
Speaking to Ultimate Guitar, Seacer Jr. said: “One day, I was doing a session with Prince in Studio A, and we happened to be talking about the vault. I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve heard a lot about the vault.’ He made a quick call to his assistant engineer, and his assistant engineer brought up three binders, like two to three inches thick. Really thick.
“I said, ‘What’s this?’ He said, ‘That’s all the songs that are in the vault.’ And there were like 20 or 30 songs on each sheet of paper, in three binders. It was mind-boggling.”
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He continued: “I’m reading these titles, and I’m like, ‘Man, I wonder what that sounds like.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you pick some songs, and he’ll bring them up, and we’ll play them.’ I’d never seen anything like that. Because most artists, I don’t want to say lazy, but they’re kind of lazy about recording. But for him, it was like drinking water. He was just recording all the time. But he kept it cataloged and organized.”
Prince’s 1987 double album Sign O The Times ultimately evolved from songs picked out from this famous vault, which according to one staffer, contained “at least five hundred finished or near-finished Prince tracks” in 1989.
In one interview with Rolling Stone, Prince admitted “I didn’t always give the record companies the best song. There are songs in the vault that no one’s ever heard. There are several vaults; it’s not just one vault.”
That relationship between Prince and his record labels is a fascinating one to dig into. Speaking to MusicRadar in a recent interview, Seacer Jr. opened up about his role as the so-called ‘Prince Whisperer’, capable of getting through to the pop mega-star and smoothing out relationships in a way few could.
“I got a call from Warner Brothers, and it was Mo Ostin,” said Seacer, reflecting on the run-up to 1991 Prince & The New Power Generation album Diamonds and Pearls. “He said, ‘Levi, we got a problem.’ I’m saying, ‘What’s going on?’ He said, ‘We need a first single. We got a solid record, but all the radio guys don’t feel like they have the first single.”
Eventually, Seacer reluctantly broke the news to an understandably frustrated Prince. He departed, then woke to an unusually early call from his frontman at 7 am the next morning, asking him to run to the studio.
“I sat in the chair and he played Cream for me, on 10. It was loud. I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ He said, ‘Well, what do you think of that?’ I said, ‘Oh, man, they gonna love that.’ I mean, I knew it right when I first heard it. I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, they gonna be happy!’”
