*In January 2014, Prince sat down with Rolling Stone magazine for a cover story that for whatever reason was never published.
In the wake of Prince’s death on April 21, the magazine has released some excerpts from the interview with writer Brian Hiatt, including discussions about his religious faith, remaining celibate, the vault of unreleased music, and his relationship with Chris Brown and the late Michael Jackson, who passed away in 2009.
Read excerpts below:
On his unreleased music:
I’ve never said this before, but 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.
Are there full unreleased albums?
Yeah, I like time capsule stuff. I have a couple Revolution albums in the vault and two Time albums, one Vanity 6 album … and tons of stuff recorded in different periods. But so much gets recorded that you don’t have time to compile everything. In the future you could put all the best stuff from one particular time period together and then you can release it. It’d just be like if we found a Sly and the Family Stone album and they saved their best stuff. If that’s even possible!
You’ve said that you’re celibate.
Yeah, I’m celibate.
Like, for real?
Well, it’s all physical; all of that then turns into other things. Libido is energy. I go back and forth. It’s like fasting: it’s a practice and you get better at it over time, you know, but no one is perfect … With fasting, after four days, you don’t want food anymore. You’ve got this thing that says “feed me, feed me,” and then when it realizes it’s not going to get fed, it goes away.
In the old days, you hooked up with some of your female collaborators.
I just see beauty in everybody now. When you’re a kid, you go, “She’s the finest. I want to be with her only.” And then you hook up with her and you realize that’s not the case ’cause here comes, you know, Saturday. [Laughs hard]
On religion:
“It’s just all expanded,” he explained of becoming a Jehovah’s Witness in 2001, after being introduced to the religion by his bassist Larry Graham. “Anything I believed then, I believe even more now — it’s just expanded.”
On Michael Jackson’s death:
I don’t want to talk about it. I’m too close to it.
He continued, “He is just one of many who have gone through that door — Amy Winehouse and folks. We’re all connected, right, we’re all brothers and sisters, and the minute we lock that in, we wouldn’t let anybody in our family fall. That’s why I called Chris Brown. All of us need to be able to reach out and just fix stuff. There’s nothing that’s unforgivable,” he said.
