An unreleased Prince album recorded in 2010, Welcome 2 America, will be released this July.
Fans of Prince will know it’s quite likely that the Purple One has enough unreleased material in his vault to release a new record every year for the next thirty years. However, the partnership between Prince’s estate with the Sony label Legacy Recordings to release the archived material, marks an entry into that vast archive of unreleased recordings.
The title track to Welcome 2 America has been released, featuring spoken-word lyrics reminiscent of Prince‘s career in the early 1990s when he announced he was enslaved to his record label Warner.
The twelve-track album, recorded at the hallowed Paisley Park, will arrive on July 30th. The record promises a searing indictment of America’s divided political landscape; touching on “golden parachutes, the superficial nature of social media, reality TV-fueled celebrity culture, and corporate monopolies in the music industry, ultimately concluding that America is the ‘Land of the free/home of the slave.”
“Prince’s concerns, hopes and visions for a shifting society, presciently foreshadowing an era of political division, disinformation, and a renewed fight for racial justice,” the announcement read.
The release also features a quote about the album from Prince himself, “The world is fraught with misin4mation. George Orwell’s vision of the future is here. We need 2 remain steadfast in faith in the trying times ahead.”
Check out Prince’s track “Welcome 2 America”:
Two posthumous collections have been released since his untimely death in 2016: the acoustic set Piano and a Microphone from 1983, and Originals, a compilation of demos of songs that he wrote for other artists.
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Expanded versions of the albums Purple Rain, 1999 and Sign O’ the Times have also been issued, featuring unreleased tracks from the vault.
In January this year legendary drummer Sheila E announced a new biopic set to detail the “beautiful story” of her relationship with Prince. Sheila and Prince met back in the late 1970s and first collaborated years later during the recording sessions for Purple Rain.
