Tucked away deep inside a maximum-security storage facility in Hollywood, the contents of Prince’s storied vault are being pored over daily in one of the most laborious research jobs in modern pop culture.
Following his death in 2016, Prince’s fabled vault at Paisley Park was opened, and all of its secrets — reportedly “thousands and thousands” of unreleased recordings — moved to Iron Mountain, a data recovery center in Los Angeles, for safekeeping and to begin the work of figuring out what music, exactly, Prince had saved. At the helm of it all is one man: Michael Howe, a former record-label executive and Prince colleague who last year volunteered to oversee the excavation and preservation of Prince’s life work at the request of Prince’s estate, run by his heirs (the six siblings), the bank entrusted as its executor, and Troy Carter, the Spotify exec who also works as the estate’s entertainment adviser.
Together, but mostly at Howe’s sole recommendation, they are working to catalog Prince’s archives so that some of it might eventually be released. This week, the estate releases Piano & a Microphone, one of Howe’s many findings that dates back to 1983. It features Prince singing alone at his piano — as he did on his final tour — covering Joni Mitchell and performing “Purple Rain.” Vulture spoke with Howe over the phone about working in total secrecy, protecting Prince’s wishes, and just how much music there is in the vault.
For people unfamiliar with your job, can you explain what your role as Prince’s archivist actually means?
I’m the guy who is responsible for the organization and preservation of the audiovisual materials in Prince’s vault. Basically, the entire contents of his recorded output, both released and unreleased.When did you get brought on?
Well, I worked with Prince when he was alive, when I worked as an A&R at Warner Bros. records. So I was in his orbit [when] he passed away and stayed involved during the process in the aftermath of his passing when the estate was trying to figure out a lot of things with respect to the heirs. I was observing from the periphery at that point but in contact with that team of people pretty regularly. So when the need arose last October to have somebody doing what I’m doing I put my hand up very happily.Did you get to see the original vault at Paisley before coming onboard?
No I hadn’t. I had been in and out of Paisley Park many times but never in the vault itself. I never saw it, nor did I ask — not that I would’ve been granted access to it at the time, anyway — but it was not something I thought was either appropriate or within the scope of what I was doing with him at the time to even bring it up.When people hear the word vault, it sounds mythic. Almost like a safe at a bank packed with cash and gold bars. But what does the facility where the vault has been transferred to now actually look like? I understand a lot of it has been digitized.
It’s in the process of being digitized — there’s a tremendous amount of stuff. I should issue the caveat that I’ve had to sign an NDA, so I can’t be specific about a lot of things. But the vault, as we’re talking about, is in a really secure facility in Hollywood that houses a lot of other valuable entertainment assets from films, other recorded music masters, memorabilia, etc. It’s a climate-controlled, very secure, natural-disaster–retrofitted fortress in Hollywood. And the room itself where all of the audiovisual stuff and some of the other materials is stored is relatively nondescript. It’s a very unsexy environment, a utilitarian sort of space that has everything basically on unpenetrable shelves. It’s mostly analog tapes that take up a lot more space.What’s your day-to-day like trying to catalog all this stuff? Has this become a full-time, everyday job?
It’s such an enormous volume of materials and hasn’t historically been organized in any conventional way. I sort of look at the job as if I were sitting in the MoMA or the Louvre or some other institution with priceless paintings and trying to make sense of who was involved, what the chronology was, and trying to draw a through-line. The easiest way to do that is chronologically. What we’ve been doing is looking at the entire body of work and attempting to start as far back as we can, both because it presents an easier path forward and, largely, so those artifacts that have the most chance of being damaged we can get to quicker. It betters the chances of full preservation. We’ve been lucky that almost everything we’ve come across has been in remarkably good shape. The path hasn’t been completely chronological because there are commercial considerations that enter the frame and require us to pivot and accommodate them. But the guiding principal is to do it with as much completeness, respect, and integrity possible. We hope to do it right the first time and never have to touch the physical assets again.And I talk to Troy [Carter] over email probably every day. I don’t have a lot of interaction with the family, but I attend some of what they call the heirs’ meetings every couple of weeks. But I communicate mostly with Comerica Bank, who are the custodians of the estate; Troy; the lawyers; and Iron Mountain, where the facility is. I work five days a week, eight hours a day.
What’s the earliest item you’ve found?
There are things that predate Prince’s first recording agreement with Warner Bros., which was signed in late 1977. There are things of all eras through his creative evolution. It’s pretty remarkable and humbling. He was so titanically creative and wildly prolific that it’s a little bit difficult sometimes to draw the line where one era ends and another begins.Is he the most prolific artist you’ve ever worked with in this capacity?
By orders of magnitude, yes.When you come across a tape like Piano & a Microphone, what’s the process for verifying it’s from 1983?
There are a couple ways we determine it. A lot of the things in the vault have very specific notes or distinguishing characteristics that date them within a couple of months. Or we can identify Prince’s writing, the engineer’s writing, or the kind of tape stock that was used. There are a many number of ways to narrow things down if we’re unsure. Also the material that’s being performed and the creative state that’s in, in some cases, gives us a pretty good idea about things that are less clearly marked. In the case of Piano & a Mic, this recording has floated around in the bootleg and collector community for a number of years, albeit in a very substandard audio quality. I was aware of it and found the performance so captivating.So one of the first things I attempted to do when taking the job was to see if we could locate the master recording, which I assumed was on cassette because of the era and sonic characteristics of it. So we did a bit of detective work and were able to narrow a wide pool of candidates. We spotted this one that had Prince’s handwriting on the label on side B and it said “Cold Coffee & Cocaine” and “Why the Butterflies,” which are the final two songs of the recordings. We were pretty sure we had it. Once we analyzed it, inserted it into the machine, and digitized it, we were fortunately correct.
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