Everybody who treasured Prince’s run of perfect albums in the 1980s knew that he’d have a hard time topping that decade’s output—and that group included the artist himself. On “Don’t Play Me,” a song from the mostly-acoustic 1997 album The Truth, he casually included the line “my only competition is, well, me in the past,” making it part of his newly independent, post-corporate blues.
Being a Prince fanatic requires some kind of attitude about the music that comes after his golden era: You can reject it outright, defend it all, or land somewhere in between. But we all know the story didn’t stop in 1993. The profusion of post-name change, seemingly-throwaway mid-’90s records on Warner Bros. that “The Artist” used to get out of his contract all contain gems and head-scratchers—and when he started his own NPG Records, he seemingly ramped up the production schedule for both types of recordings.
His post-Warners discography includes the following (and more): all-time classic funk bangers, seductive R&B grooves, galvanizing rock, some of the best blues guitar playing you’ve probably never heard, a classical project, jazz fusion excursions, and sensuous balladry. While Prince continued releasing official full-lengths right up through 2015’s HITNRUN Phase Two, it was clear as far back as the mid-’90s that the album format was probably no longer the ideal format for experiencing his stylistically gonzo, latter-day output. After all, this is the guy who sent out CD-ROMs and limited edition VHS tapes, who sometimes charged for “online music clubs” that dispensed individual MP3s.
The fans who hung with Prince through all of these ventures often considered themselves vexed. You can find thousands of old posts on fan sites and message boards about what Prince should have released more widely and what he should have buried (along with people asking where their promised fan-club T-shirt went). But we also believed.
Every time you thought you might be done paying attention to his new music, Prince had a way of sending you a surprise single, or a live excerpt, that reconfirmed everything you loved about his virtuosity, his energy, and yes, his feel for the poetic image. His contentious final releases through Warner Bros. have, in the main, been widely available for purchase—at least on the second-hand CD market—so they’re not covered here. Instead, this curated list focuses on songs from projects that were officially released after Prince started his own independent label in 1994. If you miss the man, here are 25 songs you might need to start searching for right away.
Prince performing at Madison Square Garden in 2011. Photo by Kevin Mazur/WireImage.
Recorded circa 1994 and later issued through various iterations of the NPG Music Club, this is Prince with something to prove. He jumps all over a busy uptempo arrangement that incorporates samples, turntable scratches, and electric guitar. He puts so much melody into his recitation of these lyrical come-ons that you may not initially notice how he’s also presenting some of his best-ever rapping: “If u like a brother naughty/ I'm the one 2 get in2/ The angel in my bed will hold ur attention/ While I hold somethin’ dear 2 u.” The prime soloing doesn’t occur right after he asks someone to turn up “the dirty switch” on his guitar—instead, it comes toward the very end, during a variation on a riff that spins out into dizzying, rococo melodic curlicues.
Originally issued on the 1994 NPG Records sampler 1-800-NEW-FUNK—and subsequently remixed for Crystal Ball—this R&B cut is at once a celebration of the artist’s newly adopted symbol-name and a love-not-guns social responsibility anthem. Again, it shows his growth on the mic following his early experiments with rap, which prompted some ridicule. The harmonies are bright, and the bass guitar’s funk remains bubbly throughout. It’s one of his breeziest mid-’90s highlights.
Even though it was credited to his band, the New Power Generation, 1995’s Exodus was obviously the Artist’s show. This selection contains a few chants that turned into fan favorites (and Prince even marketed a Get Wild cologne for a time). While other songs on Exodus betray the Artist’s awareness of the G-Funk moment, the synths and live horn section here point back to P-Funk origins. He takes lead vocals during the verses and group choruses and also handles the “oh shit” bits of commentary toward the back of the mix. “If you want to get real freaky,” snag this one.
Prince’s most traditional blues composition turns up in several projects—and thanks to the wide open real-estate it provided for his guitar soloing, it was frequently requested at concerts. The song was originally recorded for a 1993 power-trio album that Prince intended to give away with copies of Guitar World magazine—a plan scuttled by Warner Bros. This earliest, rawest version eventually saw a release on a VHS tape titled The Undertaker (audio from which has since been widely bootlegged). Another smoking live performance shows up, in a heavily-overdubbed version, on Crystal Ball. And a subsequent live DVD also gave another look at Prince’s softer, latter-day method of approaching the song. But no matter how you hear it, “The Ride” is essential to any understanding of his post-Warner Bros. range.
Perhaps the best known filthy-mouthed anthem from the Artist’s mid-’90s oeuvre, the canonical studio version of this burner opens The Gold Experience (jointly released by NPG and Warner). His Purple Cleverness gets away with his tale of “Pussy Control” by spinning the concept as an ode to get-money empowerment—though he had to belabor that point a bit when presenting the song on television. (“Please don’t be a victim of a 30-second bite. Listen to the words carefully!”) But since it all winds up being good natured, it’s not hard to take him at the timbre of his funk. While it’s strong, it doesn’t hit angrily.
Emancipation came around the same time that the Artist released a classical project, in tribute to his nuptials. But this eight-minute odyssey of safe-sex partner selection is the most operatic entry in his entire catalog. The Artist sings to the listener, raps, switches rhythms, finally inviting you upstairs. (It sounds like you pass another couple parties going on in Paisley Park.) There are guest raps and tap-dance routines. He seduces with guitar. The next morning, he accuses you of gold-digging, his mouth full of cereal. Taking the form of a chorus, he escorts you out the door—right before a darker, industrial interlude points to a possible moment of self-critique. After all, the Artist does wind up alone in this narrative, calling up another mysterious partner while being driven around town. “Listen, I need to get with you,” he pleads. “Nah, I mean for good. I’m serious this time.”
The 1998 3CD set Crystal Ball came out before some hardcore fans had been able to digest the equally long Emancipation. And it was even more confusingly varied: legendary, Revolution-era cuts like the title track slammed into live favorites, remixes, and never-before-heard songs. This single studio experiment does a good job of approximating the overall surprise of the set, as languidly swinging verses collide with overdriven, hard-rock choruses.
Some people got a fourth CD in their copy of Crystal Ball: a stripped-down, mostly acoustic set titled The Truth. Taken on its own terms, it’s one of the most solid-feeling 43-minute sets you’ll find in Prince’s late catalog. He belts the blues on the title track and then tells you he’s tired of your gaze on “Don’t Play Me.” But it’s not all pain and suffering: This finger-snapping song is a bright and lovely curio that would have fit in on something like Parade.
Another New Power Generation in-name-only set, 1998’s New Power Soul is one of the CDs that’s generally held in low esteem, even by fans of late-Prince. And in a slightly perverse move, this irrepressible songwriter made the album’s catchiest tune its “hidden track.” Instead of the plodding sex-brags that filled up the rest of the record, here we have one of Prince’s great spurned-lover jams. The descending melody, portraying a descent into regret, is memorable on its own. But the arrangement is even better—as keyboard timbres are put through effects that make some chords sound as though they’re souring immediately after being played. Dark, but unmissable.
One of Prince’s first unfiltered James Brown imitations—complete with shouted commands to their shared saxophonist, Maceo Parker—remains his most charming. Faster paced than the title track to 2004’s Musicology, the tempo here makes Prince’s bragging (studied as it is) sound more spur-of-the-moment. Again, this standout served as the finale to a mixed-bag release, 1999’s Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic. If you can find the rare variation on the album, titled Rave In2 the Joy Fantastic, you’ll get an extended performance of this song (with more Maceo on it)—as well as an extended version of the morsel that is “Tangerine,” and a full performance of the much-beloved rarity “Beautiful Strange.”
This song’s slow, magisterial drag casts a spell. It’s Prince as seance leader: He’s advertising in advance what you’ll feel when he touches you, but somehow making you feel it beforehand. When he starts in with some of his most Santana-influenced guitar playing, you and anyone else in earshot may already be levitating. This was one of the first MP3 singles released through the NPG Music Club—and it was included in every online reboot that Prince ever oversaw, for good reason.
The loveliest melody and most elegant performance on Prince’s 2002 piano-and-vocals album One Nite Alone…. He later rerecorded the song using synths and percussion programming on MPLSound, draining the composition of nearly all its poetry. This is the take to hear, as Prince’s jazzy, rubato exploration of the lyrics and chords lend the song an urgent intimacy.
Prince toured behind his fan-club-only One Nite Alone… release and then collected the stadium gigs into the first three discs of the 4CD set One Nite Alone…Live. The big-arena excerpts are an interesting document, but it’s the small-club, “aftershow” fourth CD that doubles as the best-ever “official” live Prince release. The whole thing exults in groove, but things kick up a notch when George Clinton stops by to rap over some of Prince’s guitar. Maceo Parker’s a part of the jam, too.
Prince experimented with instrumental jazz releases as far back as the ’80s, with his Madhouse project. But the 2003 download-only fan club release Xpectation is probably his most mature statement in the fusion-jazz idiom. Some of it funks hard and some of it sounds too smooth for its own good. But this climactic eight-minute piece is on another level. Drummer John Blackwell was one of Prince’s most flexible time-keepers—and his interplay with the composer here is a highlight of his tenure in the NPG. In Miles-like fashion, Prince pivots between two of his axes—starting out on keyboards and then switching to guitar for the feverish ending.
Early on, you can hear a little bit of applause from the fan-club audience watching this 2002 soundcheck; “Empty Room,” a my-baby’s-gone anthem, was already beloved by hardcores, on the strength of a vault recording that found its way to bootlegs. But this live performance immediately replaced the old, comparatively tentative take as the recording of reference. It features a soulful Prince lead vocal—and one of the searing guitar solos that he increasingly indulged in during latter-day live sets. It’s far and away the best thing on C-Note, the 2004 odds-and-ends fan-club collection where it was officially issued.
Musicology brought Prince back into the mainstream in 2004. The title track and leadoff single was more fun than most casual Prince fans could remember having with the man in a decade or more. And while some listeners wrinkled their noses at the suite-like sequencing on the album’s second half, this standalone R&B cut won a Grammy and even made a light impact on the charts. This was the beginning of a mass audience comeback for Prince that never extinguished, even when he took years between full-album releases.
This web-only jam was a sex romp provided to fan-club members at a time when Prince was generally talking a more modest game in public. It’s about erect nipples and features an atypically spare arrangement for late-period Prince. The hand claps and organ could have come out of an early Sly and the Family Stone rehearsal. The lyrics aren’t Prince’s best, but he improvises some winning asides (“girl’s got a case of … ‘too fine’”) and lets his guitar do the heaviest lifting.
3121 was Prince’s second major comeback statement in the aughts, and its single, “Black Sweat,” has been rightly, enduringly popular (as has the song’s highly GIF-able video). But Prince also blew away memories of some songs from the album during contemporaneous live performances. (He turned the title track into a heaving, Funkadelic-level powerhouse on BET; “Fury” came into its own during a performance on “SNL.”) The track on the album that seems best captured by the studio sessions might be this casually swaying one, with its lowkey brilliant solo at the end.
By 2007, people had been clamoring for the Revolution to get back together for two decades. That year’s Planet Earth didn’t come with particularly exhaustive credits at a track-by-track level, but Prince did confirm the participation of classic collaborators Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman. And it certainly sounds like they’re contributing vocals (at least) and possibly some instrumental parts to this effervescent rocker.
Unlike a few other cuts on the ’80s-referencing MPLSound set, this song doesn’t sound overly indebted to past successes. There are some vintage nods in the arrangement, but when Prince’s pitch-shifted vocals reference flamenco music, he includes a bit of robust acoustic filigree before punching the distortion pedal. One of Prince’s finer late-period dance tracks.
After a multi-year hiatus from album making, Art Official Age revealed a conceptually invigorated Prince in 2014. Once again, he was partnering with Warner Bros. for distribution (while keeping ownership of masters with his NPG imprint). And he was back to making concept albums featuring spoken interludes—some of which even intruded into the middle of perfectly cogent songs. The overall experience divided some fans, though this crisp R&B number has a clutch of devotees. (There’s an EDM-influenced version on HITNRUN Phase One, but it’s playing.) The less-processed vocal here makes the temptation inherent in Prince’s meme-referencing lyrics sound all the more compelling.
A sassy, punkish 90 seconds that looks back to Dirty Mind’s “Sister” while introducing the power-trio of post-NPG era Prince, 3rdeyegirl. Whatever you think of the other hard-rock attempts on 2014’s Plectrumelectrum, this one’s worth your time.
I’m on record as not loving most of the songs (or production) on HITNRUN Phase One. But again, it’s Prince’s R&B skills that provide a tonic alongside whatever late-period adventurism he’s pursuing. This excellent song had been kicking around in his vault for decades; we’re fortunate that he finally recorded an official version himself.
Last year’s HITNRUN Phase Two flipped the script again: Instead of EDM-influenced tracks, the final studio album released in Prince’s lifetime relied on the organic funk sound that the NPG ushered into his repertoire. Gospel background vocals and a horn section meet up on this song, though the tenor is much less aggrieved than on, say, 1992’s “The Sacrifice of Victor.” The song is contented feeling and generous, with a climax that builds to an open-hearted cadence reminiscent of the famed vault track “All My Dreams.”
If you thought we were going to finish this list up without a reference to one of Prince’s most popular late-career songs, you were crazy. It just so happens that, on his last tour, Prince gave us a final look at another of his skills—specifically, his talent for reimagining past hits in a live context. Gone is the flinty electronic whine of the studio version on 3121; instead, Prince accompanies his vocal melody—and occasional beatboxing—with jubilant and jazzy piano riffs. Spurred by the song’s central image, he tells the crowd that they’ve “got me sweating like Edward G. Robinson up in this muh.” When he slapped the single up on Tidal, he swiped a photo of the vintage Hollywood actor and used it as his artwork.
Find more on Prince and his legacy here.
