Eight thousand unreleased Prince songs were saved from a locked vault thanks to a professional safe cracker.
Prince, who died aged 57 in 2016, had a locked vault filled with material which only he knew the code to. His death meant the door remained locked, until a professional safe cracker was tasked with opening the door. Prince himself had forgotten the code several years before his death. The songs tucked away in the vault were at various stages of completion, with some believed to have been ready for release before being archived. It is not uncommon for major artists to put away finished songs, opting to archive them rather than release them at time of recording. Bruce Springsteen’s Tracks II: The Lost Albums and The Bootleg Series from Bob Dylan are just two of the many examples. Prince, it appears, had plenty of songs put away before his death.
They were locked away until safe cracker Dave McOmie, was tasked with extracting the songs from the vault by busting into it. In an episode of This American Life, McOmie said the six-and-a-half-foot-tall vault weighed six thousand pounds and would be no easy job. He was asked by the Prince estate to get into the vault.
He said: “No burglar has ever defeated a Mosler American Century, not once, ever.” Microdrilling is the technique McOmie used to get into the vault, which he had seen pictures of before being tasked with busting into it. He added that part of the problem with the vault was avoiding the “mousetrap relocker”.
The mousetrap relocker is part of the device which means the vault is aware of being tampered with, and thus makes it so the door cannot be opened. McOmie explained: “Basically, if the vault senses it’s being tampered with, a spring-loaded mechanism fires like a mousetrap, snapping this metal block into place, that physically makes it so the door can’t open, even if you have the combination.”
McOmie did manage to get into the vault, however, saying it was a “beautiful” sight when he looked into the vault after several hours of drilling and saw “four little tumblers” that were “like little grindstones”.
He added: “Everybody clapped. I was a little embarrassed. When the door came open, the archivist looked inside before I did. I’ve just been trained, through decades of doing this, not to look.
“I don’t know the exact dimension, but approximately 20 feet by 40 feet. Now, by bank standards, that is on the large side. And yet there was hardly any room in the vault, because it was just jam-packed with these industrial shelving units, and every one of them was packed bottom to top with tapes.”
An online vault dedicated to keeping track of the songs and work found in the Prince vault has since been established. A description noting the unreleased songs reads: “Prince had a penchant for recording music without necessarily any plans for release, and little is known about the exact number of songs recorded, although a few figures have circulated in the press.
“This enormous unreleased catalog of songs was stored in a huge safe vault in Paisley Park Studios (In 2017, it was reported that tapes were moved from Paisley Park Studios to Los Angeles, California for cataloging, storage and digitization by archive company, Iron Mountain, on behalf of the company appointed to administer Prince’s Estate, Comerica Bank & Trust.)
“Recording information on unreleased songs is not always available, or not accurate enough to state a specific year of recording. In this case, the year will be followed by a *.” The full list can be found here.
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Great article. Just pointing out one thing: the website princevault.com was already there years before Prince’s death. It is an incredible site, but by no means official or exhaustive. That list comprises most known Prince songs, but it’s not the list of songs found in the actual vault.