Prince was always focused on the future.
The ‘U Got The Look’ hitmaker – who tragically died on Thursday (21.04.16) at his Paisley Park estate – insists he never thought about what it would be like when he was gone and says he would never want to retire.
In a previously unreleased Q & A from 2014, he said: "No, I don’t think about gone. I just think about in the future when I don’t want to speak in real time.
"I don’t know what [retiring] is. There’s always some way to serve. And I never felt like I had a job. Well, life spans are getting longer. One of the reasons is because people are learning more about everything, so then the brain works more, makes more connections and then eventually we’ll be in eternal brain mode because we’ll be able to hold eternity in our minds."
And Prince, who was just 57 when he passed away, also revealed he has a number of secret vaults where he keeps previously unreleased music.
He told Rolling Stone magazine: "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.
"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!"