An Unreleased Prince Single Drops on the 10 Year Anniversary of his Passing

The song sat in a tape vault under a purple house in Minnesota for 34 years before anyone was allowed to hear Prince sing it.

That changed on April 20, when NPG Records and Legacy Recordings released “With This Tear,” a tender piano ballad recorded at Paisley Park in November 1991 and left there, untouched, for three and a half decades. The timing was not an accident. The song dropped the day before the 10th anniversary of Prince's death, and the release doubles as the opening salvo in what the estate is calling a measured rollout of vault material leading to a full archival album later in 2026.

For the hardcore, this is the holy grail arriving in the mail. Prince wrote thousands of songs. Estimates vary wildly, which is the first sign that nobody really knows, but the legend has always held that the vault at Paisley Park contains more finished and near-finished material than the man released in his lifetime. And the man released a lot. “With This Tear” is the first installment in what looks like a serious attempt to finally do something about the backlog.

The song itself is a slow, spare ballad. Prince composed it, produced it, and played every instrument on it, which by 1991 was barely worth mentioning. He did that on most things. The piano anchors the whole performance, and the vocal is the kind of high, fragile thing that he only brought out when the material demanded it. The production has been newly mixed and mastered by Chris James, a Grammy-nominated engineer who worked on Prince's HITnRUN Phase Two, Art Official Age, and Plectrumelectrum, which means the hands touching the tape were hands Prince himself had trusted. That matters more than it might sound like it does. The posthumous release industry has a checkered history, and the closer you can keep the credits to people the artist actually picked, the less it feels like grave-robbing.

Here is where the story gets good. Prince wrote “With This Tear” and then gave it to Céline Dion, who recorded her own version and released it on her 1992 self-titled breakthrough album, the one that introduced her to American audiences before “The Power of Love” and the Titanic years swallowed everything else. Dion's reading of the song is beautiful in the Dion way, all polish and swell and the vocal leaping into the rafters. But it's a cover. The version that just emerged is the demo Prince wrote for himself, and the distance between the two readings is the distance between a songwriter at the piano in his home studio at one in the morning and a global pop star delivering the finished product to an arena. Neither one is better than the other. They are just completely different artifacts of the same set of chords and words.

For Prince fans, the Céline Dion thing has been an open secret for decades. Hearing the Prince version has been one of those fantasy scenarios, the kind of thing the faithful trade theories about on message boards. Now it exists. It turns out he recorded it about six months before he gave it to her.

The release strategy says a lot about where the estate's head is at these days. For years after Prince's 2016 death, the vault situation was a legal and logistical quagmire, with two major labels (Sony and Warner) and two rights holders (Primary Wave and the estate itself) all having to agree on anything before it could see daylight. Progress crawled. A Prince estate spokesperson acknowledged last year that only about 45 percent of the vault had been digitized, which is both a staggering amount of work left to do and a reminder that a lot of this material was recorded to tape formats that degrade every year. The clock is running.

“With This Tear” is the first public sign that the machine has started moving. According to the estate, it's the opening installment of a rollout that will culminate in a full album of previously unreleased material later this year. The 10th anniversary itself is being marked with events at Paisley Park in June, including a celebration concert featuring Prince band members and collaborators like Chaka Khan, Morris Day, Tevin Campbell, Sounds of Blackness, Cassandra O'Neal, and drummer Bobby Z.

Ten years after his death, a new Prince song just dropped. It sounds like him, it sounds like 1991, it sounds like the late-night piano session that birthed it. The vault, finally, is starting to open.

Let's hope they get it all out before the tape turns to dust.