Hear Prince’s Previously Unreleased Studio Run-Through Of “Forever In My Life”

Hear Prince’s Previously Unreleased Studio Run-Through Of “Forever In My Life”

The upcoming deluxe reissue of Prince’s 1987 opus Sign O’ The Times will feature a whopping 45 unreleased studio tracks recorded between May 1979 and July 1987. Prince’s estate and Warner Records have already shared several of these, including “Witness 4 The Prosecution (Version 1)” and “(Version 2),” “I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man (1979 Version),” and “Cosmic Day.” And now we’re getting another, an early studio run-through of “Forever In My Life.”

Prince recorded this version of “Forever In My Life,” based largely around acoustic guitar, at his Galpin Boulevard home studio on August 8, 1986. “He had been up all night and he came upstairs. It was like 7:00 in the morning and he grabbed my hand and said ‘follow me’, and so I followed him downstairs,” recalls Susannah Melvoin, to whom Prince was engaged at the time. “The sun was coming through the stained-glass windows and he pressed play, and that song came on and I looked at him and I got teary-eyed. And that was it. He didn’t have to say anything.”

Today, the Prince Estate and 89.3 The Current are also launching the podcast Prince: The Story Of Sign O’ The Times. Hosted by Andrea Swensson, the weekly eight-part miniseries will track the two years and numerous shelved projects leading up to the album’s release and will include interviews with Prince’s close collaborators and confidants. You can listen to the first episode here; listen to the early studio run-through of “Forever In My Life” and compare it to the final version below.

The Sign O’ The Times reissue is out 9/25 via Warner Records. Pre-order it here.

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