Timeless

There’s been plenty of speculation as to how much unreleased music Prince left behind. Thousands of hours? Enough to produce an album a year for a century? Enough to light the way to the world beyond? But suffice it to say, he kept a lot of what he did to himself. Not everyone can justify the expense of an on-call engineer, let alone the in-home studio for them to report to. He was a genius, funky and extroverted yet totally mysterious, an artist who could turn our most primitive urges into music that felt like the future. <i>Timeless</i> moves chronologically through some of the fruits of his prodigious vault, from the punk lust of 1981’s <b>“Tick Tick Bang”</b>, recorded nine years before the version on <i>Graffiti Bridge</i>, through the playful gospel of <b>“I Wonder”</b>. There are versions of songs he gave to other artists (<b>“With This Tear”</b>, for Céline Dion) and beloved B-sides presented as live showstoppers—in this case, 1983’s <b>“How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore”</b>, played on the 2016 Piano & a Microphone Tour, his last. The ad-lib in the latter—“Got anywhere to go tomorrow?”—defines his unique charm as well as any moment: Has anyone ever been so hot and funny at the same time?