The Private Life of Music Legend Prince
His life off-stage was that of a mystery.
— -- Prince may have been a famed prodigy, but the late musician’s life off-stage was that of a mystery.
"He was a private person,” Prince’s former fiancee and music collaborator Sheila E. said on “Good Morning America” today. “Everyone knows that and there’s things that we have shared, him and I together, that people will never know. They are our moments."
Producer-song writer Christopher Moon, who is credited with discovering Prince, said the artist’s dream, surprisingly, wasn’t to be a musician.
“His dream was to be a basketball player,” Moon said on “GMA.” “Height worked against him. He let the music do the talking.”
Prince was a 5-foot-2 force of nature who once compared record labels to slavery. When he clashed with his own record label Warner Bros. in 1993, journalists began calling him “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.”
It wasn’t until he ended the 18-year dispute that he went back to being called Prince.
He became a Jehovah’s Witness in 2001 and even disguised himself in order to knock on doors and talk about his faith.
A couple from Eden Prairie, Minnesota, told the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune in October 2003 that Prince, along with soul-funk bassist Larry Graham, knocked on their door with a Bible in hand. Prince and Graham reportedly stayed in the couple’s home for 25 minutes and left a pamphlet, according to EW.com.
Brian Hiatt, a senior writer at Rolling Stone, interviewed Prince in 2014 at his estate, Paisley Park headquarters in Chanhassen, Minnesota.
The piece never ran in the magazine because Prince did not want to pose for a photo but now, in light of the star’s death, a version of the article will run, Hiatt told Amy Robach of “GMA” today.
“In person he was very warm and personable, and funny,” Hiatt said of the 57-year-old Prince. “As an artist and a persona, he’s about as complicated as an artist can be.”
While wearing light-up purple heels, Prince, who chose to remain in Minnesota, joked to Hiatt during his interview that he resided in his hometown because he liked that “the cold kept the bad people away.”
“It was a place where he could do his work and his work was all that mattered to him, and I think that’s why it was the place where he could do the most work with the least distractions,” Hiatt said.
Prince released hundreds of songs and was even rumored to fill vaults with thousands more.
“I didn’t see the vault,” Hiatt said. “We talked about the vault. [Prince] said it lives up to its legend. There are full albums – from the ‘Purple Rain’ period, even.”
