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Prince's 'Camille' album to be released

The late singer-songwriter recorded “Camille” in 1986, in which he portrayed an alter ego named after the title.

WASHINGTON — Another previously unreleased Prince album will soon be seeing the light of day. 

The late-singer and songwriter recorded "Camille" in 1986, but the record was ultimately shelved and only a handful of copies have surfaced. 

The White Stripes' Jack White, who co-founded Third Man Records, once paid nearly $50,000 for one of those copies. 

Now White and his label have gotten the rights from Prince's estate to release the album to the public, Third Man Records co-founder Ben Blackwell told music magazine Mojo.

Third Man Records has not indicated when exactly it plans on releasing the album. 

Prince named the album after his portrayal of an androgynous alter ego he had named Camille, and much of the music on the album utilizes pitch-shifted, feminized vocal sound, according to Pitchfork magazine.

The album's eight tracks have all been released before in some compacity, but not together in album form, PEOPLE reported

"Camille" will become the second Prince album to be distributed posthumously, following "Welcome 2 America" that was released last year. 

According to the Prince estate, the album was recorded before Prince's Welcome 2 America Tour, and "documents Prince’s concerns, hopes, and visions for a shifting society, presciently foreshadowing an era of political division, disinformation, and a renewed fight for racial justice."

Credit: AP
Prince performs during the halftime show at the Super Bowl XLI football game in Miami.

Prince, who died in 2016 from an accidental fentanyl overdose, left behind a treasure trove of unreleased songs in the vault at his Paisley Park complex west of Minneapolis. 

"We know that there was an immense amount not released — by some counts in the hundreds, some in the thousands … celebrated, heavily bootlegged albums and projects he did and scrapped," Alan Light, a veteran journalist and author of "Let’s Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain," previously said. 

The musician did not have a will, according to documents filed by his sister Tyka Nelson.

 

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