Hear Prince’s Unreleased ‘Early’ Take on ‘Forever in My Life’

Prince’s unheard work-in-progress version of “Forever in My Life” is the latest preview from the upcoming Sign O’ the Times reissue.

The “early” in “Forever in My Life (Early Vocal Studio Run-Through)” refers not to when the version was recorded — August 8th, 1986 in Prince’s Galpin Boulevard  home studio — but what time of day the vocal track was first laid down.

“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,” Susannah Melvoin, Prince’s fiancée at the time, said of this recording in a statement. “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.”

The Prince Estate previously shared “Cosmic Day,” the two-part “Witness 4 the Prosecution” and the 1979 version of “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” from the massive, Vault-raiding Sign O’ the Times reissue, due out September 25th (find it here).

Additionally, on Thursday the Prince Estate and Minnesota’s 89.3 the Current launched a new eight-episode podcast Prince: The Story of Sign O’ The Times. The first episode features interviews with Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman discussing Prince’s prolific Dream Factory period, as well as insights from engineer Susan Rogers and musicians Eric Leeds, Atlanta Bliss, Dr. Fink and BrownMark. Additional episodes will arrive weekly leading up to the reissue’s release.