Prince‘s Paisley Park estate will stand as a permanent memorial to The Purple One, following his shock death at the age of 57.
Heartbroken fans have been gravitating to the pop icon’s Minnesota home ever since he was found unresponsive in an elevator inside the complex last week, and now his family has revealed plans to turn the whole thing into a museum filled with memorabilia and never-before-seen photos.
As Yahoo reports, the extravagant 50,000 square foot mansion is set to become a lasting point of pilgrimage for Prince fans – just like Elvis Presley’s Graceland.
“We will turn Paisley Park into a museum in Prince’s memory,” the singer’s brother-in-law Maurice Phillips said. “It would be for the fans. He was all about the fans… Prince was always private but would have wanted his music remembered.”
The mansion houses a recording studio, a nightclub and – according to legend – a secret vault potentially containing thousands of unheard Prince recordings.
Following his death, Prince’s sound engineer Susan Rogers confirmed to The Daily Mail that the rumours were true, revealing that the singer wrote and recorded music compulsively and that she was the one who encouraged him to stash it all in a high-security vault.
“It became a bit of an obsession…I wanted everything he’s ever recorded right here,” she told the paper, who are reporting that the chamber contains around two thousand unheard Prince tracks – enough to release an album a year for a mother flippin’ century!
Whether we’ll get to hear any of the recordings, however, currently remains TBD pending what is destined to be along and drawn-out legal process, since Prince died without leaving a will.
Meanwhile, a rainbow mysteriously appeared over Paisley Park just hours after the singer’s death, a symbol which had a profound effect on many fans.
And according to Prince’s frequent collaborator and one-time fiancee Sheila E., the genius musician had long-considered turning his home into something of a memorial, where his fans could gather en masse to learn more about his life and career.
“We’re hoping to make Paisley what [Prince wanted] it to be,” she told ET online. “[He] was working on it being a museum. He’s been gathering memorabilia and stuff from all the tours, like my drums and his motorcycle.”
“There’s a hallway of his awards and things, which he really didn’t care about too much, but he displayed it for the fans because he knows that they would want to see it,” she added.
“There’s pictures of him all down the halls, some you’ve seen before and some never [seen]… There’s a mural on the wall with his hands out and on one side is all the people he was influenced by and the other side is all of us who have played with him… It’s beautiful.”
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Watch: Prince 1999 Live @ Paisley Park
https://youtu.be/4hAAU0nfBG8
