Prince's '3121' Vault Opens: 10 Unreleased Tracks — and His Las Vegas Concert Hits Theaters

The vault is not a metaphor with Prince. It is a room in Minnesota that has been teasing the rest of us for a decade — and on Thursday, the Prince Estate and NPG Records opened it around one specific album: 3121, the record that put Prince back on top of the charts in 2006 and soundtracked his Las Vegas residency a year later.

The headline release is 3121 Expanded Edition, arriving December 11 digitally and in 3LP + Blu-ray and 2CD + Blu-ray sets. It pairs the original 12-track album with 10 additional vault recordings — among them “Time of Ur Life,” which is out now as the first taste, “The Streets of Panama,” “Another Girl,” “Glass Cutter” and “Girls In the Band,” plus acoustic versions of three songs from the album itself: “The Word,” “Love” and “Te Amo Corazón.” Apple Music's listing for the Expanded Edition counts the full 22 tracks with the December 11 date. Ten songs that sat in the vault while the album they grew up next to went to No. 1.

And 3121 did go to No. 1 — properly. Released March 21, 2006, it was Prince's first album ever to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and his fourth chart-topper overall, the commercial peak of the comeback run that Musicology had started. It is, as Variety put it in announcing the reissue, arguably the best of his post-1990s albums.

The Vegas show is the real treasure

The part of this package that should make a Las Vegas reader sit up is not the studio vault. It is the stage.

In January 2007, Prince was in the middle of his Las Vegas residency — the 3121 era performed live, night after night, in this city. The performance of January 20, 2007 was filmed, and for nearly twenty years almost nobody has seen it. That changes three times in the next six weeks.

First, the show gets its own live album: 3121 Las Vegas Live, released November 27 for Record Store Day Black Friday on triple-LP crystal blue vinyl and 2CD. Then the film itself — Prince: 3121 Las Vegas Concert, 154 minutes, previously unseen — opens in theaters in the U.S. and Canada for a limited run beginning December 3, presented in 4K with Dolby Atmos where the theater supports it, as Consequence reports. Tickets go on sale November 11. The Blu-ray of the same concert is also bundled into the Expanded Edition's physical sets on December 11.

What is on that stage, per the released tracklists, is a career in one night: “Purple Rain,” “Kiss,” “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” “U Got the Look” and “Cream” alongside the 3121 and Musicology material — and Prince being Prince with the covers, running through “Pass the Peas,” Gnarls Barkley's “Crazy” and “Play That Funky Music.” More than two hours of it. The Estate has already posted the first proof: the official live video of “Black Sweat” from that night is up now on Prince's official channel, and it is not a nostalgia act coasting. It is a band being conducted at full stretch by a man who treated a residency like a laboratory.

Not just another reissue

Estate reissues can be cash registers with liner notes. This one has a shape that argues otherwise. The studio disc answers the question fans have asked about the 3121 sessions for twenty years — what else was in there? — with names and recordings, not rumors. The live releases answer a different one: what did the greatest live performer of his generation actually do with a Las Vegas room when the show was his to design, in the middle of his last great commercial run? Until now the honest answer was that you had to have been there. On December 3, in a theater, everybody gets to have been there.

There is a calendar to keep, and it is a kind one: a vault song to stream today, a live album on Black Friday, a Prince concert film in theaters the first week of December, and the full expanded album a week after that. Twenty years on, 3121 is not being remembered. It is being reopened — in Las Vegas first, the way it was the first time.