Before Purple Rain. Before the Super Bowl. Before the world even knew his name, Prince was just a shy kid outside a Minneapolis school — and that’s not the only chapter of his story that’s still being uncovered. The Prince Estate has confirmed Timeless, a new 10-song collection pulled straight from the vault, spanning his career from 1977 to 2016 and arriving August 28, 2026 via Legacy Recordings.
Two vault tracks, “With This Tear” and “Stone,” have already surfaced as previews. And that old footage of Prince as a boy is a reminder of just how much of his story still hasn’t been told.
While production manager Matt Liddy was rewinding history and searching through archives of grainy footage and kids hanging around outside a school, he found something incredible. A true gem. When you watch the news piece (about a teacher’s strike at the time), you wouldn’t think that tucked inside the 13-minute reel from April 1970 was the very first footage of a very young Prince Rogers Nelson. That shy little boy nicknamed Skipper would go on to become one of the biggest and most secretive music legends of all time.
Who would have thought that so many years after he died, the world would still be shocked by footage of Prince? But here we are. And surprisingly, this footage doesn’t come from his own vault. Instead, it sat buried in the WCCO archives for 52 years before recently resurfacing.
In the clip, we see a reporter interviewing a group of school kids during the Minneapolis teachers’ strike. One boy, around 10 or 11, speaks with a calm confidence. But he looks incredibly familiar. “I think they should get a better education too… and get some more money cause they work… they be working extra hours for us,” he says, smiling while his friends crowd around him.
While there wasn’t lower thirds or mentions of his name, it’s clear as day that this is The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, or just Prince as he became known as again in later years.
But the team didn’t just jump to conclusions. They went digging to find the identity of the boy and to see if their suspicions were correct. Another boy in the clip introduces himself as Ronnie Kitchen. That bit of information led them to the truth. A yearbook photo of Prince showed that the little boy looked exactly like Prince. Same hair. Same face. Same smile.
Even Kristen Zschomler, a historian who has spent years mapping Prince’s early life in Minneapolis, believed it was him. “I think that’s him, definitely.”
The footage appears to be outside Lincoln Junior High School, where Prince would have been a student in April 1970.
Then the producers took the footage to Terrance Jackson, who grew up with Prince and played in his early band Grand Central. His reaction was priceless. “That is Prince… that’s Skipper!” he said, wiping tears from his eyes.
Long before Purple Rain, before the Super Bowl performance, before the high heels and the splits, he was just a kid in Minneapolis who really loved music. Jackson and his wife remember it clearly. While other “normal” kids played sports, they competed with instruments. And he was the best of them.
In fact, many believe that Prince wrote his very first song at the age of 7. And by the time he was a teen, he was already mastering instruments and writing some of his big hits.
This is the same young boy who would grow up to sell millions of records and win Grammys and Oscars.
Prince died in 2016 at age 57, found at his Paisley Park Studios in Minnesota. It’s been ten years already but he’s still surprising fans with new music, unseen footage and a few more secrets and surprises.
That’s the strange magic of Prince’s afterlife — a decade gone, and the world keeps discovering him again. Timeless traces that same arc on record: the same instinct visible in a shy 10-year-old outside Lincoln Junior High is right there on the earliest tracks in the vault, recorded when he was barely out of his teens. The album is available for pre-order now, with the single “Stone” already streaming.
RELATED: 12 Celebrities Nobody Can Ever Replace
“biggest vault release yet” is more than a bit of a stretch for a byline. Check out what the previous Estate’s handlers released from 1999, Purple Rain, Sign ‘O’ The Times, Diamonds and Pearls and Originals. This newest release, while welcomed to hear new Prince music, is a slap in the face to fans when the Vault was annouced to be “free” early last year.