It's hard to know where to start with Prince, which is exactly how lots of people felt when Bowie left us in January.
They're two artists who I was fairly certain weren't even from this planet, and 100% convinced they definitely couldn't die.
But here we are, they're both gone within three months of each other, two absolute visionaries who lived their art, until death.
Considering the levels of fame they celebrated consistently throughout their careers, both managed to maintain certain degrees of privacy that added to the otherworldly aura both of them possessed. Naturally, with secrecy came rumours, and we always wondered what the hell these people did with their time when they weren't on a stage entertaining us. Prince more than most.
One of the most widely-believed rumours is that Prince had a secret vault full of material (both tracks and videos) that he'd recorded, never released and he'd just hidden them away.
Why the hell would he do that? What a waste of money and resources. Does Prince highly regard money at this point, after all he's got enough of it to live on an estate that includes a world famous recording studio, Paisley Park.
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Fans leave tributes to Prince outside his Paisley Park estate.
I guess the answer is because he can. The story went that if Prince ever passed away he would have enough material banked up to release an album every year up until sometime in the 22nd century.
Last year, Mobeen Azhar for The Guardian set out on a journey to find what the hell was in this treasured vault.
Unsurprisingly, Prince remained tight-lipped on the matter, but many other people had lots to say.
Susan Rogers, Prince's former sound engineer, told Mobeen that the vault predates Prince's world-conquering super-stardom.
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"I started the vault!" she says. "I joined Prince in 1983 when he was preparing to do Purple Rain. I realised it would be smart for me to get his tapes together in one place. I was aware there were a lot of pieces missing. It became an obsession. I wanted us to have everything he'd ever recorded. I called up the studios he'd been using and said: 'Have you got any Prince tapes'? This is his legacy. We need to protect these things. It's an actual bank vault, with a thick door. It's in the basement of Paisley Park. When I left in '87, it was nearly full."
An album every year until sometime in the 22nd century, though, really? I know Prince has a phenomenal work rate, there's even a rumour that the man never slept, like an actual vampire - but how much can be in that vault?
"I think over 70% of the music we've worked on for Prince is yet to come out," composer Brent Fischer, who worked with Prince for over three decades, told Mobeen.
Mobeen also confirmed to VICE that one thing he knows for definite is that there is a Madonna collab in the vault that is almost certainly never going to see the light of day.
It's just about impossible to imagine truly how much music can be stored in there, there's surely a limit to any one man's creativity, even Prince's.
Susan Rogers told Mobeen that "the average human brain, if we take a guess, would be on input 70 percent of the time, meaning we're taking in information, and maybe we're on output 30 percent of the time, we're creating something or we're doing work."
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She added: "With Prince, he's on output 90 percent of the time. He's constantly on output. He's constantly creating."
Sadly, now that vault is closed, as is Prince's endless creative process. Maybe one day we'll be lucky enough to witness it re-open and we'll be able to hear what, and just how much, The Purple One had been hiding away for so long.
What a gift that would be.
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Words by Matthew Cooper
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