PEOPLE is celebrating Prince with a newly updated special edition in honor of his posthumous album Timeless
Timeless features 10 rare Prince recordings, showcasing his genre-blending talent and evolution over five decades
The album includes unreleased tracks like "I Am You" and live performances, offering fans a glimpse into Prince's legacy
Recorded in 1977 when Prince was just 19, "I Am You" offers a glimpse of the icon-to-be workshopping his signature Minneapolis Sound: swaggering funk merged with the prerequisite disco of the era. A keyboard synth line proves that Prince's gift for criminally infectious grooves revealed itself early. (It also hints at his future as a musical mentor: That riff would resurface on 1982's "I Don't Wanna Leave You" from his protégés the Time.) But the song didn't make it onto his debut album, 1978's For You. And save for a fortunate few who can claim to have been in the audience of Prince's Jan. 5, 1979, debut show at Minneapolis's Capri Theater—when the young man onstage appeared so nervous at times he turned his back to the crowd and mumbled between numbers with his eyes closed—no one had heard it in decades.
"'I Am You' was a beautiful find," says L. Londell McMillan, a compilation producer and attorney for the estate. (McMillan was the lawyer who negotiated the split from Warner Bros. in 1996, giving Prince control of future releases.) "You can hear how he became a prolific artist. Listening to Timeless is like traveling in a time machine through five decades,"
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