Residence 1
📍2620 8th Avenue North, Minneapolis, MN 55411, USA
1965 – 1970“My parents came to this house when I was six. My father John was a jazz pianist — he had led the Prince Rogers Trio across the North Side clubs, and it was his stage name they gave me at birth. My mother Mattie sang in the same group. The house was full of music before I understood what music was. My father left when I was seven and the house went quiet. He left the upright piano behind. Once he was gone I started picking out television theme songs on the keys — Batman, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. I wrote my first song, Funk Machine, at seven years old on that piano. It was through these streets that I met André Cymone, who would become my first real collaborator. The music in those living rooms was what held. I never stopped being from here, even after I built Paisley Park twenty miles away.”
👍 LovedThe upright piano my father left behind — the single object that changed everything, sitting in the corner of a house where nobody expected anything extraordinary to happen
👎 DislikedMy parents separating when I was seven — it cracked the world open in a way I spent the rest of my life trying to answer with music
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons
Residence 2
📍Paisley Park, 7801 Audubon Road, Chanhassen, Minnesota, USA
1987 – 2016“I built Paisley Park in Chanhassen, Minnesota in 1987 — a state-of-the-art recording complex that was also my home, my studio, my rehearsal space and my private universe. I chose to stay in Minnesota when every instinct of the music business said I should move to Los Angeles or New York, because Minnesota was mine and I refused to let success uproot me from the place that had formed my imagination. Paisley Park was everything I wanted it to be: the best recording equipment in the world, a soundstage for rehearsals and private concerts, apartments for the musicians I wanted to keep close, and a vault that held more unreleased music than most artists make in a lifetime. I worked every day and every night, because the music never stopped coming and I never wanted it to.”
👍 LovedThe total creative control that owning my own facility gave me. The ability to record at three in the morning when the idea arrived, without booking studios or managing schedules. The loyalty to Minnesota — staying home on my own terms.
👎 DislikedThe isolation that such a self-contained world created. The difficulty of maintaining perspective when every creative decision was made inside the same walls. The way Paisley Park became a fortress as much as a studio.
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons
Sources: Hahn, A. & Bream, J. Possessed: The Rise and Fall of Prince (2003), Billboard Books; Thorne, M. Prince (2016), St Martin's Press; Nilsen, P. Princes: The First Decade (1999), Firefly Publishing
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