But there were rumblings of trouble. Prince’s movies after “Purple Rain” didn’t perform well at the box office, in part because they were increasingly arty and disjointed affairs. (In “Under the Cherry Moon,” he killed off his character, the film’s protagonist; and the less that’s said about “Graffiti Bridge” the better.) Warner responded by withdrawing support for Prince’s music, not only his own albums but the records released through his imprint, Paisley Park. Prince remained a marquee talent, but in the early nineties, after reupping with Warner for big money, he finally decided that he couldn’t endure the label’s behavior any longer—the half-hearted promotion, the way that intellectual-property laws functioned or malfunctioned, depending on your perspective.

He protested by writing “Slave” on his face, famously changing his name to a squiggly glyph, and telling Rolling Stone that “If you don’t own your masters, your master owns you.” The resulting break from Warner sent him on a long, winding odyssey as the world’s top indie artist. He put out “The Most Beautiful Girl In the World” on his own NPG label, and briefly partnered with EMI for the almost preposterously incontinent triple album “Emancipation.” Relentlessly prolific and devoted to remaining that way, he released albums at a blazing pace that didn’t always serve his broader purposes, sometimes on his own (“The Rainbow Children,” 2001), sometimes with corporate help (“Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic,” 1999, on Arista, which included the highly publicized personal support of Clive Davis, a move that got the album exactly nowhere). In 1999, Prince made his most direct and tortured statement by rerecording “1999” as “1999 (The New Master),” reproducing the song note-for-note in an attempt to do an end run around Warner’s ownership of the song.

During that period, Prince was the strangest thing imaginable: his own bootlegger (there were live sets that never would have seen the light of day under Warner), his own worst enemy (there were half-baked or unbaked experiments that would have been better served as highly prized bootlegs), and his own digital-music consultant (he pioneered various forms of distribution, from single-song purchases to subscription models, which seemed to collapse as quickly as they were established, often leaving fans in the lurch). Along the way, he occasionally, fitfully made new music of note: the single “Black Sweat” (2006), which appeared on the album “3121,” was the kind of lean, undeniable funk that had come with ease twenty years earlier. But the hits were in shorter and shorter supply. In 2009, he released three albums at once—“Lotusflo3r,” “MPLSound,” and a disc by one of his many female protégés, Bria Valentine—and sold them somewhat successfully through an exclusive partnership with Target. (He moved more than a hundred and fifty thousand copies in the first week, which landed him at No. 2 on the Billboard chart.) Yet somehow Prince seemed less relevant than ever.

Still, he was—he is—Prince, and counting him out always seemed like a mistake. In recent years, he’s started to make noise about making noise once again. He put together an all-female band, 3rd Eye Girl, that kicked up a garage-rock ruckus, releasing songs like “Screwdriver.” His appearance on the Fox sitcom “The New Girl” directly after the Super Bowl included a snippet of a song called “Fallinlove2nite,” which was then released with a vocal contribution by the “New Girl” star and indie-folk singer Zooey Deschanel. He announced an imminent album called “Plectrum Electrum,” though details on when it would appear and what it would include were a little fuzzy. And then, this week, he fired up the time machine and returned to Warner Bros. According to the deal, whose financial terms were not announced, Prince will release a new album with the label and also coöperate in a campaign to put out deluxe and expanded versions of his most famous albums, starting with a thirtieth-anniversary edition of “Purple Rain” this year.

“The Breakdown” isn’t formally a part of that Warner deal, but in some ways it is. The song has a sense of pace and space, which are two things that seemed to elude Prince as he rushed headlong into the uncharted waters of self-distributed music. More significant, of course, is what the new arrangement says about artists’ control of their back catalog. The deal turns in large part on the copyright recapture, or a provision that lets artists reacquire their copyrights thirty-five years after an album’s release. Prince’s first album for Warner, “For You,” was released in 1978, which means that its recapture window is open now, and other albums will quickly follow: his self-titled second release is up this year, with “Dirty Mind” to follow in 2015 and “Controversy” in 2016. It appears as though the Warner agreement will allow those albums to flow back to Prince with minimal interference, though only time will tell if the two sides can continue to work together. For now, it’s just a matter of waiting on new music, thinking about old music, and considering the oddity of a world where Prince is once again a Warner artist.