I'm looking for a solid place to start on attaching dates to when Prince wrote/demoed/recorded songs, particularly in the years leading up to 1999 (the album). Can anyone point me in the right direction? I'm sure this has been covered here but there are so many topics on the Org it's hard to sort through. Any help you can give will be greatly appreciated.

Princevault has already done that. More dates than not are there.

Per Nilsen's DMSR Prince: The First Decade also has extensive dates in the back. So - already done that.

I would imagine The Vault would do the same.

You'd just be copying info already out there, most likely. Lotta work.

By "attaching dates," it's not that I want to write a book, website, or database compiling the logs. I require logs as secondary research to back up my claims. Specifically, I want to be able to point to a given period and say, "he wrote x number of songs between date y and date z. He recorded x number of songs in studio session a, and wrote Purple Rain the same day he wrote Jughead (kidding of course). Thanks for the direction. Would you recommend one source over the other for ease of us or comprehensiveness?

So I used the A-Z song list on Prince vault and it was convenient and gave me plenty with which to work. Thanks again!

mtlfan said:

So I used the A-Z song list on Prince vault and it was convenient and gave me plenty with which to work. Thanks again!

Good start, there. You could probably go into a spreadsheet with it, depending on your needs.

It's good information to have.

And I would argue there's even new stuff that could be done with the information that isn't on PrinceVault or any of the other resources. For one, it would be juust fantastic if there was a way to view songs chronologically, or like to say I want all the songs recorded in say January of 1982 for instance.

Or like for me, I know people like compiling stuff that wasn't on albums proper. All of my officially-released "non-LP" Prince tracks including B-Sides, compilation appearances, cybersingles one-off streams whatever as well as officially-released protege songs with any Prince songwriting credit is sequenced chronologically according to what PrinceVault says the recording date was or was generally, but I had to go track-by-track search to get it done. You can really hear the artistic development track-by-track, though, I highly recommend it, I'm all about the chronological sequence.

[Edited 5/13/20 5:18am]