Paisley Park — where Prince lived, worked, and died

Prince Rogers Nelson built Paisley Park in 1987 on a suburban road in Chanhassen, Minnesota — a twenty-mile drive southwest of Minneapolis — and the complex became the operational and spiritual centre of his life for the remaining thirty years of it. The building is enormous and deliberately mysterious from the outside: a windowless grey structure that gives no indication of what it contains. Inside were two recording studios, a sound stage, a nightclub, living quarters, a vault of unreleased recordings estimated to contain thousands of songs, and everything else required to sustain a life conducted entirely within a single creative compound.

Prince recorded almost everything from Sign o' the Times onward at Paisley Park, working at night in sustained sessions that began after midnight and ran until dawn, recording prolifically and releasing only a fraction of what he made. The vault of unreleased material — its size and quality are both disputed — has been the subject of legal and institutional battles since his death. The studio equipment, the staging facilities, and the archive together made Paisley Park the most concentrated example in American music of an artist who willed an entire world into existence and then lived inside it.

Prince was found dead in an elevator at Paisley Park on April 21, 2016, at the age of 57. The cause was an accidental fentanyl overdose. He had purchased the drugs believing them to be hydrocodone; the fentanyl contamination was either not known or not disclosed. His death came at the end of a period in which he had been performing intensively despite physical pain from degenerative hip problems. He had not been publicly ill. The shock of his death — sudden, at fifty-seven, in the building where he lived and worked — was acute. Paisley Park opened as a museum within months of his death and now offers tours through the studios, stage, and personal spaces, with a collection of his possessions, costumes, and instruments. He is buried in an urn on the grounds.