[7][8] It is the first album released by the Prince estate consisting solely of material from his archive, the Vault.

[9] The album was discovered as a single cassette tape in Prince's vault at Paisley Park.

The music was recorded in one take in 1983 at Prince's Kiowa Trail home studio in Chanhassen, Minnesota.

[11] Four of the album's nine tracks were previously unreleased – "Mary Don't You Weep", "Wednesday" (originally recorded by Jill Jones for a deleted scene in Purple Rain), "Cold Coffee & Cocaine", and "Why the Butterflies".

The New York Times called the album "a glimpse of a notoriously private artist doing his mysterious work"[9] while Adam Mattera in Echoes cited "Mary Don't You Weep" as "a telling choice that points both to his political awareness and gospel heritage – not something people would have expected from a 25 year-old more famous at the time for his flasher mac, high heels and songs about incestuous siblings and used condoms".