“He said ‘Look, I want you to take all those albums and destroy them and I’ll pay for whatever cost was incurred in manufacturing.’ And he actually paid us out of his royalties”: What made Prince abruptly pull his new album days before release in 1987?

Prince studio.

It’s common that artists come to resent their most popular work, Kurt Cobain soon developed a distaste for Smells Like Teen Spirit and its chart-busing parent album, Nevermind, REM’s Michael Stipe grimaces at the mention of Shiny Happy People and just try and ask Thom Yorke about Creep, we dare you.

But while artists often develop less-than-positive hindsight perspective of output that might have shifted their creative trajectory, it’s extremely rare for a musician to create, record and mix a whole album, have hundreds of thousands of copies pressed, and then, out of nowhere, startlingly make the call to abandon it, a matter of days before it was due to hit shelves.