Prince is trading in his lyrics for prose.
The music icon revealed this weekend that he is writing his memoir. He made the announcement at a pop-up performance in New York City on Friday night, the Wall Street Journal reports. Before playing a brief 45-minute set to an audience that included the likes of the Daily Show’s Trevor Noah and fellow singer Harry Belafonte, Prince asked the crowd, “You still read books, right?”
The Minneapolis sound pioneer is collaborating on the project with the Paris Review’s Dan Piepenbring, and it’s scheduled to be published sometime next year by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of publishing giant Random House. The working title is The Beautiful Ones, which is the name of one of his songs from the 1984 film Purple Rain.
Prince told the crowd that his memoir will cover his “first memories up to the Super Bowl,” where he performed the halftime show nearly 10 years ago. It’s expected to discuss his legal battle with the Warner Bros. Record label as well as his massive compilation of unreleased music.
“I think it will be one of the great music memoirs,” Esther Newberg of ICM Partners, the talent and literary agency from which Spiegel & Grau acquired the world rights for the book, told the Journal. “Like [Bob] Dylan, he writes his own songs, so of course he will write a wonderful book.”
