Ten years ago today, we lost Prince. There’s also a new song.

I was in my home office on the afternoon of April 21, 2016, when the phone started ringing. New organizations wanted me to comment on the passing of Prince.

The what? This had to be some kind of hoax. There was no way he could…

Yet it was true. Death by fentanyl, which he’d been taking for his painful joints. It was so bad that he allegedly bought up to $40,000 in opioids at a time. And just like this, one of the most influential artists of all time was gone. And this was on the heels of losing Bowie that January.

Have ten years passed since that day in 2016? Yes. And as big as he was in life, Prince is even bigger since he died.

Today, there’s a new Prince song from the archives, and it’s significant. The track is “With This Tear,” recorded in November 1991 and unheard until now. This was a wild time for the Purple One, when songs poured out of him between the Diamonds and Pearls and Love Symbol Album.

Prince plays everything on the track and highlights his brilliance in the studio. The only changes to the original tracks were a remix by his Chris James, his long-time collaborator.

If the song sounds familiar, it’s because Prince gave it to Celine Dion, who recorded it in 1992. Is that version funky? No.

And there’s more, too. This is the first salvo in what will be a bigger campaign featuring unreleased material from the legendary vaults at Paisley Park. The next step (or so it seems) is a new Prince album of this material later this year.

There will be a special event tonight at Paisley Park in Minneapolis with a candle lighting ceremony at 4:21 pm, which is acknowledged at the exact time Prince died on April 21, 2026.