EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS
PAPER-BAG
WRITER
Prince wrote the
“Do Me, Baby” lyr-
ics down on the
side of a paper
bag, “illustrating
[his] penchant...
to write on
anything that
was at hand,”
Piepenbring
says. The com-
piler also found
a planner with
various marked-
up conversion
tables inside it.
Piepenbring
imagines Prince
thinking, “I gotta
get the lyrics to
‘Uptown’ down.
This is all that’s
around. Sorry,
periodic table of
elements, sorry,
calendar—I’m
writing over this.”
THE BEAUTIFUL ONES IS ALMOST AS ENIGMATIC AS
its author. But if you can’t call it Prince’s
autobiography, exactly, Dan Piepenbring—
who went from assisting the musical icon’s
writing process to, after his death in 2016,
combing through his archives—has compiled
something pretty close: an intimate assembly
of early interviews, photos, scrap papers,
drawings, and lyrics. Piepenbring describes it
as Prince’s memoir, “in that it is a record of
his life and his thinking and his process.”
The first section showcases Prince’s hand-
written work on the book. “This is the way to
get the purest sense of Prince, in his words,
literally, as he wrote them,” explains Piepen-
bring, who then translates and complements
the text with photos and annotations derived
from conversations he had with the singer.
“He was just so prolific—it’s like he just sat
down and these words poured out of him.”
Here, EW presents first-look images from
the book that tease its fascinating, intensely
personal content. “I have no doubt that Prince
could have gone on to a second act as an
author,” Piepenbring tells EW. “He [let] his
mind rove in strange places.” —Marcus Jones
P R I N C E
Files
The
