Paisley Park, the house that never turned the lights off

Chanhassen, Minnesota is not where you would expect the most famous man in music to build a home. It is flat, cold nine months of the year, and the loudest thing on the road is usually a grain truck. In 1987 Prince put 65,000 square feet of white stucco on a plot there and moved his whole life inside.

Paisley Park was never really a studio and never really a house. It was both, on purpose. There were bedrooms upstairs and a kitchen that fed a rotating cast of musicians. There were two recording studios wired so that an idea at 4 a.m. could be a finished master by breakfast. There was a soundstage big enough to rehearse an arena tour in, and he did, often for audiences of nobody.

Staff had a rule they repeated to new hires: he does not sleep like you sleep. Sessions started when they started. A guitarist once described being called in on a Tuesday night, playing until Thursday, and walking out into daylight with no memory of Wednesday.

The building was designed to be private and it was, ruthlessly. Windows were placed high. The exterior gave nothing away. From the highway it looked like an insurance office park. Locals learned to read it anyway. If the pyramid skylight was lit, he was home. If cars filled the lot at midnight, something was being made.

After his death in 2016 the doors opened to the public for the first time, and visitors found the strange domestic truth of the place. A ping pong table. A dove cage. Handwritten lyric sheets left on a piano. The house of a man who had built himself a world so complete that he had no reason to walk outside it.