NPG Records and the Prince Estate have announced a 20th-anniversary reissue of 3121, arriving December 11. The 3121 Expanded Edition sets the original 12-track album beside 10 vault recordings, among them acoustic versions of "The Word," "Love" and "Te Amo Corazón," plus "The Streets of Panama," "Another Girl," "Glass Cutter" and "Girls In the Band." It comes digitally and as 3LP + Blu-ray and 2CD + Blu-ray. The first unreleased cut, "Time of Ur Life," is out now, alongside a live video for "Black Sweat."
The Blu-ray holds a January 20, 2007 show from Prince's Las Vegas residency. That same performance gets a standalone release as 3121 Las Vegas Live on November 27, timed to Record Store Day Black Friday. It runs past two hours, drawing on 3121 and Musicology material and reaching "Purple Rain," "Kiss," "If I Was Your Girlfriend" and "U Got the Look," with covers of "Pass the Peas," "Crazy" and "Play That Funky Music" in the mix.
The concert also reaches theaters. Prince: 3121 Las Vegas Concert opens a limited run in the US and Canada from December 3, tickets on sale November 11. The 154-minute film has not been seen before; it screens in 4K, with Dolby Atmos in equipped venues.
3121 landed March 21, 2006, and became Prince's first album to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, his fourth to top the chart. Coming after Musicology, it carried "Black Sweat," "Te Amo Corazón" and "Fury" into a stretch of renewed mainstream attention. The vault material here shows a working method as much as a trove: three songs from the record stripped to acoustic form, and titles like "Glass Cutter" and "Elixer" that never made the final sequence.
For anyone who has followed the estate's archival choices, including the recent dispute over overdubs on "Calabama," the Las Vegas set is the substantial piece: a full concert, filmed and unheard, from the residency that gave the album its name. The theater run puts that performance in front of an audience again, nineteen years on, in the room where it was made.
