Prince’s Timeless offers a rare opportunity to hear his extraordinary career unfold from beginning to end. Drawn from the legendary Paisley Park vault, the 10-track collection brings together rare and previously unreleased recordings made between 1977 and 2016, stretching from his earliest days as a teenage prodigy to one of his final performances. It marks the first Prince archival release specifically curated to span every major era of his career.

Arranged chronologically, Timeless begins with “I Am You,” an early home recording dating to Prince’s formative years, before moving into the previously unreleased 1981 version of “Tick Tick Bang,” a song he would eventually revisit for 1990’s Graffiti Bridge. “Heaven,” recorded in 1985, and 1989’s “I Wonder” open another window into a period when Prince seemed capable of generating enough music for several careers at once.

The collection continues with “With This Tear,” recorded in 1991 and first released digitally earlier this year, followed by “Stone,” a 1995 recording written by Sandra St. Victor, Tom Hammer and Jules Van Even. Originally considered during the period leading up to Emancipation, “Stone” is another reminder of just how much fully realized music Prince could leave behind while moving almost immediately toward his next idea.

The later years are represented by 2003’s “Calabama,” 2007’s “The Guilty Ones” and 2012’s “Bestest Friend,” bringing the story into a period of Prince’s career that remains relatively unexplored compared with his celebrated ’80s output. Rather than concentrating on one album or moment, Timeless allows those different versions of Prince to sit alongside one another, revealing how restless his creativity remained across nearly 40 years.

The album closes in 2016 with a live performance of “How Come You Don’t Call Me Anymore?,” the longtime fan favorite originally released as the B-side to “1999.” Placed at the end of a collection that begins when Prince was still finding his way into the recording studio, the performance provides a fitting bookend: the young musician discovering what he could do on one side, and the seasoned performer commanding a song decades later on the other.

The recordings have been mastered by Grammy-nominated engineer and former Prince collaborator Chris James, whose credits with Prince include HITnRUN Phase Two, Art Official Age and Plectrumelectrum. His involvement gives the disparate recordings a common thread while preserving the character of the periods in which they were made.

With Timeless, the Prince vault once again proves to be far deeper than a collection of leftovers. These songs capture ideas Prince pursued, abandoned, reshaped or simply set aside while his attention raced toward whatever came next. Heard together, they offer a fascinating parallel history of a career we thought we already knew, one built from the music Prince made along the way and, for one reason or another, never gave us the chance to hear.