In the years leading up to his shocking death, music icon Prince was living a life as surreal and intense as the lyrics in his songs—obsessing over immortality, denying himself food, sex, and sleep, and spiraling into a secret battle with addiction.
According to resurfaced interviews featured in Prince: The Last Interviews and Other Conversations, the late star claimed he was following an extreme lifestyle of celibacy, fasting, and sleep deprivation. He insisted this bizarre routine would help him escape mortality—and, inspired by the film The Matrix, believed he might one day exist purely as a brain.
“I have gone long periods with no food, and also water—people have to remind me to drink water because I always forget,” Prince said in an interview at his Paisley Park compound just two years before his death. “After four days, you don’t want food anymore… I am music.”
The 5’2″ superstar also claimed he had given up sex and channeled his desires into guitar solos, once saying, “I can hit this guitar for you and what you’ll hear is sex.”
But the façade of spiritual purity and discipline was covering up something far darker.
Though Prince presented himself as a clean-living, Bible-quoting Jehovah’s Witness who loathed profanity, he was secretly addicted to fentanyl—a synthetic opioid 50 times more powerful than heroin. His official cause of death was an accidental overdose in April 2016, when he was found collapsed in an elevator at Paisley Park. He was 57.
Investigators discovered his home littered with prescription and non-prescription medications, many under false names. Despite his public image, Prince had quietly been using painkillers to manage long-term issues, with some suggesting he was suffering from hip pain due to decades of high-energy performances.
Prince had also become romantically involved with singer Judith Hill, a former contestant on The Voice. The pair had reportedly been dating since 2014 and kept in touch through an email account linked to one of Prince’s former managers.
Prince’s complicated love life included a trail of famous flings and two failed marriages. He wed backup dancer Mayte Garcia in 1996, but the couple was devastated by the death of their infant son, Amiir, who passed away just days after birth due to a rare genetic condition. The marriage collapsed soon after. In 2001, Prince married Manuela Testolini, who worked at his charity Love4OneAnother. That marriage ended in 2006.
Despite his claims of purity and transcendence, Prince’s final years were a volatile mix of mysticism, secrecy, and spiraling drug use. While he may have longed for eternal life as a disembodied mind, the reality was far more human—and heartbreakingly tragic.Tools