Camille (unreleased Prince album)

Camille
Studio album by Camille
Released	Cancelled
Recorded	Fall 1986
Label	Paisley Park/Warner Bros.
Producer	Prince

Camille is an unreleased album recorded by Prince in 1986 and intended to be pseudonymously credited to his feminine alter ego Camille, with Prince's vocals disguised in a pitched-up and androgynous style. The project was ultimately scrapped several weeks before its planned release. Several tracks originally intended for Camille were instead included on Prince's 1987 double LP Sign o' the Times.

After abandoning his Dream Factory LP and breaking up his backing band The Revolution in mid 1986, Prince entered the studio with engineer Susan Rogers in late October to begin a new project. He began experimenting with his vocals in an artificially pitched-up style, achieved either by using a pitchshifter or by recording his vocals at a slower tempo and then speeding up the tape to create a higher, androgynous tone (he had previously experimented with this technique on his 1984 b-side "Erotic City").

Prince began referring to this new pitched-up voice as a female alter ego named Camille. The sessions commenced with the recording of the dance track "Housequake" and within ten days he had completed enough material for an album, which he planned to release psuedonymously under Camille's name as a self-titled debut. He informed Warner Bros. that his image would not appear on the cover and that he would not acknowledge the album as his own work. At some point, his plans for Camille also extended to ideas for a movie. It has been suggested that the name was inspired by the 19th century French intersex person Herculine Barbin, who also used the alias Camille and was the subject of the 1985 film Mystère Alexina; Prince seemingly verified this in a 1997 interview.

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