We’ll have to wait for recording engineer Susan Rogers’ book about working for Prince from 1983 to 1987.
Rogers engineered “ ‘Purple Rain,’ ‘Around the World in a Day,’ ‘Parade,’ ‘Sign o’ the Times,’ the ‘Black Album,’ all but one song,” she told me.
After working with her music idol and making lots of money as producer and engineer of a Barenaked Ladies album, Rogers decided to get a Ph.D. in music cognition. I talked via phone to the music production and engineering professor at Berklee College of Music in Boston. She teaches record production and analog tape recording and engineering, psychoacoustics and music cognition at Berklee. She just returned from Barcelona, Spain, where she gave a speech at the Sónar+D Festival on the “neurobiology of creativity.”
“If you include the visitors who come at night, roughly 125,000 show up, and they have 5,500 people like me who just come and speak, or deejays,” Rogers said. “I learned much more about techno music. It was really eye-opening. Exciting.”
No memoir is in sight. “Prince fans have asked me to write a book, but I’m busy with teaching — so maybe when I retire in another five or six years,” she said.
Until then, here’s part 1 from Rogers, whose calming demeanor and gift for simplifying information probably make her a good professor.
