Susan Rogers

Torsten Schmidt

We’re here to celebrate this thing called, maybe life, but also listening. In order to do so, we have a special guest with us. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Susan Rogers.

(applause)

Susan Rogers

Thank you. Thank you. Oh, it is working.

Torsten Schmidt

Is that the first thing you do, still? Mic check?

Susan Rogers

Yeah, and Lisa Coleman. I just saw when Prince’s band, the Revolution, did some shows at First Avenue and so the crew is on stage and they’re going, “Check 1, 2. 2, 2, 1, 2, 2.” She said to me, “Can audio techs count beyond 2?” I said, “Yeah, I don’t know if that’s ever been tested.” (laughs)

Before we begin our conversation can I please say thank you, first of all, for inviting me. I’m really happy to be here. I’m really impressed. I saw this facility this morning and I learned more about you and I really got to say congratulations to you participants who are here doing this. That you beat out so much competition indicates that you’re already made of some rare stuff, and that’s only a beginning. It’s only a starting point. It’s not a predictor of anything, really. At least you’re going to need that so it’s good that you have it. Good on you, as they say, for being here. Thank you, all.

(applause)

Torsten Schmidt

Just for perspective, if you felt bad the other day when you did not match Stevie’s output by the age of 25, this is coming from someone who teaches at a little music school called Berklee. I think you know a little bit about music schools.

Susan Rogers

Little bit. We see students from all over the world with strengths and weaknesses and there’s some overlap, and then there are always a few unique individuals, but yeah, we see the future of music. The young people of today who are at that, who are in the same place you are, sort of, in your career journey – where you’re both trying to figure out how to make music, how to make this product.

I say product very consciously because I presume that you’re making music in order to sell it, which means you’re making music to make a career out of it. You don’t have to. You can make music as a hobbyist. You can do that your whole life and probably be quite well rewarded, internally rewarded by that. But if you want to be externally rewarded, if you want your music to be heard, if you want people to have opinions about it, if you want people to come up to your shows and buy your T-shirts and visit your website, then that’s a different conversation. A different conversation between you and your art, and it’s difficult. It’s difficult. There are many variables.

Torsten Schmidt

Before we get into these variables I want to dial it back a little bit and talk about listening, because I guess that’s where a lot of music starts. When you know a piece of music is dear to another human being, do you prefer to know before you listen yourself what it is in that particular piece that is dear to them or would you like to go into it unbiased?

Susan Rogers

What would be... Let me ask, it depends on why you’re listening to it. If you’re listening to it to offer them a critique, if it’s the artist, him or herself, then that would be different. Do you mean you’re just with friends sharing music?

Torsten Schmidt

I guess this is a couch and we’re trying to always make this as friendly as possible, so yeah, let’s assume it’s a friendly situation. Ideally, that is sort of the vibe that you have in the studio, as well, as a professional.

Susan Rogers

Oh, yeah. One of my favorite things to do in the studio was to have a record pool. A record pool where you just stop for a minute and everyone takes turns playing music for one another and the best thing is when they tell you why this is great. It’s so good because it allows you to hear music through someone else’s ears. Somebody will say, “Ah, this means so much to me because it solved this problem when I was 13 years old,” or, “Because this lyric just blows my mind,” or, “Because do you realize that the writer of this piece of music wrote this when he was about to lose his mind,” or “Because, blah, blah, blah, blah. This person was trying to imitate that one and actually failed and this is the result of it.”

Actually, a failure and that’s so exciting because it allows you to hear it, filtering what you’re hearing through a new set of knowledge that you didn’t have before.

Torsten Schmidt

Do you do that beforehand or after?

Susan Rogers

Before. But in a different context, if you’re working with an artist in the studio – and it’s probably worth mentioning if you’re talking about record-making – some producers like to ask the artist, “What is this song about?” so the producer can help the artist express what the song is about.

Other producers, and I was one of them, preferred to not know what it was about because I want to listen like the audience would listen. Meaning, I don’t know you. I don’t know what this is about. This song needs to mean something to me. I don’t care what it means to you.

Torsten Schmidt

What does “For the Love of You” by the Isley Brothers mean to you? Why should we care?

Susan Rogers

Oh, it’s so good. Do you know that song? “For the Love of You” by the Isley Brothers? Prince used to talk about the street you live on. By that he meant the music that is your home base, the music that feels the most right to you. It’s like the call of your people. It’s a voice that when you hear it you just know these are my people. This just feels right.

When I hear Al Jackson Jr., the late great drummer for Al Green. When you hear “Love and Happiness” and you hear the beginning of that song, (sings), you already do the pigeon head. It’s like, “Ahhhh.” It’s my resonant frequency in that it’s so powerful I stop in my tracks for fear I’ll break. I have to physically stop when I hear that, it’s so good. It’s just so perfect.

What that is and why physiologically, what’s happening, who knows? But to answer your question about “For the Love of You” it just makes me feel good. It just feels so good, that lead line and that voice. Oh, it just kills me. Where that comes from I believe is innate. I think Prince was on to something when he said, “Home base. It’s the street where you live.”

Now, that said, he believed, and it seems to be true, that we can visit other neighborhoods and we can love other music that’s not our home base. Whether it’s salsa or jazz or it’s folk rock or just whatever. You can visit other streets, but there’s something you’re always going to love best about your home base.

Torsten Schmidt

At this stage, I would kindly ask directors up there to lower the lights and make it very comfy in here. Can we do that? Can we lower them a little bit more? Just a little bit. We just want you guys to listen, and here is “For the Love of You, Pts. 1 & 2.”

(music: The Isley Brothers – “For the Love of You, Pts. 1 & 2” / applause)

Susan Rogers

What a treat that was. Oh my goodness. Thank you for playing that. Oh, thank you.

Torsten Schmidt

So why should – Oops. We get to that in a second. So at one of those record pools what would you say about it that time?

Susan Rogers

There’s so much. Do you know the album, the Isley Brothers album called Harvest for the World? Yes. So it was in the ’70s and it was soul music played with acoustic guitar, which you don’t hear that often. We need to hear more of that. Did you notice the acoustic guitar in that track? And that vocal? Oh. So there’s this high voice. As a psychologist, if I may digress for just a moment, we ask the question why do women like men who sing in a falsetto? Why are... I know, Eddie Kendricks and Tommy Jordan, folks who can just sing up there really high. What is that conveying? A possible answer is – because it hasn’t been tested – a possible answer is that a man who can sing in a high voice is saying, “I’m approachable, I’m not threatening, I don’t have this deep growly voice.” Although women, in the laboratory, women prefer men with deep voices. It’s a sign of testosterone and women prefer it. But when we hear a male sing in that high falsetto, it can be irresistible. Oh.

Vocals... you know what I’m saying. The same for men. It’s a woman with a very breathy voice, because for men it’s signaling, the woman is signaling, “I can be nurturing and gentle to your children. I will nurture your offspring. I won’t be screaming at your kids all the time. There’ll be peace in the home.” But a man who can sign in a high voice might be saying, “I’m not a threatening male.” But it might also be that he’s signifying that he’s got a lot of power. A man is naturally going to sing in his chest voice. So if a man can go up to his head voice, he’s got a full can of whoop-ass, he’s got an extra gear. Likewise, a woman who naturally sings in her head voice, if she can drop down and do a whole vocal in her chest voice, it’s sexy, because it’s saying I’ve got more than the average singer.

There’s something about that vocal, there’s something about that hi-hat that’s just pushing the beat a little bit and then the claps that are just a little bit behind the beat. Then there’s that thing that soul music does so well. The tension comes from not moving. In rock music, there are great dynamics. It’s verse, chorus, verse, chorus, and then you take a turn around the bend for the bridge, and then it’s chorus or maybe a breakdown verse and it’s the dynamics where we push and pull. But in soul music, the tension comes from staying right there, just stay right there. Those were the two words that Prince used to say to his band all the time in rehearsal, when they’d get in the sweet spot with the group he’d say, “Don’t move. Don’t move.” That just feels so good and that song does that perfectly.

There’s a rhythm track. It’s just holding steady. It’s just that beautiful steady pulse which our bodies lock onto really easily, because that’s the easiest path to hook listeners, the motor path. Then above it you’ve got this lead line floating like a dolphin over the current, you’ve got this flute line. It’s coming up and down. It’s pretty, and it’s hypnotic. Then on top of that you’ve got this high voice and that breath and that power that he’s got, and then you’ve got his message, I’m living for the love of you. It’s romantic. It’s kind of got it all. For those of us who like soul music, that’s scratching that itch in a perfect way.

Torsten Schmidt

When you described it in that way, was that the engineer talking, the music fan, someone who had piano lessons, or the doctorate?

Susan Rogers

I think first of all a music fan, which we all are, which is why we’re here. You know you love something. You might learn how to make that thing that you love, if you’re going to do this for a living. You love it so much you want to do it for a living. You actually want to make it and you want listeners to have that response to a thing you’ve made. So you set out, you set out to do this.

We were talking about it at lunch. You don’t necessarily know what you’re doing, at least not consciously. You might not be able to describe what you’re doing. Somewhere inside you there’s a decision, a set of decision criteria that just says, “This feels right.” You don’t know where that came from but you just know. This feels right, this is wrong. Deviations from this is wrong. This is right to me. But then later, after I earned my degree, I learned a little bit more about how people bond to music. I learned about the formal elements in music that do attract listeners. I can talk about it from a science perspective, but also from a record maker’s perspective, and also from a fan’s perspective. All of those perspectives are valid and true and accurate. They just use different language.

Torsten Schmidt

Can you recall when you first had that feeling that, “Oh, this is me, this is something I want to do?”

Susan Rogers

You know, I think it might have been when I realized this isn’t me, and that was the Beatles. I was seven years old and the Beatles were really popular. I remember I had my first Beatles record and thinking, “This...” I remember thinking, “I don’t get it. This isn’t really doing it for me.” But you don’t want to say anything because you’re seven, and they’re the Beatles, and you don’t want to be ostracized in second grade. But I just kind of remember thinking, “I love music, but this just isn’t speaking to me the way it seems to speak to other people.” Then I remember hearing Sly Stone on the radio and then it’s like, “Now that’s what I’m talking about,” and just feeling like... this feels a little bit more right to me.

I remember being about nine years old and hearing the long version of Buffalo Springfield’s “Bluebird.” Stephen Stills. “Listen to my bluebird laugh.” It was a long version on FM radio. At the end he goes into this blues thing and he starts moaning. He’s going “ahh” and I remember thinking, yeah, now that’s right.

That’s why I think that as children, we know who we are. Adults usually get in the way and society and social pressures get in the way and kind of shape us or push us to liking this band or that band. You want to be like these kids. You like these kids better and they happen to listen to that kind of music but, the musical street you live on is actually over there. I think we know it when we’re young.

Torsten Schmidt

I mean, you were in California at the time, right? Your first professional forays were in the environment which was about as Californian as it could get. Could you elaborate on where you got your first jobs?

Susan Rogers

I knew as a child that I wanted to make records. I was passionate about music and I loved records, but I also knew I wasn’t cut out to be a music maker myself. I wasn’t a musician. I took piano lessons and I just kinda thought, “I don’t like this. This is not pleasurable.” To paraphrase David Sedaris, it’s like a system that results in pleasure for absolutely no one. A perfect blend between sadism and masochism. I hate this, anyone listening to it hates it. It’s no good. I somehow had this vague notion that I wanted to be where music was being made.

There was an ad in the LA Times that said, “Audio trainee wanted,” for a company called Audio Industries Corporation. They sold and serviced MCI consoles and tape machines. I joined them when I was 21 years old as a trainee and I knew one end of a battery from the other and that was about it. I was studying really hard buying textbooks and electronics manuals and working to work my way into the music industry as a technician.

Torsten Schmidt

Seeing that the internet wasn’t around then, how did you get ahold of those manuals and all that factual knowledge?

Susan Rogers

I had a friend, he was a boyfriend and he was a bit of an electronics genius. Exceptionally bright. He learned electronics from a manual from the US Army. He said, “You know, the army teaches recruits electronics. They need recruits to be into electronics. They’ll send you this for free. Just call them up and ask them. Tell them you’re going to join the army.” I did. I phoned the local army recruiter and I lied about my age. I said, “I’m 16 years old and when I get out of high school I’m going to join the army, can you send me your electronics manuals?” The guy goes, “Well sure, little lady. What’s your address?” And I sent them $1.75 in postage and a few weeks later a big box [arrived] with all these electronics manuals courtesy of the US government.

Torsten Schmidt

You didn’t even need WikiLeaks for that. It just came like that.

Susan Rogers

No. It just came. The government has all these resources and I needed to, I realized, I didn’t flatter myself to think that I could be an engineer, much less a producer. That never crossed my mind. I wanted to help. I wanted to do something. I realized that I can study and I can learn and I’m good at memorization, I’m good at reading, that I can take the way my brain works, I can apply it in service of music and maybe someone will want my services. That’s what I did. I studied. I bought Modern Recording Techniques. If you don’t have it you should. They’re up to their 8th edition right now. I had the 1st edition, and I learned a lot from that book, and books on acoustics and just basic principles of sound design.

Torsten Schmidt

So later on we’ll have a recommended reading list that we can pull out. Who were the folks that you would get in contact with at that time at that job? LA was sort of a happening town for music.

Susan Rogers

Yeah, the year was 1978 and at that time there were more than 500 studios in the greater Los Angeles area. There was a little bit of a crisis in the music business at that time and some of the studios were going down. I was really fortunate I was able to see Gold Star; a lot of Pet Sounds was recorded there at Gold Star. Stevie Wonder used to work there. A studio called Crystal, where Stevie Wonder used to work. There was a studio called Angel City Sound where the Beatles had worked. Some of these studios were just dropping, dropping, dropping. Wally Heider’s. I saw some of them in the late ’70s before they went down. That was the end of the rock & roll area and the beginning of new wave and the new dawning in music. Artists like Prince were just starting to emerge.

With Audio Industries I worked on – it was a very popular tape machine – the MCI. They weren’t as good as the Studer, not by a long shot, but the Studer was like the Cadillac and the MCI was like the Ford. Everybody had one and they were fairly easy to work on. Yeah, there were studios all over the city with MCI consoles and tape machines and I was trained to become a technician. I repaired consoles and tape machines when they went down.

Torsten Schmidt

When someone sees footage from that time, even in popular things like mainstream movies like Neil Diamond’s Jazz Singer, whatever it is, always a scene when they go to LA to go to a real studio, and you’re like, “What is this?” A swimming pool from today’s standards? It’s like places that seem to be a multitude of this size, this room right here. They’ve got four orchestras in there and stuff. Those were the places that you entered as a 21 year old?

Susan Rogers

Yeah. We had the sense, myself and folks like Ed Cherney and others who were just starting out. Dave Jordan and people who were just starting out around that time, we knew that we were seeing the end of one era and the beginning of another. Not so much for studios because studios kept alive for another two decades, the ’80s and ’90s, but the music industry was changing. The old rock dinosaurs were dying out. The studios were still there, though. We saw – and it’s still there – Capitol and RCA and studios that were affiliated with record labels as well as the legendary places like Sunset Sound, which is still there. Paramount’s still there. A lot of those places are still there. Village Recorder, United Western, where Frank Sinatra used to work, which became Ocean Way and is now East West Studios. A lot of those rooms are still there.

Torsten Schmidt

How intimidating did you find those spots?

Susan Rogers

For myself and for many of us, our heads were in the clear ether of youth. We were 21 years old and we thought we belonged there. There’s some hubris, you’re feeling like, “Yeah, this is going to be great.” You don’t know anything. You’re trying really hard to not screw up because you want to stay around just long enough that they’ll teach you a few things and they’ll value you and they’ll want you there. There had to, I think for everyone starting out, there has to be a great deal of guts. You have to be a little bit egotistical. On some level you have to say, “This is totally going to work. I’m totally gonna make it.” Then on the other hand you have to be able to say, you have to know, you have to have the realization that the odds are against you. You’re going to have to do something right to keep it working. I think guiding your career early is knowing when to hit the brakes, when to hit the gas pedal, knowing how fast to take the turns. Knowing when to slow down. You really have to manage your career rather successfully early on.

Yeah, we had a certain cockiness, but I’m not going to say that I was confident when I walked into some multimillion-dollar facility to repair some guy’s console that cost him... These consoles cost more than his house back then in the early ’80s. Those consoles sold for $300,000 and $400,000. A tape machine was $40,000, and at the time when I was really getting good at it I was 23 years old. Disco was popular. Sometimes I would go to work in high heels. (laughs) It wasn’t the norm. I didn’t have the plaid shirt and the pocket protector necessarily because why would I? I was a young woman. As long as I knew what I was doing, the tape machine didn’t care what I was wearing. You have to have a little bit of hubris, but you have to really be able to deliver. You have to know what you’re doing.

Torsten Schmidt

How did you learn to navigate the balance between the hubris and the healthy sane approach?

Susan Rogers

By being embarrassed. By making mistakes. By being an idiot, but just enough of an idiot that it’s not so bad, that people will forgive you and they think that you’re worth a second chance. Someone said to me recently, he’s got two kids who are college age, and he said, “I don’t think the youth of today are being given the license to make as many mistakes as they once did.” I don’t know if that’s true or not. I know back when I was young, we were allowed to make mistakes provided that we showed we had the right stuff. We had to demonstrate that we learned from our mistakes. We had to demonstrate the necessary humility. I’ll share with you something that Tony Maserati, the record producer, said recently at a keynote address. He was taking Q&A from the audience and he said, “Let me tell you guys. If you’re under 30 years old and you like to go out, you like to socialize, you like to go to parties, you like to have fun, you don’t belong in the studio. You should not be a record maker. You might be an A&R person. You might be a manager. You shouldn’t be thinking about a career in music.”

He said if you’re under 30 years old, you have to be studying, and he used the word study, every night. Every weekend. Whenever you have discretionary time, you must be honing your skills. You must be learning your craft because it’s so hard to do. That’s what I was doing every night and every weekend. I was studying.

Torsten Schmidt

Interesting that you mention him, because a lot of people that worked with him would always say, “I came up under Tony Maserati,” so it seems like there’s a clear hierarchical thinking in the same way as it used to be with, let’s say, painters or high-scale photographers or whatever where you have this master-apprentice relationship.

Susan Rogers

Yes. That is it exactly. The old school methods, I think, still apply, where it is a master and an apprentice. When you’re young, someone sees something in you – and people are egotistical, we might as well admit it. What they see in the young you is a younger version of themselves. They see themselves and they recognize it and they say to themselves “You remind me of me when I was young. I recognize you. I’m going to take you under my wing and I’m going to teach you.” They will allow you to make mistakes if you’re making the same kind of mistakes they made. If your mistakes are completely off the rails and they don’t know where you’re coming from, they’ll probably say “I don’t recognize you.” Tony Maserati said, when he does have really talented young people who are not like him, who want to party on the weekends, he’ll tell them “I think you’re cut out for this business, but not the studio business. I think you should be in the music industry, but in a different role.”

Torsten Schmidt

Do you think that sort of hierarchical thinking still has a place in the 21st century?

Susan Rogers

It worked, so I don’t see why we wouldn’t continue to do it. I assume it was. I don’t think humans change that fast. Systems that work tend to stay in place for good reason. I can’t see that that would be overturned because what would be the substitute? If you didn’t have that system, you’d have what we have, which is Berklee College of Music. Schools. Where you go to a school and you learn jazz composition or film scoring, or you learn record production. You learn mixing. It doesn’t make you a mixer. It doesn’t make you a film scorer. You still have to go out and enter this system, and the system is going to vet you. It’s going to test you to see whether or not you’re worthy. It’s the same thing for musical artists. What musicians are coming up under, oddly, it’s like a circle that goes back to the basics. Your boss is the record-buying public. You’ll come up under and be given license to practice your art if enough people like you. It’s very humbling, isn’t it?

Torsten Schmidt

Interestingly enough, in a culture where people seem to get a lot of their daily validation for existence out of the number of digital likes they’re gathering, how would you recommend keeping their mental sanity as a human being?

Susan Rogers

I think it’s really important to define success for yourself. I think you should say “What would success look like and feel like to me?” You don’t know whether or not you’re going to like it if you get it and you might not. A friend of mine said, “Sometimes you don’t get the dream you want. Sometimes you get the dream you didn’t know you had.” Sometimes your life doesn’t turn out the way you thought it would. It turns out actually better than you thought it would.

You should know yourself, know enough to know what you want. Joni Mitchell said “Do you want do be an artist or do you want to be a star?” Because there’s the Venn diagram of those two things. It’s not perfect overlap. Do you want to be a star? You should acknowledge that. If success means fame, then you should admit it to yourself and you should shape your music to help you get that. If success means being known by other musicians, you’ll make different choices in your career. I talk with students about how there are three primary audiences for music. You can be a success with just one of them and that’ll do, but they’re very different.

The three audiences, to my way of thinking, are the general public that’s looking for a certain thing in their music. Another audience, however, is the music critics and the scholars. The scholars are looking for something different, just like movie critics like different movies than the general public likes. Because the scholars have the history of where art has been and they can predict where it’s going to go and they critique art based on a standard of all art. Then the third audience is your peers, other musicians. At Berklee, we see a lot of kids who fall into the trap of playing to impress other musicians. Other musicians hear music very differently than the general public.

I think the youth of today should define success. Does it include marriage? Does it include children? Does it include living in a really expensive city like London or LA or New York? Does it include waking up every day and being at work? Do you want to wake up and have a studio in your home? Or do you want to wake up and drive to where you work? Do you want to have a spouse who’s in the same industry as you? Do you want to fall asleep at night and put your head on the pillow and talk shop? Some people love that and some people hate it. Do you want to have employees? What do you want? I think that’s important for beginners starting out before they really get themselves down a road they might not like.

Torsten Schmidt

Before we embark on that train, using an example of how that sort of worked, you talked a lot about mistakes. Where do you see the threshold? When do you need to excuse yourself publicly, personally, for mistakes that you may have committed? Or where is it better to just brush them over and hope it will sort itself out?

Susan Rogers

People do their best when they know themselves and when they’re honest with themselves. If you’re honest with yourself, if you can really define and describe yourself, ironically, that’s the first step toward being something else. Because it lays a foundation for change. I think it’s wise to admit our mistakes to ourselves and to others. People who don’t, however, are often really, really successful. We see it in our politicians. We see it everywhere. It’s hard to know for sure. I guess it depends on what you can live with and what your environment will support. Frankly, the music industry, think about it, you’re making a product that no one needs. Humans can live without music. It’s debatable whether or not we could thrive without it, but it’s not like we’re making bread or we’re running electrical cable or we’re heating people’s homes. We’re making music. It’s something that they buy with their disposable income.

You’re making a product that we don’t need and we already have too much of. There’s too much music out there. Nobody wants it. Nobody’s asking us, “Give us more of that because we don’t have enough.” Wouldn’t it behoove you, then, if you’re going to compete and you’re going to make this thing, you should be humble and you should recognize that maybe it would behoove me to try to do something. To try and solve a problem, to try and achieve something with my art. Then, in that case, mistakes are possible.

You might be the kind of artist who makes music for a hobby or who doesn’t care too much about selling it. In that case, there’s no mistakes because it’s just up to you. As soon as you involve the magic words “other people,” then it’s possible to make mistakes because now we have a transfer function between you and other people. You might drop the ball. You might mess up.

Torsten Schmidt

I want to let that sink in for a second and maybe after that second, change the mood a little bit.

(music: Prince – “Let’s Go Crazy (Special Dance Mix)” / applause)

Torsten Schmidt

So what was that?

Susan Rogers

That was so amazing. Amazing to be with Prince at that time. He was 25 years old, making his sixth album, and when he was 24 the year before, he went to his record label, Warner Brothers, and he said, “I’m going to make my next record, and also I want to make a movie, too, and we’ll release them both, kind of at the same time.” Who does that? And what label says, “Yes?” But they did, they believed in him enough, and he was just climbing, he had just had his first crossover hit with “Little Red Corvette” on the previous album, on 1999. So it could have tanked his career, but he just had the guts to say “No, I think this is going to work,” and just did it. That song was recorded in the warehouse rehearsal space. We didn’t have a proper studio yet.

In Minneapolis, he had... There was a little bedroom across from the master bedroom in his home that had a tape machine and a console in it, and that’s where he did some of the Purple Rain album, and then there was a rehearsal space, just a warehouse, really, where he would set up with the band, and all the mics on the stage would feed a splitter snake, and then the output of the splitter snake fed a monitor-mix console, and then it also fed an API recording console, and then the outputs of that, I wired up to a tape machine so we could record rehearsals. There was no isolation, so the console and where the band played, there was no isolation. It was all right there, so to monitor I just had to listen to headphones, or stick my head right in front of the loudspeaker to try and hear it, and you couldn’t hear it anyway because the band was just so loud, but we would record the basic track with the band onstage, he’d keep the girls around, like Wendy and Lisa, to do backing vocals, and then he and I stayed up the whole rest of the night and finished the song, and printed it to two-track.

Torsten Schmidt

That sounds like it was long hours.

Susan Rogers

With him, it was typically anywhere between 16 and 24. 16 would be a fairly short session, but we frequently did 24 hours. That was fairly common. That was how long it took, because he never wanted to come back to a song. If he started it, he wanted to do all the overdubs and mixing it as we went, and then print it, and then it would be done, and then we’d sleep for a few hours and then start another song.

Torsten Schmidt

How did you keep up? Like mentally, physically?

Susan Rogers

It was kind of easy and invigorating, because I was a Prince fan! I was just so excited to be there, and with every song, with one exception, with every song, I was always thinking, “This may be the greatest thing he’s ever done! This is the greatest – Wait till people hear this! This is great!” Just one after the other after the other, they were all so amazing. You take that clear ether of youth, and you couple that with a little bit of training and preparation, and then you take that energy and you put it in an environment where people say, “Here’s a lot of money. Go ahead and make a movie. Make a record. Do whatever you want, and there doesn’t have to be a producer in the room. It can be just you, the artist, and your engineer, because we trust you.”

It’s just so invigorating. Prince didn’t... Well, I say this knowing what we know about how he died. At the time, he did not do drugs, not at all, because he wouldn’t have been able to stay up if he had done drugs. He was just healthy and young and strong, and every once in a while he would have a cup of coffee, but we didn’t want to make him coffee, because then we’d be up for another 24 hours!

Torsten Schmidt

Also a lot of sugar, one hears.

Susan Rogers

Well, he kind of went through phases, but yeah, he had a sweet tooth. He lived on Doritos and cake.

Torsten Schmidt

Nothing wrong with that in my book.

Susan Rogers

Yeah, he ate like a little kid at the time when I was with him.

Torsten Schmidt

When you showed up there in Minneapolis, you had done how many recording sessions?

Susan Rogers

He had done, or I had done?

Torsten Schmidt

When you showed up there.

Susan Rogers

I had done very few, and only basically as an assistant engineer. He hired me as his technician. He needed someone to... he asked his management, “Find me someone from New York or L.A.,” because the locals weren’t as fluent in pro audio techniques, the local Minneapolis folk, so he wanted someone from the industry, and I’d been in the industry five years now. At this point, I was working for Crosby, Stills, and Nash, their studio in Hollywood. I heard through the professional grapevine that Prince was looking for a technician, and I just jumped on it, because I knew he liked working with women, he was my favorite artist in the world, and I wanted that job so badly, and I was qualified for it, so his management hired me. They interviewed me and hired me, so I had done practically no sessions.

What I did was, I pulled out... the first thing I did was, I pulled out an old console and then installed a new one. I repaired his tape machine. There was some stuff with his outboard gear that I fixed, and just basically got the studio up and running so he could continue recording on the Purple Rain record. He just put me in the engineer's seat at that point, because he didn’t like to work with too many people. If you knew how the gear worked he assumed you knew how to run it, so be the engineer. That was really a dream come true.

Torsten Schmidt

Did you have a moment of, “Oh, shit this is what we’re doing.”

Susan Rogers

Hell yeah. I remember the very first... I finally had finished setting up everything and he gave me instructions to put up a vocal mic. The vocal mic... at that time it wasn’t that rare, but now it’s extremely rare, it was a tube U47, the Neumann. They’re very expensive now, so beautiful. I put up the tube mic to do a vocal and hung it on the boom stand over the console the way he said he wanted it. I kept thinking, “Oh, no. The engineer’s going to walk in any minute and catch me. I’m going to be in so much trouble and I’m going to have to tell this engineer, Prince told me to do it. I had to.” He told me to get a sound on the mic, I’m thinking, “Oh, my god I’m going to be fired now, this engineer is going to tell on me.”

It was my boss who was telling me to do it, so I did. I got a sound and he came in and finally I asked him, “Who’s going to record it?” He said, “You.” I said, “OK, fair enough chief, off we go.” That’s how it began. I had the dawning realization after awhile that, he doesn’t know that I’m not an engineer. Then a second dawning was, he knows and he doesn’t care. I felt very fortunate every single day I was with him.

Torsten Schmidt

How important do you find that unorthodox way of setting things up and running recording sessions contributed to the way his art translated onto record?

Susan Rogers

It’s really important. I think that’s a really important question. People have asked me, or they’ve prefaced questions by saying, “Prince was known to be a perfectionist.” I always have to correct them. He was not a perfectionist. He wouldn’t have had that output if he’d been a perfectionist. What he was, was a virtuoso player and a genius with melody, a genius with rhythm, a genius at writing songs. It just poured out of him, he couldn’t wait on perfection. The important thing was to have the sound serve the ideas, not the other way around. Working quickly was fine with him and only a beginning engineer would have no bad habits to break.

Only a beginner would be willing to go that fast. With an important record, the Geggy Tah record that I did in the mid ‘90s put a fine point on that for me. I learned more about music from those guys than any people I’d ever worked with. Tommy Jordan and Greg Kurstin from Geggy Tah. With them I learned that the rule book is for beginners. Once you know what you’re doing, chuck it.

Torsten Schmidt

There were people who were instrumental in helping you to figure out which way he would have liked the rule book to be chucked. As in people that would be working with him that showed you the ropes and gave you a little bit of a hand.

Susan Rogers

That was Jesse Johnson from the Time. Prince went out to Los Angeles to work on the Purple Rain movie logistics and he let Jesse and me use the studio. Jesse had some tracks he wanted to record and Jesse was instrumental to me keeping my job. He taught me, “Here’s how Prince likes the kick drum sound. Here’s how he likes the snare to sound. Hi-hat always has to be on the left. Rhythm guitar has to sound like this, electric guitar has to sound like that.” He showed me on the console, “This is Prince’s sound.” We had a lot of conversations, he helped teach me Prince’s value system.

Torsten Schmidt

What would that be?

Susan Rogers

What we need music to do. When you’re mixing a record, you need to understand something about where you want your listeners attention to go. You need to subconsciously, I suppose, understand how you want people to move to this music. How would they dance to it? The answer to those questions determines, is the bass louder than the kick drum, or is the kick drum louder than the bass? Is the focus on the two and four, or is the focus on the one and three in this song? Should the vocal be up, should the vocal be down in the track? Where do we want peoples attention to go, because what do we want them to feel when they hear this? That’s the value system that is always in place for every artist and Jesse helped me to transition from the LA sound that I knew into this Minneapolis sound. That was really just the Prince sound that he was crafting for himself. This is who we are, there’s an us and we sound like this.

Torsten Schmidt

This band that you mentioned, The Time, how on the radar on a scale from zero to ten?

Susan Rogers

The Time is Prince. Prince wrote all those songs and performed all the instruments on the record. He’d have Jesse do a guitar solo. Prince would sing a guide vocal and then Morris would come in and just copy Prince’s lead. The Time is just another one of Prince’s musical personalities. Music is an expression of life, but it’s not 100% of an artist’s output. Music is only a part of Prince’s life and Prince music was only a part of the music of Prince’s life. There was the Time music, there was Sheila E and there was Vanity 6. They were his musical alter egos. To answer your question, the Time was just another version of Prince. The public didn’t know at the time, because Prince didn’t want it to know. He didn’t want it know that it was him.

Prince created his own competition for the purpose of making... he’s the first artist as far as I know to ever do that. Who does that, create your own competition so that you can get the record buying public to think that coming out of this town, Minneapolis, Minnesota is a scene, not just one genius guy. He created the Time to be his competition and then he wrote this movie to play them as the competition and the prize they were fighting for was Vanity 6, which is anther one of Prince’s alter egos.

Torsten Schmidt

Sounds like a very healthy, small balanced ego.

Susan Rogers

It’s not a balanced ego, I don’t suppose. Everyone’s missing something, but it’s a multifaceted ego. He was very masculine and he was feminine in ways that a masculine man is. He had a feminine sensibility, he was very street and he was very sophisticated. He had an artistic streak that a lot of people didn’t give him credit for. One of the movies he loved was David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Stuff like that. He was a really extraordinary, extraordinary human being.

Torsten Schmidt

In the end, using that example, that movie and the soundtrack for that movie got him something that Ludacris boasts about 20 years later to be the first rapper to get a Grammy and an Oscar, Prince did that 15-20 years before that, right?

Susan Rogers

Speaking of rap, he knew that it was coming, he knew that it was going to take over funk. It was. In the ’80s, it was already showing signs that this is where it’s going to go. That rap and hip-hop would become the dominant force. That was difficult for him, it must have been difficult for Michael Jackson, too. To recognize that you’re on the top of your game and the next wave it’s about to crash over you. You’ll always be good, you’ll always be valid, because you’ve done so much up to this point, but you will never again be the dominant art form. As in all art the next wave, it just comes and crashes on the beach right over you.

Torsten Schmidt

All these guys that were scratching at his throne, would always obsess about how on earth does he get the drums to sound the way they sound. Especially the drum box that he used, the LM-1?

Susan Rogers

Yeah.

Torsten Schmidt

Seeing that we’re amongst friends, there were some BOSS pedals I guess involved?

Susan Rogers

What we did is, the LM-1 was different from the LinnDrum, which is a better more improved model. The LM-1 had a crystal clock that wasn’t quite as accurate as the next one. So the timing of the LinnDrum, the old cheap LinnDrum that Prince used, the LM-1, it wasn’t as robotic, it wasn’t as rigid which made it slightly more human. When that thing would heat up, it would speed up a little bit, drift a little bit, so there was that. The other thing it had is that it had individual outputs for all of the sounds, kick, snare, hat, claps, clave, all the toms. There were individual outputs.

In the later model, the LinnDrum, they only had individual outputs for some of them and then the rest had to be combined in this little mixer. Prince could take the LM-1 and he could take the claps and run it through the flanger. He always had his guitar pedal, his guitar pedals were the Roland BOSS pedals. We would take his BOSS pedal board from his guitar rig and just plug it into the output of the drum machine and we could send claps, or snare or toms usually, and hi-hat, whatever we liked through this mixture of the heavy metal pedal and the flanger and the chorus and the delay and the distortion. Dialing in on the pedal board, dialing in the sound for the percussion was one of the tricks that he invented and that others copied in his work.

Torsten Schmidt

How much money did you get offered for the settings of those pedals?

Susan Rogers

Oh my gosh, no never anything. I will tell you a story that’s telling about him. Prince’s guitar tech, this might have been around the Parade album, thought it would be really great if Prince had a much more sophisticated guitar sound and setup. There was a guy, and I honestly don’t remember the guy’s name, but it was a guy who made really sophisticated guitar setups. We were working at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, so this guy came in to demo the new Prince’s potentially guitar rig, very, very expensive, very sophisticated. The guy needed hours to setup and Prince wouldn’t stop working to give the guy the time. He said, “Well you can set it up, but I’m not going to stop what I’m doing. Set it up and let me know when it’s ready.”

The guy spent hours setting up this rack, big rack and all these presets and all these pieces of outboard gear that were very expensive and very sophisticated. Prince walked out, picked up his guitar, played a chord, looks down at his feet and then he says to the guy, “How do I change settings? How do I change the delay, the chorus, the flange, the distortion, all the stuff that I like?” The guy says, “Oh, well here’s the beauty of it Prince. You preset it for every song, so just tell me what song you want to play and then I’ll set that sound up for you.” Prince just set his guitar down, walked into the room and said to his guitar tech, “Tell him to go.”

Prince liked having the pedal board there because when inspiration struck on stage or on the studio he could just reach down and dial it in. The settings changed constantly, all the time, they changed during the recording of a song sometimes, just play with it, you hit the pedals on and off.

Torsten Schmidt

Nevertheless there are certain staples that you somehow find in a lot of different songs from different eras, like certain types of...

Susan Rogers

That’s true.

Torsten Schmidt

Is that something that as you, as the recording engineer in the room knew, “Oh, now he wants that sort of thing on here on the kick, or he wants to snare that.” Is that something you would prepare before you go into it?

Susan Rogers

When he went into a session, he liked to have everything set up and everything possible so that he could dial it in or have me dial it in as the song required. As songs were taking shape, I didn’t know what we were doing. I would change sounds as the song was coming into being. I had mentioned before, record makers are going to manipulate the listener’s attention. When I’m realizing this is a ballad, I know what kind of reverbs he wants on ballads. When I’m realizing, OK, we’re doing a dance song now, it’s going to be slightly different.

While his hands were playing, my hands can be tweaking sounds to get them to be compatible with what I think he’s going to want. He was very hands-on so he was always doing the same thing. Especially when it came to his pedal board and the drum machine sounds, he was the one that was dialing them in. I had them all available for him but I wasn’t presetting those sounds for him.

Torsten Schmidt

I would like to move on to the next album and play a piece of music but I’d be curious why you chose exactly the title track of an album that had things on it like, “Pop Life,” “Raspberry Beret” and “The Ladder,” something that’s very fitting right now in America, or “Condition of the Heart,” which is probably one of the more interesting ones. You went for the title track. Before we listen to it, why should people care about "Around the World in a Day?"

Susan Rogers

The reason I chose it is because I think it is one of the core songs on that album and because of the message that it conveys. Prince believed rightly that when you’re making a record, you’re not going to make a record of 12 great songs, you’re being realistic. People don’t make albums of 10 or 12 great songs because “great” is a really big word. When you make an album, every song, in his view anyway, had a seed, the kernel which was six songs, three or four really, realistically that formed the heart of that record. The other songs were either written or chosen, re-written or re-vamped to compliment the seed. He’d just finished his Purple Rain and he’s a huge success and he’s won Grammys and he won an Academy Award and he knows that he’s peaked. He was smart enough to know that things go in cycles and that after you peak now artistically, you’re probably going to sell less with the next record. Now’s a good time to have a transitional record to help signify, here’s where we’re going next.

On Around the World in a Day, on the cover he abandons the purple for a rainbow kind of thing. He’s pledging no allegiance to any particular color and this opening track “Around the World in a Day” is using musical instruments that are different for him, using more cello and using finger cymbals, they’re popular in the Middle East. He’s saying, “Now there’s a bigger us. I’m a bigger star than I was before. Let’s re-start the conversation.” I think even the tempo of it is signifying a beginning, it’s kind of an opening of the next phase in his artistic life. I think it’s important that way.

(music: Prince – “Around the World in a Day” / applause)

Susan Rogers

That’s another one that was recorded at rehearsal with the band on stage in just open warehouse space.

Torsten Schmidt

Rehearsals were pretty important to him, right?

Susan Rogers

Making music... he was fiendishly attracted to making music. If he was awake and not eating or sleeping, which he did very little of, and not on the phone having a business meeting, he had an instrument in his hand. Do I have a minute? Can I tell people what a typical day was like, so you can know what this guy was like?

Let me give you a typical day on tour. In a big, big tour; it’s probably still the same way today, a big arena tour. You have soundcheck. Usually, soundcheck, after you’ve got it dialed in, usually soundcheck takes 20, 30 minutes, tops. That’s what bands do. They soundcheck for 20 or 30 minutes. Then, they have the dinner break. Then, there’s doors, and then there’s the opening act, and then the headliner takes the stage. The headliner plays, it can be 45 minutes if they’re really cheap, but it can be hour and a half, two hours. If they’re really giving you your money’s worth, they’ll play for two and a half hours. Then, that’s the end of it. Then, they go out and they party.

Prince would have a four-hour soundcheck, just for the fun of it, to play new songs, just to have some fun. We would soundcheck from two in the afternoon until 6 PM. He’d leave the stage from 6 to 6:30. The opening act would do their 30-minute soundcheck. There would be the dinner break. There would be doors. When he would hit the stage, it would be about nine o’clock, because the opening act was 8:30 to 9. Prince would hit the stage at 9:00, and he’d play until 11:30. Two-and-a-half-hour set.

The last song would be “Purple Rain.” He’d leave the band doing the coda on stage. He come down off the stage. Get into a little van. The van would take him to his hotel. He would shower and change, and do one of two things. We would either go into a recording studio, and work all night, or, we would play an afterparty. There was a little truck, a small truck, that had a second set of instruments, and I knew what we were doing ahead of time. I’d either meet him at the studio, or I’d meet him at the small club. At one in the morning, he’d come in. I have to go, of course, because I have to set stuff up. I have to go directly from the gig to the studio, or to the club. Either mix front of house at the club, or record with him all night long, until the next day, until the sun was well up and it was time to get on a plane, or the bus to go to the next city, and do it all over again.

This was on the road, because, after playing for all day, he still didn’t have enough. He wants to be with people, but he was socially awkward. He didn’t want to just be with people and talk. He wanted... His way of being with people was to play. He just wanted to be playing. Sometimes, we had records to do, and he had songs in his head that were coming so fast, he had to have access to a studio to record them. We would do that on tour.

That was on tour. If we were home, it was: Wake up in the morning, if it was morning, or wake up after a few hours of sleep. Four hours was a full night for him. Wake up after his customary four hours of sleep. Make a few phone calls. Have his hair done, or whatever it was he was going to do. After being up for a few hours, I would get the call telling me to meet him at the studio. Sometimes he would tell me what to set up for him. Sometimes, I’d find a note. Other times, if there was no note, I’d just have everything set up. It might be an acoustic drums. It might be a drum machine, or whatever.

It would be set up, and he’d come in, and we’d start to work. 20, 24 hours later, we’d be done. He’d go to bed. I’d make his cassette copy. I’d sleep my customary three hours. The phone would ring, and there’d be... I’d pick up the phone, and his voice would go, “Ready?” Yeah. Then, it would go all over again.

Torsten Schmidt

Where did that leave you as a private person?

Susan Rogers

I had no life other than... We used to call it... Other employees and I, we would call it our tour of duty. It was my tour of duty, and I was with him over four years. It was going on our fifth year together, and I was exhausted, still exhilarated, but I had done as much as I possibly could. That was a long run with him, because I was by his side for all those years. Whether we were doing a movie, or we were on tour, I was his employee, so if he was awake, he was making music, so I was right there. I was quite exhausted by the end of it. I needed to have a proper life, but it was good while it lasted.

Torsten Schmidt

Just for context, at this time, this guy’s competition... Most of the people you’d know today, like Metallica, were still playing dive bars around then. His competition would be Michael Jackson, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, and that was about it. Then, this guy comes out with his next artistic statement being this, or the album afterwards. Was there any reasoning, as you were facilitating that in the studio, going, “Oh my gosh. That’s either super brave, or suicide?”

Susan Rogers

Yeah. He was always... He was bold. He was bold artistically. He’s, like any artist, he wanted to be loved. He wanted people to like him. He wanted people to like his music. There was an ongoing rivalry with Michael Jackson. This was sad, because it was perceived by the general public that Michael was the good guy, he was the safe guy. He was the guy that you could send out on a date with your 15-year-old daughter, and she’d be safe. You’d let him babysit your children. Michael was the good guy.

Prince was perceived as being, somehow, threatening. I remember, somebody said to me once, he was was an assistant engineer at Sunset Sound, and he was talking about Bruce Springsteen and Prince. He said, “I like Bruce Springsteen better.” The guy said, “I get the feeling that if I met Bruce, he’d sit down, and he’d have a beer with me. I have a feeling that, if I met Prince, he’d steal my girlfriend.” There were these perceptions about Prince, that he was this bacchanal. There was always a bacchanal, and that he was this sexual predator. He was the opposite. The truth was, he was a working man, who went to work every day, and that’s basically all he did.

He dated, but it was usually women that he was around, like Vanity, and Susannah Melvoin, and Jill Jones, and Sheila E. He was just a working man. He also was sober as a judge, so your kids would have been really safe with Prince.

Torsten Schmidt

Do you think there were racial undertones in those perceptions?

Susan Rogers

There might have been, in the United States, anyway. I don’t know about elsewhere in the world. In the United States, there were certainly stereotypes about African-American artists, and Prince was singing about sex. One of the things that was lost on some people, not on his fans, but on a lot of people, they didn’t really get that when Prince was singing songs about sex, he was giving power to women. “Do Me, Baby” is the archetype example of this. “Do Me, Baby” was just a B-side of a single. “Do Me, Baby” was him saying to the woman, “You do me. You. Be the guy. You be the aggressor. You do me.” He’s saying how much he loves it when she has all the power. All of his songs, from the... If you’ve got bootlegs, you’ve heard it. It’s called, “We Can Fuck.”

All of those songs are about, it’s brilliant, by the way... All those songs are about us. He never, ever took a predatory stance in his seduction. It was never about, “I am going to conquer you, my prey.” It was always... he always approached women as equals. I think that’s one of the reasons that women loved him so much. We trusted him. We felt safe with him. We felt empowered. We felt equal. He gave us that, and he always did. He was always consistent with that. That’s who he was.

Torsten Schmidt

On that note, I think we should leave the chronological order for a second, because he also adored other artists, and female artists, as well. I think there’s something that is the segue here.

(music: Kate Bush – “Running Up That Hill” / applause)

Torsten Schmidt

Rumor has it that was a rather popular record around Paisley Park.

Susan Rogers

Prince played the groove off that record. He played that record a lot. He loved Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell, he loved women artists. If I may get all pedantic on your ass for just a moment, I’d like to share something with you that I teach the students. I was talking as a psychologist a little bit earlier about how people bond to music. Psychologists know that there are three basic ways that a song can get us. The first is simplest pathway, which is the motor, just the rhythm, Al Green, Isley Brothers, it just feels good rhythmically. We can bond to a record and love it for the rhythm track alone and hip-hop has taken that principle and dominated music for the last 20 years or so, on rhythm oriented music.

The second path, however is melody and harmony. Melody and harmony since time immemorial, Beethoven had nary a drum kit, but with melody and harmony we can love that melody so much that it becomes the music of us. We bond to it and we love it. The third way that people will bond to music and identify with it is through cognition, cognitive process. Music makes you think and typically that’s done by the lyrics. The value in this record is not the rhythm track, it’s just that basic pulse that’s going throughout, drum machines, not much variance there. It’s not the melody, not the harmony, you’re not going to really learn the chord changes of that and it’s not going to become a jazz standard. What’s great about it and why he liked it, it’s aside from the production elements, it’s a well-made record, but the lyrics. She’s saying, “If I only could, I’d make a deal with God and I’d get him to swap our places.” Rather bold in 1986 or whenever it was when that came out, it might have been ‘85. Then it’s that bridge where she says, “Come on angel, come on darling, let’s exchange the experience.” She’s presumably talking to a lover and she’s saying, “Let me be you.” Let me see what it feels like to be man and you be the woman. Let’s exchange the experience. It’s rather brilliant.

Recording, making involves finding what’s good about, finding the great element. Is it your rhythm track? Is it your melody? Will people want to learn the chord changes to this song? Is it the harmony? Great session musicians will do that for you. Is it the lyrics? If you’re Bob Dylan and you win the Nobel Prize for literature, if your lyrics are ten on a ten-scale then you don’t need to be funky, do you? You don’t really need to have great melodies, good melodies. What are you selling? You’re selling the words.

If you’re James Brown, you can say, “Hot pants give you confidence.” The lyrics don’t have to be Nobel Prize worthy because they’re so funky. That’s what you’re selling. I think Prince knew that on some level. He knew with each one of his songs, with each one of his tracks, which elements were carrying the musical weight.

Torsten Schmidt

He was sort of proficient in a lot of those different arenas...

Susan Rogers

Yeah, I think arguably you might say he was not necessarily a genius with lyrics, he wrote a good line. Compared to others, I don’t know that he was a genius with lyrics, but I think he was certainly a genius with rhythm. One of the things he did better than just about anyone else, he was peerless in his capacity to turn out hooks. I mean, a lot of hooks, one after the other, after the other. It’s almost impossible to think that someone could write that many good hooks and not repeat himself.

Torsten Schmidt

Yeah and there were these moments when he did these shows in LA when he would treat this arena as a club show and do these jams for hours. Then because people came for hits as well, he would just go to the grand piano and do a 15-minute medley of, “Oh yeah and then I did this and this.” It would just be hook after hook, it’s like hearing DJ Khaled play.

Susan Rogers

Yeah, really otherworldly, really astonishing. His own line, when he did turn a good line, like on “Sometimes it Snows in April,” he said, “Those kind of cars don’t pass you everyday.” Extraordinary, extraordinary artist. I’m glad he’s getting a lot of attention now.

Torsten Schmidt

I’m not so sure that I would totally be alright with you downplaying his storytelling skills because on the back of “Running Up That Hill” I would like move on to the next album and a song that sort of has of a similar idea going on and play this one.

(music: Prince – “If I Was Your Girlfriend” / applause)

Susan Rogers

You can hear those BOSS pedals. You can hear that slow flanger on the drums, and you can hear the snare is, on this one, just completely dry. I had switched to a new compressor around that time. I started using the 1176 on the snare, and he was letting me play around a little bit more, but you hear the obvious distortion on the vocal as well, and that was an accident.

Torsten Schmidt

Do you feel bad about that accident?

Susan Rogers

Well, yeah, it was bad. I just had, the presets at this console, at Sunset Sound, weren’t continuous. It was discrete knobs in 10 dB steps, and I accidentally had it set to 10 dB too hot. Prince liked to do his vocals completely alone in the control room. He didn’t want anyone else there, so I would set up the signal path for him, and patch, put a piece of tape on the patch cord. Then he needed to move to get himself to the next track if he was going to do backing vocals, arm the track that he needed in to record, and then I would go wait in the next room while he did the vocal, so I didn’t hear it as it was going down, but you hear that API preamp is clipping at the top. I thought he was going to be furious when he heard it back, not in headphones, but in the speakers, and he liked it.

He used to say, “We don’t sound like those other people. We don’t sound like Michael Jackson. We don’t spend all that kind of money. We go fast. We make mistakes,” so he was okay with it. I was kind of mortified, but you hear the high pitch on the voice that was done back in those days by varispeeding the tape machine.

Torsten Schmidt

Is that on purpose?

Susan Rogers

Oh, yeah, yeah. You varispeed the machine to get the timbre that you want. You can go the other direction, too, like you can get a bass to sound really, really fat, if you would speed up the tape machine and then play it in a different key, and then set it back to the standard speed, and then you’d have that low tone, and it would be great. You could do the same thing. You can slow the track way, way, down, sing a vocal, and then when you bring the speed back up to where it’s supposed to be, you get that high, thin voice that he liked. He put on a character. He became kind of a character in timbre in order to say something that he really meant. He was dating Susannah Melvoin at the time. I think it’s fairly safe to say, because they were in a really close relationship at this time, and she has a twin sister, Wendy Melvoin, and twins are really, really close.

I think Prince may have, this may have been, it’s always conjecture, but I’m supposing that he’s trying to say, “I wish I could have the relationship with you that you have with your sister. I wish we could be that tight.” It was a bad choice to release it as a single. Prince... I had talked earlier about audiences, and he was trying, at this point, on the "Sign o’ the Times" album, to win back some black radio, and he needed a more black radio airplay, and he did the song Sign o’ the Times. He did a door on this record, and he was trying to win back his core audience. He did some things on this record that would have been appealing to that audience, but some things it would have turned that audience off. Most African Americans in the city, in the United States, wouldn’t necessarily think it was cool for a guy to say, naked, “For you, naked I will dance a ballet.” Not cool.

Maybe in certain communities of different populations, maybe in New York or whatever, but for most people, not cool. It was kind of a mixed bag, I think, for him, but he was an artist to his core, so he did what he thought was cool, and hoped it would be cool for others.

Torsten Schmidt

What is the final line there, “Imagine?”

Susan Rogers

“And together, we’ll stare into silence and try to imagine what it looks like.”

Torsten Schmidt

What does that mean?

Susan Rogers

I don’t know.

Torsten Schmidt

Do we need to know? Actually, as ...

Susan Rogers

Yeah, I don’t know. Yeah. We started talking about it when we started. Does... the consumer’s going to decide for themselves what they think it means, and that’s part of the beauty of it, isn’t it? The artist doesn’t have to reveal what it means. You don’t need for people to get it. It can be kind of great if it is what they think it is.

Torsten Schmidt

AKA “Wonderwall.”

Susan Rogers

Yeah, or as simple as a hamburger. You don’t know what the chef tried to do. You just know what it is to you, and that’s all that matters.

Torsten Schmidt

On the notion of hamburgers, we absolutely butchered drum machine programming and put generations of hip-hop and techno artists to tears with another track on this album. Can you tell us how the drums on “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” were recorded?

Susan Rogers

That was another mistake. The track sounds very dull. We listened to Kate Bush a moment ago, and I was thinking, “Man, I wonder where the filter setting was on the high-pass filter on her voice?” I know from people who worked with her that she would just boost 5k like mad, and she would sing her vocal through this little Fostex semi-pro preamp to get that really bright, bright, bright vocal, because it cut through on radio. It was great. Lots of 5k, but the opposite was true on “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker,” and it was a mistake, but as it turned out, the song is about a dream. It was inspired by a dream he had, so it sort of worked. We were installing a new console in his home studio, a custom-made console, and Paisley Park was being built, but it wasn’t finished yet. The fellow who designed this console, whose name was Frank DeMedio. Frank came in from Los Angeles, and he’s hooking it all up, and Prince couldn’t take it anymore. He was just dying to record, and he told me to send Frank home.

He says, “If it’s just... Just send him home. I just, I got to work.” We put Frank on a plane, and we sent him home, and Prince came downstairs and said the magic words, “Fresh tape,” and put up, “Fresh tape,” and we started recording the song, and as soon as I heard it, I realized, “Oh, my God,” because there was no high-end. It was the opposite of Kate Bush. There was low-pass filters on everything, is what it sounded like. The drums, everything he played that was... First, I was thinking it was just one channel, and then... one track, I should say. It wasn’t. It was the whole console, and I’m thinking, “Oh, please stop, so I can get out the voltmeter and see what’s going on with this console,” but he wouldn’t stop, and he just kept going, and going, and going, and going. It was like a baby eating baby food. It’s like, when’s it going to stop?

He just kept going, and going, and going. Then we finished the song, and then we mixed it. He didn’t stop, which was typical of him, but I kept thinking, “Isn’t he noticing that there’s something weird with this?” We finally mixed the song, It was like a day later, and then he gets up, and he’s all happy, because he got the song then. Then he goes, “That was great, good,” and then he goes, “This console’s nice. It’s kind of dull, isn’t it?” (laughs)

Then he goes upstairs, and he’s happy! Finally, oh. I take out the volt meter and I finally get to check the power supplies and, as some of you may know, consoles have bipolar power supplies. There’s usually a + or - 15, or a + or - 24 depending on the manufacturer, and one whole power supply was completely down, so it was only swinging half the current that it could normally swing. It had no high-end, because it couldn’t swing the current fast enough to give us high-end, so the song ends up sounding like it’s kind of underwater. I was able to fix it, but only after the fact. I wasn’t able to fix it for this song, but it was so cool, because the song’s about a dream, which is interesting.

Torsten Schmidt

How many takes were the drums?

Susan Rogers

Just the one.

Torsten Schmidt

Alright.

Susan Rogers

That’s how he would do it. So we played “Let’s Go Crazy” earlier. He would just play it, and if he made a mistake he would stop, and you would just punch in, but yeah.

Torsten Schmidt

OK, well, thank you, Frank, wherever you may be. Thanks to you, we got this now.

(music: Prince – “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” / applause)

Susan Rogers

He’s playing all the instruments, and when you think, “Who does that?” With the LinnDrum machine, you could set up a one or two bar loop very easily, a simple loop, and then you could, with the pads, you could just play rolls on the snare or toms, or high-hat, and that’s what he was doing with that, so he would just set it up and hit record on the tape machine and just let it roll, and if we made a mistake, we could go back and punch in, well, no we couldn’t actually with the drums, because we weren’t locking to it, but on other instruments, after he finished and laid down the drum machine, I’d hand him the bass and he’d put on the bass bar, and then he’d do the keys, and halfway through he’d do the vocal and the backing vocals, and then we’d finish it up with the remaining overdubs, and we were done.

Torsten Schmidt

That’s one of the few tracks where there is an actual fade-out. Normally, it seems like it’s a very composed, decisive moment of, “This is the end of the song.” How did these processes work in the studio?

Susan Rogers

That’s a great question. Those decisions, often, were made in sequencing an album. Prince loved sequencing an album. I had spoken earlier about how an album would have the core songs, and he would construct the record around those core songs, so when you’re sequencing a record, for Prince, anyway... Let me back up a little bit. Because so many of his tracks were dance tracks, he would want a long version of things, so the original track of this, I can’t remember for sure, but it’s probably really long. It might be eight or nine minutes long. It could even be longer. When you’re sequencing a record, and you kind of know where the song is going to go in the sequence, sometimes you’re going to want it to fade out so you can crossfade it into the next song, or sometimes you just want a little breather in the sequence.

We often would print a long version. It would have breakdowns and things like that, but we would often print a version that had a fade, so if that’s what we wanted in the sequence, ultimately, when we cut the record together, we would have a fade-out version.

Torsten Schmidt

Where in the sequence of that album would “The Cross” sit?

Susan Rogers

“The Cross” was on side four, as I recall. I believe it was. I don’t remember where it was, but I thought it was near the end of the record. That was... Prince had a few different lyric themes, and one of his themes was, of course, was salvation and religious topics, but he would never adhere to any particular religion at that time, but it would talk about an afterlife. “The Cross” was one of the songs that he did where he played the drums. Not well, as a matter of fact, because it speeds up terribly, but he wanted to say something about his belief system, and that was near the end of the record, perhaps as a bookend to the opening track, perhaps as a bookend, which was “Sign o’ the Times.”

Torsten Schmidt

Was the recording process of that song different in any way to, let’s say, outside of the channel being on the right voltage now? Would that differ in any sort of way to the songs we heard off that album before? Like “The Cross,” would that be a different recording situation?

Susan Rogers

Yeah, “The Cross,” we did at Sunset Sound. At the time when I was with him, we either worked at home or we worked on the road, and there are several songs that were recorded in a mobile truck on tour, or we worked at Sunset Sound, and a good chunk of Sign o’ the Times was done at Sunset. The studio was still there. It’s a fantastic studio. It’s my favorite in the world, and Prince was very much at home there. He loved the sound of the equipment, he loved the atmosphere, he loved being there.

Torsten Schmidt

Would you be told beforehand, “Today, we’re going to do a hot club track” or “Today, we’re going to go this way,” or “This is the mood I’m trying to achieve?” Or would you just be on guard and seeing what was going to happen?

Susan Rogers

It was more the latter, but I’d have to be just ready for anything. He’d call me and tell me... sometimes he’d tell me what instruments to set up. He’d want acoustic piano or electric piano or whatever, but oftentimes he would just have me come to the studio, and there’d be a note written. In fact, I still have one at home, just a note from him that says “Set up this, this, this, this, this, and this,” but by a certain point I knew him well enough that I could read what it was he wanted set up. Like, if he says “acoustic piano and a long reverb,” we’re going to be doing a ballad, and then it would be my choice what reverb to use or what mics to use on the piano, he didn’t care about those details, I could do it however I wanted, but he’d say... If he was going to be playing acoustic drums, sometimes he’d come in with a song already written, about half the time.

The other half of the time, he would write the lyrics after the track took shape, but if he came in with lyrics written like he did with “Dorothy Parker,” or with a song that he was going to play acoustic drums on, he would take the lyrics and he’d tape them...he’d either tape them to a tom, if he wasn’t going to play a tom, or I’d tape them to a mic stand in front of the kit. He would wear headphones and with no click, reading the lyrics, he would play the entire drum part from top to bottom with the fills and the breaks and everything, just mentally singing the song in his head. He’d lay down this acoustic drum track, come into the control room, lay down the bass and then everything else and then eventually sing it. He would have, not full arrangements in his head, but he’d had basic arrangements in his head as he was making the track. He knew what he wanted it to sound like.

He rarely experimented and if he’d just experimented, recorded just for the sake of recording, it was usually just a funk thing, something to dance to. A lot of the album that was never officially released, the album called the Black Album was songs we did for a party, just to dance to at a party. In those days, you could do a recording and if we were at Sunset Sound we’d take it up the street to Grundman Mastering and Bernie Grundman would press acetates for us. Then you could take those acetates to the club and you could play them at the club.

Torsten Schmidt

How did that make you feel when you spent an awful lot of time in doing... because there was a series of albums around that time that never saw the official light of day and knowing, “Oh, we just worked so hard on making this album,” and then it’s gone for this or the other reason?

Susan Rogers

It was funny how albums worked with him. He was like a farmer that grew a lot of plants. He was always recording, as I said. Songs that he recorded, and this is why there’s so much material in the vault – he was always recording. Whether or not it actually became an album, depended on sales of the previous album and depended on what he wanted to say for the next album which is why I wanted to play “Around the World in a Day.” That was an anchor song, it was a seed that was an important song. When I heard that song and heard how he was talking and how he was writing, I knew this is the approach, this is the world view. “Under the Cherry Moon” was certainly the anchor song for the Parade record. Other songs just came and went. Whether or not they made it on the record, I think, my own personal thesis has to do with the lyrics. Lyrically was it saying what he wanted it to say? For example, the song “Tambourine” on Around the World in a Day, “Oh my God, there you are, prettiest thing in life I’ve ever seen.” He’s actually talking about masturbation. He’s saying, “There I go, falling in love with a face in a magazine, all alone, by myself, me and I, play my tambourine.” The groove underneath it is really funky but he could turn those out in his sleep practically.

There’s other really funky songs, but the lyrics aren’t as good. Like songs like “All Day, All Night.” “All day, all night, you can be my baby, make you feel all right.” I mean, in “17 Days.” “Been gone, 17 days, 17 long nights,” it’s okay, it’s good, but it’s not nearly as clever. Songs were kind of always evolving. These plants that he grew, sometimes he was growing things specifically for Sheila or for the Time or for his alter ego. Other times like with “Nothing Compares 2 U” it was for the Family and at one point he took it back after Sinéad O’Connor did it and had that hit with it. I cannot answer your question, I cannot really say I was disappointed, records were always coming together and then coming apart depending on whether or not he changed his mind about what he wanted to say.

Torsten Schmidt

Obviously a lot of thought went into making these decisions, whether something should be available to the public or not. Obviously now there’s a lot of interest groups that would be like, “Oh, let’s just raid the vaults and then make it all available and then we can subsidize the recording industry for the next three years.” To which degree you think even most die-hard fans should respect the artist’s decision not to release something?

Susan Rogers

That’s such a good question. I don’t have a fully thought out answer. I still haven’t completely decided what my position is on that because it’s so difficult. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. An artist decides, “I want you to hear this, this and this.” I said earlier that Prince's music was just a fraction of the music of his life. He was making a conscious decision at the time when he wrote “Nothing Compares 2 U.” He’s not going to talk about himself in that way. He doesn’t want people to know that that’s him. He gives it to his competition. He wants to write it, but he doesn’t want to be associated with saying it.

He made these decisions about what he wanted us to know about him. He was the most honest of writers. If you want to know who Prince is, listen to his music because that’s how he talked. It was his way of being in the world. Everything he said in his lyrics, that’s who he is. There was no hidden side to him other than what happened later in life when he was in tremendous pain and that’s a topic for another time and for another person. I didn’t know him later in life.

How I feel about his unreleased material... my hunch knowing him, my hunch is that now that he’s gone, he’d want us to know everything. Why wouldn’t he? Why would you want to keep things secret? We already know you Prince. We know you. That cat’s out of the bag. We know who you are. There’s nothing that would make us think less of you. I would think that he would want it all out there, but maybe he wouldn’t. That’s artistic license, isn’t it? Don’t artists... you get to decide what you want people to see.

Tommy Jordan from Geggy Tah, a band I worked with who was influential on me, Tommy used to say – this is good – “When the spotlight of attention comes on an artist, you don’t want the spotlight coming on you when you’re getting dressed and you’re just putting on your underwear, that’s very unattractive.” You don’t want to be with the spotlight of attention just standing there with one leg in your underwear and the other leg just, no I’m not ready yet. You want the spotlight to come on you when you’re dressed. You want to go outside when you feel you’re presentable.

The material that was unreleased was his way of saying no. There’s a song called “Moonbeam Levels” that I heard in ‘83 when I came to work for him. It was one of my favorites and he wasn’t ready to release it. We put it on Purple Rain on the album sequence at one point and then he pulled it off. We put it on Around the World in a Day and he pulled it off. I was so disappointed every time. He just didn’t want people to know that about him. Now I think maybe he would. What do you think about it?

Torsten Schmidt

I guess there is this moment, obviously there’s a voyeuristic quality when you listen to let’s say the tapes of Pet Sounds and all of a sudden it’s almost like listening to archeology and you all of a sudden start to treasure the genius even more. You hear a lot of things that are somehow lost in a Beach Boys’ classic. There’s too much information going on and through the dissecting process of listening to all the different versions you’re like, “Oh, that’s in there as well, and that.” All of a sudden when you go back to the actual thing, you’re like, “Oh wow, I appreciate this a lot more now.” At the same time though, and that would lead to my natural next question is, your job as an engineer or as a producer later is sort of to help the artist formulate and define their artistic statement.

I very much like that about recorded music, that no matter how many chefs there were in the kitchen, at one stage someone had to go, “That is what we put out there. This is the definitive moment.” “Watertown” sounds the way “Watertown” sounds period. In that way, maybe it’s kind of good. I mean it’s like, does anyone really care about whatever the Notorious B.I.G. was putting into a rhyme after he left us? After that final album? Maybe people should stop the hunger and don’t urge for consuming anything and everything.

Susan Rogers

Doesn’t it depend on why you want it? Talking about different audiences, the fans, the Prince fans want it because like you said they want more. They want to know this person that they’d like to hear more of. I’d like to hear more Beach Boys stuff because I idolized Brian Wilson. I love Brian Wilson, I want to hear more. All my musical heroes, yeah I’ll take more, yes please. There’s another audience which is the critics and the scholars and that includes the historians and the music educators and they want to know where to put this artist in the arc of music’s history. How was he important? What kind of person was he? How did he think? What did he do? How important is he? Will we recognize another one like him if another one comes along?

What does it all mean, is what they ask. They should have access to that. These scholars and these thinkers...

Torsten Schmidt

Why only them and not the general public?

Susan Rogers

No, but I was going to say, everyone should have access, so that we include the historians and the scholars, so that the scholars can analyze it, so that the fans can love it and so that other musicians can learn from it. Like maybe you want to learn Prince’s bass techniques or maybe you’d want to learn, how do you do a vocal like that. How do you do that? I think there’s much to be gained, but it depends on what your perspective is. I think it’s rewarding for all of us. It doesn’t need to reward his label, they’ve made all the money they’re ever going to make on him and doesn’t need to reward his family because his heirs now don’t know what to do with the money that they have. It’s for fans, it’s for scholars, critics, historians. It’s for other musicians, there are strong arguments and I’m leaning in favor of releasing it all, but the decision is not up to me. But that’s what I’ve advocated for publicly, to release it all.

Torsten Schmidt

Let’s think about that for a second while we play the song we just talked about and before we move into the next segment. This is “The Cross.”

(music: Prince – “The Cross” / applause)

Susan Rogers

You mentioned recording studios earlier, you can hear the effect of Sunset Sound. Some of the earlier songs that were played were recorded either at home or at the warehouse. That Sunset sound, that’s a custom DeMedio console and you can hear those real echo chambers.

Torsten Schmidt

So loud.

Susan Rogers

It’s amazing isn’t it? Beautiful chambers. Love that sound.

Torsten Schmidt

When did you really know you had enough?

Susan Rogers

I was really tired. (laughs) Paisley Park had finally opened its door and Prince could finally hire a staff of engineers, it had been just me for previous years, but we had some new folks who could... now we could work in shifts and he was giving me more independence. He was at home at Paisley Park doing the second Madhouse record and I was in Los Angeles mixing the concert film, Sign o’ the Times, the music for that. I met a boy, I met a guy and I had a date, one night I had a date.

Torsten Schmidt

Finally, after all these...

Susan Rogers

Yeah, after all these years.

Torsten Schmidt

Prince.

Susan Rogers

There was one evening, after all these years, where I was out and he was trying to reach me and couldn’t find me. I didn’t think he was in town, he was in Minneapolis, I was supposed to have the night off. But he flew into LA and he was trying to find me and I was unavailable. The next day I met him on the soundstage and as soon as I walked in in the morning he was already there, which is a bad sign. Then he pulled me, made the gesture and pulled me into this small little booth and we just went toe to toe. He was asking, “Where were you last night?” At the beginning of every relationship, an employer-employee relationship, and at the end it’s kind of exactly the same. At the beginning you look at each other and you recognize, OK, you’re going to play this role, boss, I’m going to play this role, employee in my case, and this is a voluntary contract. I can quit at any time and you can fire me at any time. But for the moment, in this role together you be you, I’ll be me. For this much money I’ll do this much work, deal, bammo.

But at any time, one of you can say, I need to renegotiate, and it was that moment where I realized and he realized, things can’t go on the way they have been. We realized, well then they can’t go on, it was kind of the end of it. It was a natural end of it and he knew it and I knew it and it was sad, but it just had to happen, so it did.

Torsten Schmidt

All the baking him cake was gone?

Susan Rogers

Yeah, he had to buy his own cakes now and I only did that a few times. He had a sweet tooth and every once in a while when we’d be working at home he’d say, “You know what would be really good right now? Hot chocolate.” Or chocolate chip cookies, and I’d go, “Yeah,” and I’d make stuff. But that was, that was rare. He did not exploit me or any of his employees. He didn’t expect us to do... to go... he expected us to work our asses off, literally we had no asses. He expected us to work inhumanly hard, but he respected the role of employee-employer and he treated us with respect and he obeyed the social contract of what that relationship was. He was never abusive, never and in this business there are a lot of abusive people. He sure as hell wasn’t one of them.

Torsten Schmidt

Did you ever bake for other clients later?

Susan Rogers

No, I don’t think I did. I don’t remember that I ever did. When I worked with this band, Geggy Tah, who was the next really big client in my life, in terms of my professional growth, at one point we were all living and working together. At least some of us were all living together and so cooking was a natural part of it. But that just kind of happened a little bit more organically.

Torsten Schmidt

I’m sort of somehow getting signals from the back, so I know we sort of need to rush through 20 years that happened afterwards until we arrive here.

You managed something extremely interesting outside of having a career as engineer, as producer and in all these different roles for the next years to come. Looking at the discography there’s a lot of people that are really good for the reputation and sound like a hell of a lot of fun, but also people you would not necessarily know about and would be probably way below the pay grade you could expect with someone that’s been dealing with an artist of that magnitude. How did you navigate which projects to pick and which ones to let go?

Susan Rogers

I had... After I left Prince, I had a manager. I had a couple of managers that didn’t work out, and then very briefly. Then I found a good manager, Sandy Roberton, from World’s End.

Torsten Schmidt

How do you find a good manager?

Susan Rogers

I heard about him, or he heard about me, I really don’t remember who approached who first, but we met. We mutually agreed that he would manage me. He had a stable at that time of about 40 producers, and I was very, very pleased to be among them. Flattered and pleased frankly, because I hadn’t done much as a producer, but he believed in me. Producer managers, like all managers, they take 15%, but what Sandy would do is go out and find work for all of his clients, and he would take meetings in New York and LA and in London. Then he would come back with me and say, “Are you interested in working with this person or that person,” and you say yes or no. He kept me busy, that was from 1988 all the way up until 2000. He kept me in projects.

I wanted to... If I had had my ideal career, I would’ve worked in R&B and soul music, I would’ve been making Anita Baker records and Tevin Campbell. I did do that one record with Tevin Campbell and worked with Al B. Sure!, but for the most part I was called upon by the alternative indie crowd.

Torsten Schmidt

How did that happen? You might want to argue that some of the, let’s say, when you did the Violent Femmes you can somehow draw a line between “The Cross” and what they were doing if you’re really bold.

Susan Rogers

Yeah, it’s very different. I don’t know why. Sometimes people knock on your door and you don’t know why they’re knocking, but they’re just there. Part of it was because I was a woman. I did not take offense at that. Delighted to have the work. Sure, you can hire me because I’m a woman. I’m fine with that. Sometimes, it was because I had worked with Prince. Sometimes it was because I liked soul music and it would behoove... and this is good advice for all of you artists, it would behoove you to populate your team with people who have strengths that are different from your own.

You don’t want to work with people who are just like you. You want to bring in other people with musical minds that are going to hear something different in the music. I would shape things in such a way that they maybe sound a little bit more soulful than they otherwise would have. I had that ear and I had that desire and I kept wanting to pull music back to the street that I lived on.

I think that’s why. At some point I just accepted it. Well, this is what I do, I guess. I liked it. It’s not that I didn’t like it. I understood the value of that. You don’t always get what you want.

Torsten Schmidt

Did you ever hire someone based on gender?

Susan Rogers

No.

Torsten Schmidt

You seem to have pretty strong opinions about why you should pick a certain person.

Susan Rogers

It depends on what the role is, but you know, you’re making music with people so you have to... In the studio, when we’re making music, you know this, you’ve been immersed in it... When people buy music and when we sell it, we’re buying and selling emotions. We’re communicating emotions. It’s different from books. Books are words and that’s information. Movies are stories, but this is emotions and emotions run high in the studio and you need to be with people that have strengths that you don’t have but also people that you can communicate with. There’s a musical language. There’s an artistic language that we share, I believe, because we’re musicians more or less. I’m not one, but kind of a musician.

You just choose those flavors, you choose those people you want. Gender really has nothing to do with it nor does race or nationality or anything like that. It just has to do with your artistry and how you filter music, because each one of us is a filter for music.

Torsten Schmidt

Some of the projects you did were rather successful, and at one stage you had collected enough royalty checks that you were like, “OK, I’m done with this sort of lifestyle,” and opted for something different. How long, in advance, did you mill around with that thought?

Susan Rogers

Oh yeah, we get the calling, you know? Whether you’re going to become a nun or a priest or you’re going to become a rock star. You just get a calling. Something just tells you, “I think this is me. I think this is me.” When I was very, very young I had the calling to make records and then when I was about 35 a little, little, little voice started saying, “Scientist. It would be really good to be a scientist.”

I had never been to college. I had never finished high school. I had never had a formal education. I was self-taught. That little voice was saying... I don’t know, I was just curious about the natural world and how it worked. Especially the minds of other species, of other animals. I could just stare at an animal, whether it was a lizard or, I don’t know, a rat and just wonder, what’s it doing? I was just curious.

That’s what a scientist is, they’re just curious. The voice started getting louder and louder and then in my 40s I began realizing, hmmm. I overheard something, T Bone Burnett was being interviewed for something, and I was working with T Bone at the time. This was in the late ’90s . The interviewer asked him, “So, do you listen to college radio?” He said in that southern drawl he goes, “Hell, no!” He said, “I’m 47 years old. There’d be something wrong with me if I listened to college radio.”

I was just a few years younger and I realized, “That’s true, then.” Because I was starting to feel it. I was in my 40s and I was starting to realize the music that once spoke to me doesn’t speak to me now. I’m interested in jazz. I’m interested in other musics that aren’t as... I’m not listening to college radio anymore. That’s when the voice started getting really strong and saying, “Scientist. Scientist.”

Then I had a hit record as a producer with Barenaked Ladies and I got a big royalty check. Back in those days, when we actually sold records, you’d get a lot of money. Sorry you guys, but that’s just how it worked back then. You already know, so I’m not breaking the news. You’ll make money another way, but back then we made money from selling records. It was a big check. With that check, people pay off their mortgage or they build a home studio and I opted to quit my job and I left. I entered college as a freshman.

Torsten Schmidt

What age?

Susan Rogers

How old was I? Let me count back. I was 44 when I entered college as a freshman.

Torsten Schmidt

How awkward did you feel?

Susan Rogers

I thought I was going to feel really awkward. I thought the teachers wouldn’t like me because I was older. I thought the other kids won’t like me because I’m old. I thought I wouldn’t be able to learn. I was really scared. It turned out none of that was true. Teachers liked having an older student. The other students, they wanted to hang out with me. “Let’s have a study group together.” I don’t know why, but it was all good. I did well and I was right. That instinct was right. I went from there, I did four years at the University of Minnesota and then I went to McGill just up the street here and did four years.

Torsten Schmidt

Right here?

Susan Rogers

Right here, yeah. Got my PhD in program and behavioral neuroscience. Then went to Berklee College of Music, so I teach psychoacoustics, I teach music cognition and I teach record production, and because the kids love it, I teach analog tape. Kids love it.

Torsten Schmidt

You had quite the illustrious professors over there at McGill, right?

Susan Rogers

Oh yes. I started in Dan Levitin’s lab, and just the year I joined his lab he said, “You know I’m writing this book. It’s about the brain on music.” It became a New York Times bestseller. Then, because he was so busy with his book tour, I studied with Stephen McAdams in psychoacoustics. He’s the world’s foremost timbre expert and he’s a hardcore scientist.

Then there’s Evan Balaban and Caroline Palmer are these great, great, music cognition researchers. McGill is the world’s mecca for music perception and cognition, so it was just really fortuitous.

Torsten Schmidt

Are you implying that if you have a chance to extend your visa you should just sign up over there?

Susan Rogers

McGill is pretty great. It’s a really prestigious college. I’m very fortunate to have studied there. Unfortunately, for me, my scientific career will be short. I’m not going to make a big contribution to science because I got my degree when I was 52. Berklee keeps us really busy. It’s a teaching college. I have my lab and I do experiments... I get to play scientist, and I get to do a little bit of stuff, but mostly I’m a teacher now.

Torsten Schmidt

Seeing as that was that voice that was egging you on to do all that, do you feel sad, that it was probably a little too late?

Susan Rogers

Oh, no, no. It’s so good. This is my theory. That, if you want to figure out how to have a really good life, first thing you have to do is do what you did when you were five years old, just daydream. A five-year-old doesn’t have to do much, doesn’t have to go to school, really, doesn’t have to go to work, doesn’t have to pay a mortgage, doesn’t have to put food on the table, really, you have a lot of time to just daydream. Your mind goes a lot of places. When you’re five years old, you get to know yourself, as much as you can at age five.

We undervalue that. The best thinking I’ve ever done in my life, and I think the best thinking most people ever do, is when you just daydream. When you’re like a five-year-old, in that, you’ve paid your bills, you’re comfortable, you’re not going to get evicted any moment, you’re okay for a minute, you’re not going to starve, you’re not going to freeze to death, you’re not going to overheat, you’re good.

If you can resist the temptation to be on input, and be taking in the web, or the TV, or other people’s music. If you can resist the input to take in other ideas, just shut the fuck up for just a minute, and let your brain have some frickin’ fun. Let it just go where it wants to go, just let it daydream. When it can do that, it will, if you’re open to it, it’ll show you who you are. Your daydreams, that’s who you are.

If you’re really fortunate, and you believe, if you have that daydream and you believe it, and you can get someone to pay you to think like that, then you’re in good shape. When I was young, I daydreamed about being where records were made. I didn’t see myself, I didn’t have the dream about being an artist or being a performer, I mean, all little kids get on a microphone or on a hairbrush in front of the mirror, and they’re like, they’re singing. I knew that wasn’t me. I knew that me, my daydream, was just to help records get made. Later, that dream became, wouldn’t it be fun to just look at stuff, wouldn’t it be fun to just watch stuff.

That’s what scientists do, they measure things, they watch it and they measure it. That’s what I do now. When I’m in my laboratory, I do auditory brain stem response measurements. The musicians, Berklee musicians come in, and I stick the electrode right here, and two more electrodes here on the mastoid bone, right behind the ears. I put earbuds in their ears, and I play them the most boring of all sounds, it’s just a stream of clicks, but I can measure the activity in the auditory nerve bundle, going from the cochlea up to the temporal lobe. What that activity tells us, is whether or not these young musicians are at risk for early on-set hearing damage.

Are they hurting themselves with their practice? What I want to know is, my specific question is, are some instruments more dangerous than others? Drummers, are you at greatest risk for future hearing loss? Is it our electric guitar players, is it the kids in the heavy metal bands, is it the horn players, is it the vocalist, a voice can be really loud if it’s right there, next to your ear, that can be really dangerous, is it DJs, who’re at risk? That’s what I do, when I’m in the lab I just watch the signals, and I look at stuff, and I measure it. It feels really good, that’s a good way to be I think.

Torsten Schmidt

On that feel-good note, I would love to open it up to questions, because I guess, especially with the last hints you gave people a lot of incentive to ask stuff, but I don’t want to do that without taking the chance to maybe ask everyone to join me in thanking Dr. Susan Rogers for taking the time today.

(applause)

Susan Rogers

Thank you, thank you. Thank you very very much, Torsten for your questions, they were great, I really appreciate your generosity and letting me speak for this long. Thank you for your attention, I love musicians, I love music, I want you to be great and I want you to do great things.

I want you to realize, this is something our visiting artist Greg Wells just said when he came to visit Berklee, he’s a famous record producer, and he looked at our Berklee kids, and he said, “I want to tell you something, you don’t realize it, you don’t know how great, great is.” I thought, “Oh, good, great is really good, really good.” When you get to work with a k.d. lang or you get to work with a Prince or you get to work with Tricky, or you get to work with any artist you care to name who is selling a lot of records.

Believe me, when you see these people in person, and you’re in the studio, Meghan Trainor, some of our Berklee grads actually produced some songs on her first record, and they described Meghan Trainor and they played some tracks for us. Meghan Trainor, “I know I’m all about that bass,” is great. Good is really good. You’re going to have to work really, really hard. You’re already good, because you’re here. Somebody recognized something in you, somebody liked what you do, and they liked how you talked, and they like the cut of your jib. You’re doing alright. You have a lot of work to do because the grade is really high. I hope you do it, I’m looking forward to hearing what you do. Yeah.

(applause)

Audience Member

Thank you so much, for all the stories. I’d want to ask a lot of questions about the Prince era, but I’m going to go back to where you are now. I’m curious about like, when we cut ourselves, or if we get cut, our flesh heals, do you know about the ear’s ability to heal itself, after it has been damaged?

Susan Rogers

I don’t know how much you know about it, but I’ll try and be brief.

Inside the cochlea, which is that little bony shell that is shaped like a snail, there’s a membrane, basilar membrane, and above the basilar membrane, our hair cells, there is a single row of inner hair cells, and then there is a triple row of outer hair cells. Hair cells, if you look them up online, you see they’re one of the coolest things in all of the universe, it just, it looks like a cartoon drawing of an alien. It’s a cell, and it’s got these little hairs on top, and it’s got a nucleus in it. When you’re hearing a sound, sound is coming into your ear canal, and it’s pushing your eardrum back and forth, and that’s connected to three little bones, which is pushing that little oval window, which is a little port, on that bony cochlea, it’s pushing that back and forth.

That’s connected to this membrane, that’s going up and down like this. On top of that, are little hair cells, and they’re swinging back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth, and as they swing back and forth, and this is why nature is fucking amazing... so, it’s impossibly small, but the little hairs themselves have pores in them, and as the hairs swing back and forth, and they’re connected by this little spring at the top, all these little springs, so the hairs on springs, they’re swinging back and forth, pores in the hairs are opening and closing, and ions are coming in and out. That becomes, that’s your analog to digital converter, that’s your analog signal, the hair cells going back and forth, which converts the signal, if it’s hot enough, into a nerve spike.

There’s a nerve sitting there, waiting at the bottom of that hair cell, saying, “Hit me.” If it gets enough ions coming in, it becomes a nerve spike, and there’s your one, if the signal is there, and a zero if it isn’t. There goes the nerve spike, it goes up the chain and it goes to here.

To answer your question, think about it. You’ve got a hair cell and you’re playing it a pure tone of 4k, 4,000 hertz, the little hairs are going back and forth 4,000 times a second. That becomes spikes. If you overdo it, and you blast those hair cells for too long, too much, what happens is the nerve that is sitting there waiting to receive all those neurotransmitters, those ions, the charged ions, which became neurotransmitters, the nerves get so overexcited, they suffer from excitotoxicity and the ends of the nerves swell, and they burst. Hair cells can die from overuse, and they do not grow back. An auditory nerve is a long nerve – long, it’s long in biological terms, it’s about 25 millimeters, an inch or so long, from the inner ear to the cortex, to right here.

That path, that’s our wiring, and that consists of about 35,000 nerves on each side. The nerves have branches. Musical training in childhood grows more branches, so that’s good news and bad news for musicians.

Musicians, this is well established, and I’m glad I have an opportunity to say this to you, musicians who’ve been training since childhood have a super highway for processing sound compared to non-musicians.

You guys hear things in sound that I don’t catch. It’s not that your hearing is necessarily better than mine, it’s that because you're musicians, your processing acuity is sharper and finer than mine. It’s like you’ve got a really sharp photograph, I’ve got a Polaroid. I can still see it’s a Polaroid picture. It’s dad and it’s the boat and it’s in the driveway. Yeah, I can see what it is. I can tell you what it is. You guys, with your high-resolution system, can tell us, “Hey, in this picture, dad’s fly is down.” I can’t see that detail. I can’t hear that detail.

To answer your question a little bit more thoroughly, one, the hair cells can die and they don’t come back. Two, branches on the auditory nerve can die and eventually kill off the nerve. We’re going to kill off some of it anyway as we age, just as our eyes are going to change, but think of sound exposure like a sunburn. If you do it too many times, if you burn your skin too much for too long, your skin says, “OK, I guess this is what we’re doing,” and tumors can grow.

Likewise, if you burst your hearing too much over too long of a time, the auditory system says, “I can’t deal with it anymore. It’s just too much.” You musicians are somewhat protected because you have a better pathway, but you’re still at risk. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Research is being done right now at a ferocious pace to help see if we can grow new auditory nerves and new hair cells, but, so far, no. Not too much. The good news is... I don’t want to leave you with bad news. This is super cool and it’s recent. Scientists have discovered that not all injury is created equal.

Let’s take a crude example. If you are playing a sport you love, your favorite sport, after you played that sport for a whole day, your muscles are going to ache, but you feel good because your body hurts, but you felt good doing it. That muscle ache is different than the muscle ache you would get if someone pushed you down a flight of stairs. Literally, when we add insult to injury, it hurts worse and it causes more damage.

Likewise, noise exposure caused by sound we do not like, like construction work or gun shots and stuff like that, is much more damaging than the same sound pressure level from sound that we like. When we’re being a DJ, when we’re mixing, when we’re working in the studio, when we’re playing, we’re actually not getting the same level of harm as when we’re just exposed to random noise. There’s some protection there.

That said, the early results of my work is suggesting that maybe horn players might be at greatest risk for hearing damage. That surprised me. I thought it would be drummers, I thought it would be the electric guitar players, but, with the drummer, your cymbal is at some distance from your ears. Your snare is at some distance. With electric guitar players, your amp is going to be at some distance.

Torsten Schmidt

Rather than the guy who’s sitting next to the cymbal.

Susan Rogers

Right, exactly. The person setting up your amp is probably in greater danger. Horn players will often have in a set, they’ll have the bell of some guy’s horn right next to their ear. That can be rough.

Torsten Schmidt

On the notion of psychoacoustics, how does it work if someone like Beethoven, who had hearing loss, was still able to compose?

Susan Rogers

That involves something called auditory imagery. Musicians are known to be better than non-musicians at auditory imagery. It stands to reason that genius, genius musicians would be extraordinarily great at it. It’s the capacity to, one, imagine a song in your head, have an earworm, but, two, to be able to control and remember the sound that’s in your head. It takes a high working memory capacity to be able to think of a theme, like Beethoven would have to do, play it in his head, and then add orchestration, add harmony to that.

A genius musical mind could do it because his brain was so adept at manipulating auditory signals. Mere mortals would have a hard time, but Ravel did it and, after a number of years, we could. That has been shown in laboratories. It has been shown that musicians can hold and manipulate a signal in auditory memory longer than a non-musician can.

Audience Member

Actually, you almost answered my question, but I’ll ask it anyway. First of all, thanks so much for the really insightful interview. The question is if... It segues into something I’ve been thinking recently, that the greatest artists and musicians are, when you listen to their music, you are really listening to how they hear. The decisions they make are really informed by that. I keep realizing this more and more.

The question is I guess if there are moments when Prince or someone else that you’ve worked with, some of these great creators that have done things or reacted in ways which were so unnatural to you or so surprising that it could have only happened if one’s perception and system of perception and hearing was so different and maybe idiosyncratic or unexpected, any moments like that which may have remained in your memory, where...

Susan Rogers

Yes. The band I worked with not long after Prince, this band Geggy Tah. You would have heard of Geggy. Geggy is Greg Kurstin. He just wrote and produced Adele’s new album. Prior to that, he’s been nominated a couple of times for the Grammy Award for Producer of the Year in 2015 and in 2009. He worked with Pink and Sia. He’s one half of the Bird and the Bee. Anyway, he’s the Geggy in Geggy Tah. Then Tah is Tommy Jordan.

The first time I heard their music, it was a little cassette in the offices of Warner Brothers Records. I realized, “These guys know something about music that I don’t know, and I’m desperate to know it.” It was just something. It was something about this song and the arrangement of it that made me think, “I don’t know what that is, but I know they’re hearing something that I can’t hear, and I want to know what it is.”

You had mentioned earlier about what records to say yes to and what records to reject. I said yes to this record. It was supposed to last only two weeks because they only had two weeks’ worth of money. I ended up working on this record for a year. I nearly went bankrupt. I was this close to declaring bankruptcy. What I learned about music from those guys actually allowed me to have success in all the records I did afterward because I learned so much about music.

That’s a very astute point. When we’re listening to music, we’re listening to the outcome of decisions. You’re hearing everything that the artist wanted you to hear, but you’re not hearing the rest of the decision process. You’re not hearing what they rejected, you’re not hearing the outtakes, you’re not hearing all the different keyboard presets they went through, all the different guitar presets, or grooves they went through until they arrived at that.

Being a record producer involves that process. That’s what you walk in the room with is a decision criterion for what constitutes right and what constitutes wrong. You don’t know if you’re right or wrong. You don’t know, but you listen to a performance and you just say, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” until you say, “Yes.” Then there it is.

What the listener gets is the execution, but you never know the distance between the execution and the intention. You never know what they tried to do, you only know what they did.

Audience Member

Thanks so much.

Susan Rogers

Thank you.

Audience Member

What was the name of the singer?

Susan Rogers

Oh, the band I’m thinking of is Geggy Tah. They had three albums out on David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label. I learned more about music from those guys than anybody, but the song that I heard in Kevin Lafferty’s office was something called “Ready for Rain.” They never did release it. It was like Prince’s “Moonbeam Levels.” Tommy never released it, but they were geniuses. They were both geniuses in a very different way, a different kind of musical genius.

Audience Member

Over here. I just wanted to ask something because you were just talking about decisions. While you were talking about the processes of the recordings of Prince, for instance, where you have all these BOSS pedals, and it was recorded that way and it was irreversible, nowadays, and I see it here in the studios in the programs, especially as everything is very much computer-driven in production, you offered a variety for possibilities... Of the possibility of, again, removing effects, adding, changing, whatever.

These decisions that you had to take that had some kind of responsibility because they were irreversible I think somehow probably helped in the process rather than endangered it. Then, on the other hand, all these possibilities that are given are something that actually is making it much more difficult to take decisions. Decisions is what takes it to a record. How would you say or how you would share to people who are producing with all these vast possibilities that maybe are not a help or sometimes ...how to confront this in some way or to creatively get out of this?

Susan Rogers

I’m so glad for your question because now I can teach you something that Geggy Tah taught me. In the old days of record-making, we made records from the materials to the vision. You take the materials that you have and then you’d make a record with those materials. In the case of, let’s say, Motown. What are the materials? We’ve got these players, we’ve got Holland–Dozier–Holland, we’ve got these songwriters, we’ve got Smokey Robinson. We have these materials, we’ve got these little studios. What can we make with this?

You’re constrained. Your decisions, of course, are constrained because you’re either going to go eight-track or you’ll go 16-track. Are you going to go 24-track? When I worked with Prince, it was 24-track. He would not, he refused to synchronize two machines together. The entire arrangement had to be realized in 24-tracks. We went from the materials, “Here’s the instruments we have,” to the vision, “Here’s what we can make. “

Most records are done that way. The only people who could have a visionary record, “Here’s what I’m envisioning, and then now I’m going to go out and get the materials to make that,” would be the people with endless amounts of money. The Beatles could make a visionary record. They could make Sgt. Pepper. Paul Simon could make a visionary record, people who had all the money in the world. Most people went from the materials to the vision.

Now, because the tools are so affordable, everyone can go from the vision to the materials. You can make anything you can think of. Your software synths and your tools will allow you to have... You could have an echo chamber. If you’ve got a laptop, you’ve got a studio. You can have an echo chamber, you can have a choir, you can have an orchestra, you can have a gamelan orchestra. You can go from the vision to the materials.

Now, when everyone is going from the vision to the materials, that says, what? As Prince used to say, “The one who wins is going to be the one with the best vision.” Back in the old days, the big records were the ones who had the best materials, the high-budget records. Just like high-budget movies, they had the best materials. They can hire Barbra Streisand or the LA Philharmonic. Now it’s whoever has the best ideas because everyone has the same materials.

I would say to your generation, if you want to improve your thinking, give yourself constraints. Give yourself a time constraint, a money constraint, an instrumentation constraint, a track constraint, and force your thinking, constrain your thinking to allow it to grow, to allow it to flourish. Don’t let it run wild. Give it some boundaries, give it some parameters, and see what you can make with that. It’s a great exercise for your thinking, which is what you’re going to build your career on.

Audience Member

Thank you very much.

(applause)

Susan Rogers

Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate it.