Prince's sound engineer, Susan Rogers: 'He needed to be the alpha male to get things done'

One of a tiny number of female recording engineers, Rogers was there at birth of some of pop’s classics, including When Doves Cry. She recalls the man she knew – and shares her theory about why he loved working with women

Between 1983 and 1987, Susan Rogers didn’t really sleep. She’d work late into the night at a recording studio, then just three or four hours later would be woken up to head back in again, year after year – always at the beck and call of Prince as he answered his own relentless creativity. “I didn’t get a chance to form memories because I didn’t sleep long enough to form them,” she says. “People remind me of the wildest stuff and I say: are you sure I was there?”

Rogers, 61, is an extraordinary figure, a working-class autodidact who, as one of the tiny number of female recording engineers in the US, ended up helping to craft some of the greatest pop songs ever, from When Doves Cry to Raspberry Beret. The Prince sessions ensured a further decade of work with the likes of David Byrne, Barenaked Ladies and Tricky before she finally graduated from high school at 44 and then obtained a PhD in music and psychology.

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from Music | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2iILyMq

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