Susan Rogers
Photo: Darren Pellegrino
Producer & Engineer Susan Rogers Worked With Prince And Barenaked Ladies. Now, She Wants To Know Why We Love The Music We Do.
Susan Rogers has some serious bragging rights in the music world — she was part of some of Prince's most GRAMMY-recognized albums, from Purple Rain to Sign o' the Times. But the producer and engineer remains absorbed in listening and learning which sounds touch her soul — far more than her own musical acumen.
"All of us have a unique listener profile that is shaped over a lifetime of listening to music," Rogers, who teaches record production, psychoacoustics and music cognition at Berklee College of Music, tells GRAMMY.com. "By listening to the records you love the most, it actually shapes your auditory cortex to make you highly attuned to the sounds, performances and grooves you like."
With all that said, what's in Rogers' "listener profile," as she calls it? Soul music that springs from the heart, like one of her first musical loves, James Brown. Lyrically, she's into innovation — deep wordplay and love of language. Plus, it's got to groove, and groove heavy.
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Still, Rogers is aware that the music that makes her heart leap may leave another listener cold — which is the whole point of her upcoming book, This Is What It Sounds Like. (She's still administering the finishing touches; a release date remains TBA.)
By dissecting one's preferences into seven components — three of them aesthetic, four of them musical — Rogers is able to examine why one person might love the Beatles, another may dig the Stones, a third may be into both, and a fourth might go for neither. That's to say nothing of the innumerable other permutations one's musical tastes might take.
How does Rogers apply this methodology to her own work as an engineer? "It's a lot like being a chef, in a way," she says. "You're trying to create food that satisfies your taste, but with a good awareness that there are people whose tastes are for more salt, or more spice — or for less."
Read on for an in-depth interview with Rogers about her early life, her creative relationship with Prince, living and working in a male-dominated sphere, and loving heavy metal as a 65-year-old.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Tell me about your history and legacy in the realms of production and engineering.
I'm from Southern California. [I grew up as] one of those kids who was just crazy about records — just crazy about records.
Those people will sometimes go on to be DJs or A&R executives or business managers, and some of them will become record producers. But I did not believe myself to be possessed of any of those talents, so I chose a route that seemed easy to me but harder to others. That was being an audio tech, and I worked as an audio technician repairing consoles and tape machines in the greater Los Angeles area starting in the late '70s.
Then, I got a big break with Prince. Prince was looking for a technician when he came off the 1999 tour, and he was about to dive into the Purple Rain movie and album. He asked his management to find him a tech, and they found me!
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That was a big break, so I went to work. I left California, moved to Minnesota and worked as Prince's engineer on Purple Rain through Sign o' the Times and The Black Album. I came back to LA and continued my work as an independent engineer. And, eventually, as a record producer, I had [Faux-pompous voice] grrreat success with Barenaked Ladies in 1998!
With that big money, I was able to leave the music business in 2000, do eight straight years of college, go from freshman to Ph.D., get my doctoral degree in music perception and cognition, and now I teach at Berklee College of Music. I teach record production, but I also teach psychoacoustics and music cognition.
How did you react when you realized Prince chose you as a tech?
I heard through the professional grapevine in LA. Among technicians, there's a pretty strong grapevine. I heard he was looking for a tech and I said, "Tell him his search is over, because that's my job! I'm getting that job!"
I was a huge Prince fan. He was my favorite artist in the world because I loved R&B and soul music — always have. I had seen him play live a number of times. If you asked me to write on a piece of paper "What would be your biggest dream come true?" I would have said, "To work for Prince."
And it happened! As soon as I heard he was looking for a tech, I knew. He liked working with women. In addition to that, I listened to a lot of R&B and soul records that he listened to as well, so we could listen to music from a common frame of reference. That helped us both.
In the larger audio world at the time, was it a boy's club? Was there weird gender inequality?
There was certainly gender inequality; "weird" is the word you can debate. Everything is the way it is because it got that way. Men are biologically a little bit more competitive, or they tend to compete differently than women do. In a highly cognitive field like record-making — or even being on tour and doing live music — men are going to compete for those jobs.
Back in those days — in the '60s, '70s and early '80s — it was pretty easy to use intimidation to keep women from wanting to be part of it. They could employ intimidation, and whether or not women were intimidated depended on the woman, and it depended on how strong the implied threat was.
Fortunately, for me — and for other women of my generation who were successful — we had the good fortune to work with men who welcomed us, who were not competitive with us, who empowered us, who wanted to give us a chance.
So, yeah, it was certainly male-dominated, but it became rapidly less weird as we found our comfort zone in this field.
How did you develop your individual approach, or voice, in this field?
As the mathematicians say, "If it is true, the equation will suffice." If the tape machine is broken, it does not care if the person repairing it is wearing high heels or not. It's an objective standard.
Then, as far as developing a sonic signature goes — and neuroscience bears this out — all of us have a unique listener profile that is shaped over a lifetime of listening to music. That is built up by the dopaminergic reward system. We get rewards from certain records and not so much from others.
So, the more you're rewarded by listening to the records you love the most, it actually shapes your auditory cortex to make you highly attuned to the sounds, performances and grooves you like.
A sonic signature for producers and engineers works the exact same way: you're trying to shape sound to be what you like, to match your profile. And keeping in mind, of course, that others — the client and label you're working with, and the listeners out there in the world — have their own listener profiles.
It's a lot like being a chef, in a way. You're trying to create food that satisfies your taste, but with a good awareness that there are people whose tastes are for more salt, or more spice — or for less.
What do you want to impart with your upcoming book, This Is What It Sounds Like?
A couple of years ago, I was approached by a fellow Ph.D. in computational neuroscience whose name is Ogi Ogas. He said, "My job is finding scientists with cool ideas, and I help them turn those ideas into popular books. Would you like to write a book on music?"
I said, "Well, no, because I'm not a musician. I'm not an expert on music." But I did say, "What I'm an expert in as a recordmaker is music listening. That's what I've done my whole life. I'm a music listener, and I could write about that." He said, "Yeah, let's do it."
As we were compiling material for chapters in the book, we realized there was a model for music perception and cognition in there that is gleaned from scientific findings, but includes the uniqueness of each listener.
In this book, that's what we talk about: how your listener profile forms over a lifetime of listening, specific to seven dimensions of music. Three of them are aesthetic; four of them are musical.
The musical dimensions are the things we know — melody, lyrics, rhythm, and timbres. The aesthetic dimensions are our appetites for novelty versus familiarity, above-the-net and below-the-net gestures — does that performance come from the gut, or is it from a cerebral place?
Also, a capacity for liking music recordings that conform to realistic scenarios — realistic recordings, like the kind my generation made — or the new, more popular, abstract recordings that people make today with digital audio workstations and modern sound design tools.
Susan Rogers. Photo: Jandro Cisneros
So, that's what the book is about: how your listener profile forms and what those musical loves say about you and what you need music to do for you. Why you want the music. Why you love it so much and why it's so personal. Why the music you love the most is likely to be something someone else listens to and just says "Eh, no big deal."
Why does that happen? Why are there those big differences? We explain that in the book.
Through that lens, tell me about your own listener profile and how it's developed over the years.
When I first heard James Brown as a little kid — about nine years old — I just knew right away, "Ah, that's the street that I live on." That's what Prince used to call it. It just felt so much better to me than the Motown music I heard in those days. As soon as I heard James Brown, it just felt right.
That suggests that that rhythm — and that emphasis on rhythm — matched something in my body that said, "Now that's what I'm talking about! That's the kind of groove that I like!" Whereas someone else responding might be more receptive to and rewarded by the harmonies, melodies or lyrical statements of Motown. Whereas someone else might be more rewarded by music that was rock in those days and ultimately became alternative/indie.
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We all respond uniquely to music. My profile includes the rhythm of R&B and soul music. Lyrically, I like innovation. I'm an avid reader, so I like prose and poetry. I love clever wordplay. Melodically, I love those swooping, sweeping melodies.
Therefore, rap music, with its lyrical inventiveness, is less appealing because it doesn't have the melodic component that I crave so badly — the harmonic component that I really love. I would say that all of those are part of my listener profile. And when I listen to music, I'm going to be seeking at least a reward from one of them.
They don't all have to be there, but at some point, the sounds, rhythms, melodies, harmonies, and lyrics — something needs to be powerfully rewarding enough that you want to listen to that record again.
How would you describe the arc of your career after working on those Prince albums?
It kept advancing through different stages, and they didn't feel like advancements.
Going from a tech to an engineer allowed me to be more creatively involved. After engineering, I did a lot of mixing, which [involves] more creative input than if you're engineering. Slightly more, but still. This allowed me to then produce records with artists, which gave me an even greater voice in the record-making process.
Then, changing careers, I had to go through that period of not knowing anything — being a rank beginner again in the psychology department at the University of Minnesota, and then at McGill. Once I reached a new level of expertise, that allowed me to have conversations about music from a different, more biologically informed perspective, which has been really fun.
I'm sure Prince's passing was a pivotal moment for you.
It was really tough. It was really tough for all of us. Those of us who knew him or worked with him — for the most part; I'm sure there were exceptions — but myself and my friends among the Prince alumni, we loved him. We loved him.
He was good to us. In the case of Wendy and Lisa and myself — those of us who started with him when we were young; Sheila E. is another one — he gave us careers. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Jesse Johnson, the list goes on.
We worked really, really hard. But he had a warm heart deep, down inside. I never turn down requests to be interviewed about Prince, because of the love I still have for him and the unshakeable belief I have that the new generation of music lovers should know him and his work. They should know about him, so I talk about him.
Here's a two-pronged question: what are you working on this week, and what are you listening to this week?
What I'm working on this week is the final edition of the book. The book has to be delivered very soon — by Dec. 1. We've got some final tweaks to make, so I'm working on that and I'm teaching.
Right now, at the top of the list [of what I'm listening to] is a local Boston band called Atomic Guava. They're a metal band with xylophone, and the lead singer, Ellie [Hull] — she's just so charismatic and dynamic. They just put out a new album and they've got a show in Boston on the 21st, so I'm excited about that.
I was in a meeting yesterday with my colleagues in the music production and engineering department and I mentioned, "Hey guys, metal lovers here around the table — Atomic Guava has a show on the 21st!" My colleagues to my right just looked at me and stared and I said, "Yeah! I'm 65 and I really like metal!"
