Does anyone if Susan Rogers is still engineering albums or is she long gone? If gone, does anyone know what the last album she engineered was?

After Prince's Paisley Park Studio was built, Rogers' "tour of duty" was up. She went independent and her characteristic sound and style led to a stint with the Jacksons. As Rogers worked with Edie Brickell, Public Image Ltd, Laurie Anderson and David Byrne, she got more into producing and mixing. The Barenaked Ladies pursued her and she took a few weeks in January 1998 to work on their album Stunt. It was a multi-platinum hit. Finally Rogers was earning royalties, which allowed her to pursue her second career goal. "I always wanted to go to school and become a scientist."

Rogers got her high school diploma at age 44 and entered a BSc at the University of Minnesota the same year. Now in her third year at McGill in the Levitin Laboratory for Music, Perception, Cognition and Expertise, Rogers probes whether the human mind is specialized for music, how musical training shapes your auditory memory and cognitive abilities. Because it's impossible to find true musical naives — "even if you hate it, you can't escape it" — she's considering turning to gerbils, "great little participants," who have a range of hearing close to that of humans.

Ever wade through a throng on the McGill campus and wonder where people have been instead of where they're headed? The person passing you on the stairs might have once spent great chunks of quality time with, say, Prince.

Rogers, a behavioral neuroscience doctoral candidate now working on auditory memory, grew up in Southern California, where she dropped out of high school and became a sound engineer. "I loved music, but I wasn't a musician," she recalled. "I just always wanted to make records. I heard if you became an audio maintenance engineer, you'd always have a job."

September 7, 2006

Wow -- good for her!

wow, prince AND laurie anderson. nice gigs.