Earlier you mentioned that he liked to record his lead vocals alone. Did he record his background vocals in a similar fashion?
If he was singing background vocals, he’d sing them alone. If it was going to be Wendy, Lisa, Susannah, or Jill Jones doing the background vocals, he’d leave the studio and let us do it on our own. He would leave me alone to do horn arrangements with Eric Leeds as well. He’d tell Eric, “Take it away! Do what you like.” Prince would go to dinner or on a date or to the club, then when he would come back, we’d finish his parts. He was a genius with those backing-vocal arrangements. He really loved those gospel chords. He loved sevenths, ninths, and thirteenths. He was so great at it. He was quick with layering harmonies. It didn’t take him any time at all. He was brilliant at everything he ever did. He’d always say, “We’re going to go to church on this one.” [ laughs ] On this record, I can think of one exception where he wasn’t especially brilliant, and that was during the making of “The Cross.” The drums on “The Cross” weren’t steady; they were sped up. I thought for sure he was going to redo the drums on it, because he played the drums on it all in one take and it just progressively became faster. It really bugged me, because I thought it was sloppy. I was hoping that he’d redo it, but he was satisfied with it, and he knew what he was doing, so who was I to argue. It was one instance where I thought he could’ve tightened something up. [ laughs ]
Can you take me through the mixing process for the songs on the album?
The mixing process happened as the songs were being overdubbed. The way most artists do it is they finish the final overdubs and they put the tape away, then they give it to a mixing engineer. The mixing engineer starts from scratch by combining these sounds to turn the collection of tracks into a vinyl record. But Prince didn’t do it this way. He didn’t want to put the tape away until it was done , done , done . So I would be getting sounds when he was doing the last of the overdubs. We would be tweaking the mix as we went along, then all that remained was a few hours of work. We’d polish it up a little bit, then print it. Mixing is kind of like an arrangement. Our mixing process was concurrent with the recording process, unless there was a problem. If there was a problem, we spent a lot of time mixing it. If it wasn’t coming together, the song would probably end up in the vault, or in the case of “U Got the Look,” the song was too good to go in the vault. He started to change things. I remember changing the speed on “U Got the Look” and totally redoing it. At some point, we made it much slower, and at another point, we made it much faster, until we got the final groove that he was happy with.
When the album was being constructed, were there any interesting behind-the-scenes stories that took place?
One thing I can say that was interesting is on the song “Forever in My Life.” Prince somehow got off sync, because he was monitoring the track himself when he was doing his lead and backing vocals. When he was doing his backing vocals, he opted to do his backing vocals first and he came in on the wrong bar of the intro. This is why it kind of sounds like a little bit of a round. I haven’t listened to the song in a long time, but I think the backing vocals precede the lead vocals by like four bars. He was happy with it, even though it was an accident. He was excited by it. “Starfish and Coffee” was about Susannah [Melvoin] telling him a story about a girl [Cynthia Rose] that she went to school with that was cognitively impaired. Prince just loved that story. With Susannah,
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