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In the Studio with Prince, Part 3
As I mentioned in Part 2, my involvement with the Prince project started ramping up during the production of Graffiti Bridge, both the album and the movie.
In those days (1989) we mixed to 1/2" 2-track tape. Prince would assemble all the master mixes for the record into two big reels – side 1 and side 2. He liked to work on how the songs transitioned. He would have us cut the the songs very close together, even cutting into the fade of the previous song, so the next song started sooner than you thought. As he worked on songs he would replace old mixes with new mixes, play with the order of the songs and add and remove songs. The record was a living thing and he always had a current version of it. Back then we gave him cassettes; I don’t remember burning CD’s. I think that technology was just coming around.
The Graffiti Bridge record was already cut together when I started working on it. Presumably Femi Jiya (or maybe Tom Garneau or Dave Friedlander) put together the original version. A few songs on Graffiti Bridge I had nothing to do with – they were already done, such as Joy in Repetition, which I love. But I kind of took over at this point and was the engineer who shepherded it through the process and eventually to mastering. Meanwhile the movie was going into production and Prince was dating Kim Basinger.
