What did they bring that helped turn all of the personal chaos into such a polished album?

Well, the funny thing is neither of them had extensive studio engineering experience, but they each brought something unique.

Um, Richard Dashut was the live sound engineer for the band, so he had gotten to know the whole group really well just by being out on the road and spending long days together and long nights together working.

Um, so he had become kind of a confidant, and he was the, um, kind of black box that all of [laughs] their drama was being, you know, channeled into as they all confided in him and told them, you know, told him what they were going through personally, and a close friend of, of all the different members of the band.

Um, Ken Caillat, you know, he crossed paths with the group, um, when they were in LA working.

Um, they were doing a, I believe a radio mix of one of the songs, so he, it was just a quick job.

He was supposed to mix, you know, this one live performance that was gonna air on a radio station in LA.

That tour to support Rumors, what do you know about, in, in putting this book together, about what it was like for them to perform these songs night after night in front of each other?

[laughs]

Yeah, so very early on in his career, Prince was writing and recording way more music than he could possibly release, and, you know, his label, Warner Brothers, only wanted him to put out an album a year, but he was recording many albums each year.

So over time, he amassed hundreds of unreleased songs in a literal vault at Paisley Park.

They put a big bank vault door downstairs, and he would walk the reels down there and throw them in this room.

Eventually, that vault actually filled to the brim, and the room leading up to the vault [laughs] also started filling up with material.

So when he passed away, it was just volumes upon volumes of material that had to be cataloged and properly archived.

I just, I want to kind of just get your abiding memory of him, and also what you think he would've made of the controversy.

Well, Prince had a complicated relationship with both his label and his fan base, you know, and he changed his mind all the time.

But I want to imagine myself as somebody who lives in Dallas, Texas, and I'm coming up to the Twin Cities for the first time, and I wanna ask you, what's a spot that I really have to see while I'm in town if I love Prince and am really connected with his work?

work?Hmm.

Well, I've had so many moments of going to seek out places and try to feel a connection to him, and, um, I definitely feel it every time I'm at First Avenue.

I mean, that's such an obvious one, but that place was so important to him.

Actually, the most emotional time I've ever had trying to find a, a Prince location was when I went to look for the place where they filmed the Lake Minnetonka scene in Purple Rain, and I did all this research and tried to figure out where that actually was.

You know, you'd think Lake Minnetonka, but he actually found a small town about an hour south on 169 called Henderson, Minnesota, and they filmed that scene on the banks of the Minnesota River.

So I actually went there, and I went into their city hall, and this woman looked at me, and she was like, "Another one of you people, huh?" And she made me this map, and she showed me where to find, like, the exact spot where they filmed this, and it was weirdly emotional because it was so unexpected that it was so remote.

Oh my God.