What making music with Prince has to do with ghostwriting

I didn’t expect to find a framework for ghostwriting in a book about music.

“The music that delivers the maximum gratification to you,” according to Susan Rogers in This Is What It Sounds Like, “is determined by seven influential dimensions of musical listening: authenticity, realism, novelty, melody, lyrics, rhythm, and timbre.”

Rogers was the recording engineer for Prince when he made Purple Rain and Sign o’ the Times. Her job wasn’t to make music. She was there to make sure that what came out of the speakers sounded unmistakably like Prince.
Not like Susan Rogers’ version of Prince.
Like ‘The Purple One’ himself.

Record pulls were an important part of the process of making an album with Prince. A record pull is when you take turns playing your favourite artists or songs for a friend or colleague. It’s a conversation inspired by the music that moves you.

“Gaining insight into a friend’s musical tastes can be an intimate experience that reveals how they see themselves in relation to the world,” writes Rogers. It’s not just the songs they play that is revealing but “their explanation of why a record matters so much to them. Good record pulls feature as much storytelling as music.”

Prince learned he could trust Rogers’ taste and she realised, “My lifelong love—listening to records—helped me push sound around and arrive at something my new boss approved of.”

Likewise, my lifelong love — reading autobiographies and memoirs of my sporting heroes, musicians, and more recently founders, owners and entrepreneurs — helps me to move words around until the book on the page sounds like the person sitting across from me.

Rogers’ book is part memoir, part neuroscience, part manifesto for how to listen to music. Almost everything she says about recording music sums up the relationship and dynamic between a ghostwriter and the person they’re writing about.

The job of a recording engineer is to capture someone else’s sound in the studio and preserve it. That’s almost identical to what a ghostwriter does.
Your job is to capture the voice of your client.
To make sense of their story.
The closer you get to nailing it, the better the result.

In the recording studio, Rogers made hundreds and thousands of little choices to bring out the best in Prince and his music.
Making the right choices are what makes a good ghostwriter.
The big choices include deciding what stories to keep and how to tell them; what stories to leave out; identifiyng the thread that pulls the narrative togther, and so on.
Then there’s the writing where every word, sentence and paragraph depends on the choices the writer makes.

Before the writing begins however, the ghostwriters job is to listen.

Hearing, not just listening

Listening is a vital skill in sound engineering as well. It is not, however, the same as hearing, says Rogers. “Listening is an active process, not a passive one, and becoming a competent musical listener requires curiosity, effort, and love,” she writes.

Rogers argues that the most underrated skill in music is the ability to hear — to automatically analyse “verbal intonations, rhythms and word choices for the slightest hint of the speaker’s true sentiments and intentions.”

When I sit down with a founder to write their memoir or company history, the writing is the visible part of the work.
The listening, questioning and reflection?
That’s the real work behind the scenes.

Most of my clients have never been properly listened to before. Journalists have interviewed them hoping for a scoop or a soundbite; Consultants have pitched at them; Family and friends have politely tolerated their stories. But sitting across from someone whose only job is to hear you — to follow the thread of what you’re actually saying, to notice when you pause before answering a particular question, to ask “tell me more” when most people would move on — is an unusual experience.

What ends up on the page is what survives the long, slow process of being properly heard. The book is the end product but the process is often as important and more rewarding for the client.

Rogers writes brilliantly about why some music moves us and other music doesn’t. Why we fall in love with one record and not another. The same question applies to autobiographies and memoirs. Why does one founder’s story feel alive while another causes you to give up after a few pages?

The answers might just lie in Rogers’ seven dimensions: authenticity, realism, novelty, melody, lyrics, rhythm, and timbre. Together, these form a ‘listener profile’ unique to each of us. The records that move us most are the ones that hit our personal sweet spots across those seven dimensions. Similarly, we all have a ‘reader profile’.

Part of my job as a ghostwriter is to figure out who your story is for, and write it in a way that matches their ‘reader profile’ without losing your voice in the process.