Prince’s sound engineer, Susan Rogers has revealed in a recent interview how she created the artist’s legendary vault, and ultimately saved his masters from the now infamous 2008 Universal Music fires.

Speaking to Double J’s Take 5 podcast, Rogers revealed that when she worked with Prince between 1983 and 1988, she began to collate his reference tapes as a “practical matter,” recalling his tendency to request recordings at all hours of the night.

“When I first started working for him, he would sometimes say to me at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning ‘bring me this tape or that tape’. I realised I have to know where all these things are, ’cause how would I know this obscure stuff that had never been released,” she said.“I started working with the women who worked in his office, and I asked for their help. Let’s collect all these tapes and start a database…With [a] personal computer we were able to start forming a database of all the tapes.” 

From there, in the spirit of building the most comprehensive collection possible, Rogers reached out to record labels, asking for the master tapes of Prince’s recordings, “I got really ambitious. I started calling faraway places that might have some of his tapes. Now, I did not know that you’re not supposed to do that,” Rogers laughed, acknowledging that, as she has since learned, those tapes did technically belong to the labels. 

But her determination – and unwitting bending of the rules – certainly paid off in 2008, when the infamous blaze at Universal Music destroyed somewhere between 120,000 and 175,000 master recordings, including priceless original recordings from Buddy Holly and Elton John, to Nirvana, and Tupac. Thanks to Rogers, Prince’s tapes remained untouched, locked safely in the vault she had created three decades under his Paisley Park estate.  

According to Consequence of Sound, after Prince’s death in 2016, the estate’s archivist drilled the vault open, reportedly discovering “enough unreleased music to release a new album every year for the next century.”  Listen to the most recently un-vaulted single below. 

Prince | “Witness 4 The Prosecution”

With an expanded reissue of Prince’s 1987 masterpiece, Sign O’ The Times announced just last week, with an incredible 63 previously unreleased tracks unearthed from his treasured vault – pre-order here – it seems we will be thanking Susan Roger’s ingenuity for many years to come. Listen to her full chat on Double J’s Take 5 podcast, here. 

Listen to the newly un-vaulted Witness 4 the Prosecution on Spotify:

Listen to Witness 4 the Prosecution on Apple Music: