Hello, Damespals!!

As we head into roadtrip season I, Dame Margaret, would like to point you in the direction of a particularly excellent podcast episode from a reliably excellent podcast team. The podcast This Is Love, part of the uniformly excellent Radiotopia podcast family, released an episode focusing on Susan Rogers, a sound engineer who began her career working with Prince right before his career took off. In addition to sharing the incapacitatingly charming origin story for “Nothing Compares 2 U” (the iconic love song Prince wrote and then gave away to Sinead O’Connor), Rogers gives us a window into Prince’s creative process, discusses what it was like to be part of his inner circle, and examines the relationship that we develop with music that really matters to us. If you have even a passing interest in any of those things, I have a strong feeling this is an interview you’ll enjoy.

I love every episode of this show and also every episode of its sister podcast Criminal, so if this has whet your appetite, here are a few particularly strong episodes of each to continue on with:

• Something Large and Wild, which tells a love story between a young woman and a baby whale

• Always Tomorrow, which illuminates how experiencing a profound love story led one women to practically invent the market for African American-led romance novels

• The Editor, an episode of Criminal about a relationship that blossoms between the editor of the Merriam Webster Encyclopedia and an incarcerated autodidact

• And Pappy, a Criminal episode about a real-life bourbon heist.