Just learned yesterday that Jamie Lewis of House Music stalwarts Purple Music scored a Grammy nomination for his contributions to Prince’s final album.
Hit N Run Phase Two (released on Tidal in December 2015) will go down as the last studio album released before Prince’s death on April 21, 2016. It was nominated at the 59th Annual Grammy Awards in the “Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical” category, featuring a litany of techies including Lewis.
Jamie Lewis worked on several projects with Prince, most memorably “Dance 4 Me” (from the triple album project LOtUSFLOW3R/MPLSoUND), “2 Nite” by Bria Valente (Elixer), “Rock & Roll Love Affair” and “Screwdriver,” released digitally in early 2013 and appearing on Hit N Run Phase Two.
In his interview with 5 Magazine after Prince’s death, Jamie confirmed he’d flown to Paisley Park for studio work several times over the years, scoring a “mixing engineer/recording” credit on Plectrumelectrum with the 3dEyeGirl band before this one.
“The reaction was very good,” he said of the Prince releases on Purple Music. “We topped the British, Swiss and German dance charts, as well as many official European dance charts. At that time we could say that we brought Prince’s music back into the European club scenes.”
“We were always together, working in the studio with the band and all the musicians,” he recounted. “It was an unforgettable amazing time… Paisley is a big, great family.”
Other familiar names on this year’s Grammy nomination list include Louie Vega for his debut solo album and Tycho for his LP Epoch.