TR: Well, Patti and I were friends from when we both first came to New York. We hung out a lot together. I always thought of Patti as a poet and a soul who performed her hardest. I got to see Patti with her little 45 record player doing her improvisations and reading her poetry. She’s just an incredibly remarkable and powerful person in that context. You can actually see her aura crackling around her. I thought that the din of the instruments drown out what was unique about her. But, lo and behold, she connected with something; she connected with people. She did something that no other girl was brave enough to do, and she built a career around that. By the time I actually got to work with her, it wasn’t necessarily out of a musical prerogative; it was out of a personal prerogative. She came to me and said, “I’ve met the love of my life and I’m going to go off and raise a family and I haven’t told the band this yet, but essentially, this is going to be my last record for the foreseeable future.” In that context, it wasn’t that I was the best producer for the record, but that this was maybe our last chance to work together on a record and that’s how I wound up working on Wave. She was coming off of a real hot streak with her previous record “Because the Night” that she wrote with Bruce Springsteen. But, by the time she got to Wave, the record we did together, her head was in a whole other place. Her head was in Michigan. It was something of a bittersweet experience. It wasn’t until we got to the very end of the record that the band even found out that this was going to be their last record.

(From Still A Wizard, A True Star; emphasis mine)