Kanye West engineer and local Andrew Dawson helping P.O.S. record new album

Photo by B FRESH

​While there has been plenty talk locally about Justin Vernon's involvement on the new Kanye West record, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, the LA Times pointed out another local tie today: engineer Andrew Dawson, a Hopkins native who worked in the studio with Kanye.

Dawson has worked as a recording and mixing engineer for Kanye throughout his entire career, earning a Grammy for his work on Late Registration in 2005. In addition to discussing some details about working with Kanye, Dawson also dropped a little tidbit about a new P.O.S. record that caught our attention:

Where do you see yourself going next in terms of upcoming projects?

I'll be producing an album for P.O.S. He's a friend of mine going all the way back to high school, and he just reached out to me earlier this year and said he wanted me to produce his entire album. So he and I are set to start working early in 2011 in L.A. to his follow-up album to "Never Better." A lot of the mixes and the engineering I do are heavily production involved. I'll do a lot of sound replacing or changing arrangements. I've worked on quite a few tracks as a producer, but sadly all of the artists on the label I worked with, nearly every one of them, were dropped or shelved. So I'm really excited to work with him on his album.

Word on the street is that P.O.S. will be recording throughout January in L.A., which means his album should come out sometime later on in 2011. Judging from his recent work with the musicians in Marijuana Deathsquads, we're thinking the new record will be another leap for the local rapper, whose restless, genre-busting approach to making music has already produced some fascinating results.

Read the whole interview with engineer Andrew Dawson here.