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Melody Maker

PHOTO BY AHKIL SESH

JULIE EDGAR SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

A Detroit native

returns home

to create an all-

encompassing

recording studio

dedicated to helping

bring music back to

Motown.

ABOVE: A musician’s paradise, Royal
House Recording was created to inspire
clients to break out of the confines
of the traditional recording studio.
Goodman, seated, oversees engineers
from Vintage King setting up computers
and software in the studio.

R

oger Good man would not have
chucked his life in L.A. if he didn’t
have faith in the musical eminence
of the Motor City.
Since he opened Royal House Recording
in Royal Oak in 2016, the 36-year-old
Bloomfield Hills native has been produc-
ing local talent, including Detroit female
rapper Dej Loaf, and is on the lookout
for artists who might usher in a Motown
revival. Goodman wants to help them
record high-quality work at a lower cost
than they’d find on either coast.
Goodman’s got the bona fides: He put in
15 years as a sound engineer and producer
in Los Angeles, running his own studio
for eight years. He worked with rap per-
formers like Lupe Fiasco (with whom he
worked on a Grammy-nominated record-
ing), rap/crooner Chris Brown and Lil
Dicky, a profane but witty Jewish rapper
from the suburbs of Philadelphia.
Established performers like R. Kelly and
rising rap stars like Lil Yachty and Post

Malone have laid down beats at Royal
House, a Victor Saroki-designed modern-
ist building that occupies a former street
cleaner maintenance and repair shop in a
semi-industrial block in the northeast part
of Royal Oak.
Since he opened, Goodman says, the
studio’s been booked solid. Still, he finds
time for goodwill work, like helping to
produce a Purim-themed song for Temple
Israel, his spiritual home. He had his bar
mitzvah there and went on a teen mission
to Israel through the temple. Goodman
recently returned from a trip to Israel with
Friends of Israel Defense Forces. A chet yud
(“chai”) tattoo on one hand and a Jewish
star on the other — both remnants of his
early 20s — announce his Jewish pride.
The son of Gary and Enid Goodman
of Bloomfield Hills found his redemp-
tion from a rather fast life with Beit
T’Shuvah, a faith-based residential treat-
ment center in L.A. that helps kids 13 to
18 recover from substance abuse through

Jewish prayer, thought and meditation.
Goodman learned with rabbis there and
volunteered by talking to private school
Jewish kids about real-world issues from a
Jewish perspective.
“I’m covered in tattoos, from the neck
down,” he says, on this day covered up
with a track suit. “These kids saw me and
knew I wasn’t a square.”
Beit T’Shuvah was a milestone in
Goodman’s zig-zaggedy life path. For high
school, he left Michigan for a boarding
school in New Hampshire (to get out of the
“bubble” of his hometown, he says), did a
stint in the family steel business, studied at
UCLA for a short time, and then enrolled at
the Los Angeles Recording School, where he
learned music production. He’d already been
writing music on his computer, and that’s
what he really wanted to do.
“I got a bit of a late jump. Then it was
full force,” Goodman says.
Leaving L.A., building Royal House
— and getting married two years ago

jn

June 8 • 2017

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