Dance music’s super-producer on crafting a funky new recipe and why laptop producers should learn to DJ
It’s a fall afternoon in Paris, and David Guetta’s voice hovers right about there, smack in the middle between free-flowing exhilaration and utter panic. “Oh, my god! My head is spinning,” says the DJ/producer. His new single, “Dangerous,” was released earlier that day, and with its twinkling piano, down-tempo beat and funky, Chic-style guitar riff it’s a vast departure from anything the 47-year-old global dance-music icon has ever released. “I’m super anxious,” he says, and you can feel that deep, French-brewed, you’re-better-than-this self-motivation struggling to wash over him.
Wildly successful and widely considered one of—if not the—world’s quintessential DJs—a private-jet flying, continent-hopping symbol of fame and all that commercialism can offer; a long-haired, perpetually-smiling pop music producer who more or less single-handedly brought throbbing house music from dark, dank warehouses parties to American radio—David Guetta typically gives off an air of confidence, a sense of purpose. Right now however, he can’t help but worry that on some level he might be making a mistake: “It’s a big risk I took by doing something so different from anything I’ve done before.”
He’s talking about Listen. It’s his new album, out on November 24th. And where its predecessors bent the radio over with a mountain of electro throb and seemingly every big-name pop-star collaborator he could wrangle, his latest work, with its emphasis on live instrumentation, classic songwriting and rock-centric riffs and rhythms, is a dive into the unknown. Sure, there’s an electric current running through it all. And yes, it does feature some tried-and-true pop stars, like Nicki Minaj and Sia, both with whom Guetta has already created chart-topping magic. But now the DJ is flexing his emo-muscle: he’s partnered with previously unimaginable collaborators, like U.K. singer Birdy, all genteel precision and adolescent grace, on “I’ll Keep Loving You”; chick-rock Irish kings The Script on “Goodbye Friend”; and even Ladysmith Black Mambazo—the same South African mbube choral crew featured on Paul Simon’s Graceland—backing up pop newcomers Nico and Vinz on “Lift me Up.”
To hear Guetta tell it, he’s done doing safe. He could set it on autopilot and crank out some more of that automatic-grade, primed-for-success, urban-dance-pop radio fare. But, he concedes, “after awhile doing those production tricks can feel a little bit like a recipe.”
He’s on a different level now. His new creations, he says, featuring live piano and a full orchestra, “almost sounds like classical music.”
“I know it’s going to shock some of my fans,” he continues. “But I think it’s good! I think the point of coming out with a new album is to have something new to say. Otherwise, stay quiet.”
It’s hardly in the disposition of a contemporary DJ like David Guetta to stay silent. Guys like him are in-your-face. They’re hard to ignore. From festivals to bougey bottle-service clubs to the long-since-infiltrated mainstream radio, DJ/producers like Guetta, Calvin Harris, Avicii and Tiësto are everywhere. Many believe it was Guetta who started this whole electronic dance music craze, popularly abbreviated as “EDM.”
“That was the moment,” Guetta says, and he doesn’t need to elaborate for us to know he’s referring to his mid-2009 partnership with the Black Eyed Peas on the endorphin-pumping, since-inescapable hit-single-cum-wedding-and-Bar-Mitzvah anthem “I Gotta Feeling.” It was the direct result of Peas’ frontman Will.i.am joining Guetta in the booth one night at the DJ’s legendary Fuck Me I’m Famous dance party he holds every summer week in Ibiza. The twosome later powwowed to cook up game-changing tracks like “Feeling” and “Boom Boom Pow” for the BEP’s album The E.N.D. The results were commercially successful if not supremely consequential.
The combination of house music’s unrelenting rhythm and pop’s melodic hooks did nothing if not change the entire landscape of contemporary music.
“It was feeling like the promised land,” Guetta recalls of the early U.S. shows following his pop ascension. He’d already been selling out stadiums overseas, but it was a different story in America. “We were going there and people were so excited about it! Because they were not spoiled yet!”
Unlike many European producer/DJs before him, Guetta’s juicy beats and melodic hooks were able to draw the interest of both the hardcore electronic-music audience and the mainstream pop worlds.
“There’s only a handful of guys in the world [that can do that],” says Sean Christie, managing partner of Encore Beach Club at Wynn Las Vegas, where Guetta has a multi-million dollar residency through next summer and will perform over 20 times in the next 12 months. “Otherwise we wouldn’t pay these types of fees.”
Christie is referring to the several-hundred-thousand dollar paydays top guys like Guetta now command for each club performance. It’s a point of contention among outsiders. Though, as Christie will tell you, Guetta, who has the highest revenue-generation of any DJ performing at Encore Beach Club, earns his keep: “Any time that a guy can come to a venue like Encore Beach Club and sell it out every time he walks in the door... he’s worth the money.”
Guetta’s pop-crossover formula has been repeated ad nauseam in the years since his stateside arrival. But where others in his position might have hostility towards the copycats, Guetta views himself as still leading an underground revolution. “OK, maybe I did pave the way when it comes to crossing over,” Guetta concedes when pressed on the topic. “But all the DJs before that who were playing more underground music, they paved the way for me too.
“And that’s completely OK,” he adds. “Everybody brings a little stone to create the big house. And that’s great. I come from a background where we were really struggling to get the respect and the recognition for our music. So the more [of us there] are… the stronger we are looking, you know? I can’t be there on my own and say ‘There is this huge movement.’ Because then it doesn’t mean anything. But when there’s a lot of us then people say, Wow, this is big!”
“Everyone [in the DJ world] is so quick to rip each other off,” admits Mike Caren, President of A&R for Warner Music Group, who worked with Guetta on nearly every song for Listen and previously collaborated with him on Nothing But The Beat hits including “Titanium” and “Where Them Girls At. “So it really takes a whole other effort to create real songs that can separate themselves.”
That’s why several decades removed from his time as a young Parisian teenager who dreamed of being a DJ and mined the gay clubs for a new electronic sound, Guetta was so adamant this go-round on sonically moving forward. Unlike many of his peers however, who graduate from beat production to headlining festivals, Guetta is adamant that the physical act of DJ’ing—more than any amount of glossy production or radio hits—is paramount to retaining his musical dignity.
“I don’t think everybody feels like this,” he concedes. “I’m a little bit old-school when it comes to that. A lot of kids they start by making beats on the laptop, they make a hit record and then they learn how to DJ in front of 10,000 people. It’s kind of strange. But it is what it is.”
“They’re very talented producers,” Guetta continues, “and after awhile they can also DJ. But to me what makes me want to make music is to DJ.”
Guetta had barely finished promotion for Nothing But The Beat, and yet he couldn’t stop himself from looking ahead to his next project.
“When I first started I had no idea what I wanted,” he says of an entire year spent crate digging for new material. “So I listened to everything: pop records, rock records, pure-EDM records, hip-hop records. I was trying to find my sound again. Starting from scratch, creating new sound banks. It was a lot of work.”
Given his transcontinental work schedule, much of this sonic excavating was done remotely—in a plane, a hotel room, occasionally at his studio in France. He’d send ideas back and forth between his collaborators, open to criticism and insight. “He’s an opinionated guy,” says Caren, who recalls this album-assembly time resembling “a musical game of telephone. He’s decisive but he’s also open-minded.”
Guetta knew he wanted to test himself this go-round: he shied away from his familiar mechanized aesthetic, and even starting contributing lyrical ideas for the first time in his career. “I can only speak for myself,” he says, “but I know Avicii feels the same way: we start by making beats just to make the people dance, but then we want to add emotion and we want real songs and real melodies.”
It’s this desire to evolve, says Craig Kallman, COO for Atlantic Records and founder of Big Beat Records, on which Guetta is releasing his new album, which he believes has aided in EDM’s explosion. “No one could have predicted it to be as big as it has become,” he explains. “But I think what was obvious though was the amount of musical innovation that kept happening from the creative community in dance music. It’s why it has continued to flourish while other genres maybe have not had the same kind of mass appeal.”
To that end, principal to his vision for Listen, Guetta says, was expanding his repertoire of collaborators. Rather than enlisting Akon, Flo Rida or any of his usual army of urban cohorts—“If I were to collaborate with urban artists that’s easy because I’ve done that before”—he instead sought out precise, emotion-driven vocalists, like U.K. singer Emeli Sandé, for the slow-building and soaring ballad “What I Did For Love,” and John Legend, who with his brilliant vocal on the title track, a heartfelt, chills-inducing, piano-anchored stunner, may have given the DJ the most honest, impressive song of his career.
“I had to make them feel safe,” Guetta says of working with a new batch of artists that also included OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder and Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger, co-writer of Avicii’s “Wake Me Up.” “That was not easy. Because every time I start a new song and I collaborate with artists I have to prove myself. If you work with an indie artist, for example, it’s a completely different game. They’re like, Really? You want to work with me?”
“The whole EDM world, it’s sort of alien to me. But there was just so much enthusiasm,” Einziger says recalling when he linked up with Guetta in a London studio earlier this year to work on the eventual Listen lead single “Lovers on the Sun.” “It’s easy for musicians to get jaded, especially after having lots of success. But it was really fun. There was that feeling like we were unwrapping a new present.”
A few weeks after he released “Dangerous,” David Guetta sat in a room flanked by a collection of diehard fans at a local Chicago radio station. He answered some questions about his new album; it was all rather run-of-the-mill, procedural promotion. But something changed when he cued up a few of his new songs: suddenly, as if switching his brain into a different mode, Guetta’s gaze became entirely serious. There he was, the worldwide superstar DJ, intensely scanning the crowd of the dozen or so fans, watching their every move.
In that moment I was reminded of what he’d told me a few weeks earlier. That for all his massive success, what still makes David Guetta happiest at the end of the day is the physical act of DJ’ing.
“The biggest happiness I can have is my life is when I play one of my records for the first time and I look at the crowd and I read them.” Guetta says. “And I’m like, ‘Wow. This is gonna work!’ It makes my heart beat.”
David Guetta photos by Danny Mahoney / DMahoneyPhoto
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