You premiered your new song ‘Fade Away’ with Lush & Simon and singer INNA on your radio show Heartfeldt Radio recently, how did it come about to make this track together? How do collaborations usually come about?
For this collaboration specifically, it as Lush & Simon who initially sent me the basic idea of an instrumental, which is the guitar part of the song actually, then I just got cracking with it and made the drop. I thought “Cool, we need a good vocal now” and wrote it together with Leon, a good friend of mine from the Netherlands. Then we thought “Now we need a good vocalist” and it had always been a dream of mine to work with INNA, she has a lot of of hits and a great summer style that I thought would match perfectly with my style of music. So yeah, I reached out to her and she was really happy to sing it for us but a collaboration could come about in a lot of different ways. Hook & Sling worked with me on my latest single, it was a lot different because the vocals were already there. Also because there’s a bigger distance between me and Hook & Sling in logistical terms. He lives in L.A., I live in Amsterdam so we work digitally together so yeah, they could come about a lot of different ways.
Do you usually lay out the track first and then try to find people that fit that sound or have you reversed engineered the process?
It really depends, right now I’m working with vocals because then you know you have a really strong acapella to start off with. I’ve done it the other way around, like making the instrumental first like in Fade Away for example, but then you could have 30 people writing on it and only one comes out good. It’s a lot of waste of time for some different parties involved but if you start of with a really strong vocal, then usually the process of creating the track is a lot shorter. So it would be definitely be faster to complete a track that way. Yeah, if you start off with a strong vocal it’s
easier to build a great track around that but you could also create a really good track and then find a vocal that is just as good or even better than that.
Sometimes it could be a hit or a miss, sometimes you have 30 misses but then you get the one hit. That’s how it all starts. Speaking of vocals, you actually include a lot of live elements in your performance. You bring out singers sometimes but more recently, you’ve brought in saxophone players. Should DJs and artists start incorporating live music more into their performances than focusing stage production?
Well, I think both are important. I started the Sam Feldt Live Band a year ago, so right now we have a trumpet, a saxophone players, me playing live and we’ll be adding a guitar by the end of the year for the album tour. Ultimately, both are important...My background is also in graphic design so I will not argue that visuals aren’t important. Stage design, special effects...but everyone can do that though. Anybody could put up a big amount of money and hire a graphic designer to make cool visuals or pay a lot in production and get flames the entire set. It’s a matter of money. The bigger the artist, the bigger the production is going to be. I think for smaller artists, up and coming ones, placing live elements or playing live yourself can really make a huge difference in terms of energy in your set, in terms on uniqueness and taking it to the next level.
I also think in general at festivals, people are getting tired of seeing a DJ walk on and off the stage, it’s happening over and over again and I think once you bring live elements it becomes more of an act than just the DJ. They are looking for an experience and want to be like “wow” from start to end. You’re doing your tour right now but do you have any projects coming out soon?
So I released my track with INNA, I released a track with Akon who is a really big American Hip Hop/ R&B artist which is something new for me so it’s going to be interesting to work with these kinds of vocals and still keep it “Sam Feldt”. I think we managed to do that and I think it’ll be a big hit. These two songs are going to be on my new album which is dropping in October with a lot of exclusive new Sam Feldt music so that’s
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