We aren’t shy about our love for Calvin Harris around here, and his new album, Ready for the Weekend has only made us more effusive. On the phone today, Calvin spoke to us about what to expect on this week’s DJ tour. To win tickets to his LA show, follow the link at the end of this post.
“I play dance music,” Harris says of his DJ sets. “A lot of people expect to hear an eclectic mix, like my music. I like to play pretty straightforward dance music… sometimes noisy, sometimes disco-y. I think this time I’m going to play a little more disco-y. I think last time I played a little too noisy and a little too scary. It’s quite good not to scare people, not to scare the girls away.”
There is nothing scary about his own material, in fact, it’s an invitation to the dancefloor like none other. If you follow Calvin on Twitter, you know that he’s a little obsessed with making sure his audiences “go off.” The lead single, “I’m Not Alone,” does just that. It was deemed the anthem of Winter Music Conference this past March and definitely sets the tone for the album.
“I made ‘I’m Not Alone’ quite a long time ago and I realized that should be the nucleus of every other track, not that every other track would be a shit-er version of that track, but that it would be like the acorn from which many different branches of song would come from.”
Those branches, err songs, include the second single, “Ready For The Weekend,” a track which Harris calls one of his favorites, partly for it’s complexity. “It was a real foray into different territory,” he says. “It was a big mixing job. So many tracks and so many things to consider.” Notably, the hook was sung by Mary Pearce – it’s the first time Harris has deployed this classic get-a-big-voiced-woman-to-sing-your-chorus technique, and the result is a total banger. The rest of the album, on tracks like “Flashback” and “Stars Come Out,” Harris is at home re-working themes of the nightclub into catchy new classics. As for how much of Ready For The Weekend you’ll hear in a DJ set, well, Harris says it’s more than before.
“I play more of my tracks now than I used to because I was having people tell me I should,” Harris explains.”It used to be really quite hard to fit in to what I was playing which was quite electronic and – compared to what I make – incredibly underground. It was kind of just striking the balance between what I really want to play and what I think is gonna go off on the poppier side of things. It’s a surprisingly hard balance to strike sometimes.”
He admits, it’s not always a smooth seque. “To be honest, usually I just bang in something that doesn’t really go well… you can get away with it a couple of times.”
We’ll have more from our talk with Calvin next week. In the meantime, go see one of his DJ sets this week around the continent. This will be your only chance for a while to see him in North America; sadly, there are no plans to bring the band over anytime soon.
09/10 – Music Hall of Williamsburg – Brooklyn, NY
09/11 – Vision Nightclub – Chicago, IL
09/12 – Vanguard – Los Angeles, CA
09/13 – Venue – Vancouver, BC
To win a pair of tickets to see Calvin at GIANT Saturdays at Vanguard in LA, send an email to us here with the correct answer to the following question:
Who did Calvin produce a pair of tracks for in 2007 before his first album was even released?
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