THE TRACK: Jonas Blue, Perfect

Strangers. The Dance producer breaks down the follow-up to his big hit Fast Car

Virgin EMI Records, 2016

Jonas Blue burst into the public consciousness in 2015 with a Tropical House cover of Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car with singer Dakota, which swiftly became an enormous mainstream success and established Jonas – real name Guy Robin – as one of the biggest new names in commercial Dance music. We caught up with Guy in his Ilford studio to find out how he created the follow-up, Perfect Strangers featuring vocalist JP Cooper.

There must have been quite a bit of pressure to follow up the enormous success of Fast Car with something equally massive?

“Kind of… The problem was there really wasn’t much time to be worried about it!” he laughs. “I finished Fast Car, it blew up, and the record label and my management basically said, ‘What’s next?’. I was like, ‘Let’s just make some music’. I didn’t really think, ‘Fuck, Fast Car has done this and I’m never going to be able to match it’. It was just a case of carry on, make something that feels good, and hopefully other people will think that it feels good as well!”

Fast Car was obviously a cover version, but the follow-up, Perfect Strangers, is an original piece. How did the composition process work?

“I always start at the piano because I’m a piano player, and I started with the initial riff, the marimba. I just had that on loop and bounced it, and that was pretty much it for a few weeks. We left it there as it felt amazing – it really stuck in our heads. I got a rough instrumental done, and then I went on the road and I started touring so I didn’t have a chance to write anything to it.

“My manager happened to go into Island Records for something completely different, nothing to do with me, and ended up playing them the instrumental. Island suggested JP Cooper who I already knew from the London acoustic scene – he has this amazing voice and he’s just so talented. I was on the road, and got

sent this really rough demo of a chorus and a first verse. It was amazing but wasn’t quite there, and when I got back off the road we jumped on FaceTime and we wrapped it up within a couple of days. It was JP, a co-writer called Alex Smith and myself. Alex can engineer as well so he was recording the vocals. I’m quite picky about that stuff so I was on FaceTime the whole time; they were bouncing and sending it over and it sounded great. I worked on it myself for a few weeks after that here, and I was really happy with how it came out.”

Do you make the short radio or the longer club versions of your tracks first?

“I started off originally making soulful House, under my real name Guy Robin, and I was signed to Defected so I was making songs which were seven or eight minutes long. I decided to stop that for a while and make Pop music, because I’d always been into it, and I got into the whole two and a half, three minute vibe. I’ve never left it, and that’s how I make all my songs now – I start out with the radio version first, because I feel, if I nail it in that, stretching it out is not going to be hard.

“The beat and the bass drove Perfect Strangers, so I knew I’d have a perfect intro and outro with that, especially with the

“I finished Fast Car, it blew up, and the record label and my management said ‘What’s next?’. I was like, ‘Let’s just make some music’. I didn’t really think, ‘Fuck,

Fast Car has done this and I’m never going to be able to match it’. It was just a case of carry on, and make something that feels good.”