Has EDM gone country? Fans are finding common ground
Recent music collaborations seem to have struck a chord with electric dance crowds
Maybe it’s that country and electronic dance music (EDM) are both, at their core, dance-oriented styles of music. Maybe there’s something exotic in the Southern twang of a country singer showing up on a dance record. For whatever reason, more and more EDM dance DJs and producers have been bringing in country singers as featured vocalists on their recordings lately.
“There’s this emotion in country music that’s special,” says Audien, who recently released “Something Better” with country trio Lady Antebellum.
“If you’re able to capture that and implement it into dance music, you get the energy of dance music but the emotion of country music. It makes a really cool combination.”
We took a look at some of the recent country and EDM pairings. Audien & Lady Antebellum, Something Better
Audien’s Nate Rathbun felt like a kid in a candy store when he heard the members of Lady Antebellum singing his song. Literally. “When I was really young, I worked in a candy store and their music would constantly come on the radio in the store,” says Rathbun, who grew up in Connecticut. “I grew up with ‘Need You Now’ and all those really big hits, because that’s what they played in there.”
The collaboration isn’t Lady A’s first foray into EDM. The group covered Avicii and Aloe Blacc’s “Wake Me Up” on its last tour and performed with Zedd at June’s CMT Music Awards.
“When people come to the country format looking for collaborations, it gets me all excited,” says Lady Antebellum member Dave Haywood. The trio recently posted a video of a backstage performance of “Something Better” and have discussed adding it to their set.
“If it really does take off and ends up being a big dance track, absolutely we’ll add it in,” Haywood says. Owl City & Jake Owen, Back Home When Adam Young, who performs under the name Owl City, wrote this small-town ode for his Mobile Orchestra album, he knew he was venturing into country terrain. “I started to play the opening riff on acoustic guitar and thought I could add some handclaps, maybe a little slide guitar and give it a swing I had never really done before,” Young says.
Young, who had a hit with “Fireflies,” approached Owen, who immediately heard a kinship between “Back Home” and the songs he was writing, such as current single “Real Life.” “It really relates to a lot of this music I’m making right now about the things I grew up with,” he says.
Owen felt the song so closely matched his own musical vision that he briefly considered asking Young to help produce his new album, “because it doesn’t sound pop. It sounds like he took a guy that sings in our country format and made it part of his record, to sound kind of country.” Gazzo & Chase Rice, Sun Turns Cold
“I’m all about meshing new genres together,” says Los Angeles DJ Mike Gazzo. “It’s what makes producing interesting.” He reached out to Rice, who had a million-selling single last year with “Ready Set Roll,” even though the two had never met.
“Not only is he extremely talented, but having that little taste of the country, the grit of that country sing- er, added this entire element to the track,” Gazzo says.
Rice says he knows his fans listen to music other than country. An EDM track “is not an obvious place my fans would expect me to be, so it helps me continue to evolve their musical experience,” he says.
The two still haven’t met, though Gazzo says, “We’ve been trying to plan a Skype call. We’ve also been planning on doing some sort of acoustic video, if we can make the moons align.” Avicii & Zac Brown Band, Broken Arrows
Swedish DJ Avicii, who had blue- grass singer Dan Tyminski as featured vocalist on last year’s top-10 hit “Hey Brother,” previewed this track with the Zac Brown Band on his LE7ELS podcast in June, saying of Brown, “He’s an amazing singer and has a really unique voice.”
“Broken Arrows” will appear on Avicii’s forthcoming album, Stories, set for a September release.
“Avicii has an incredible mixture of organic and electronic music together,” Brown recently told Country Weekly. “And when was the last time you were in a nightclub and heard a song that didn’t have those elements in it? If you want to climb into an arena with those things, the songs need that kind of accompaniment.” Lost Frequencies & Easton Corbin, Are You With Me
Belgian DJ Lost Frequencies did basically the same thing for “Are You With Me,” a track from Easton Corbin’s 2012 debut album, that Felix Jaehn did for Jamaican singer OMI and “Cheerleader”: He sped up the original, transformed it into a dance track and made it an international smash. There was just one major difference: Lost Frequencies replaced Corbin’s vocal. The revamped “Are You With Me” has been a major hit in more than a dozen countries, including Australia, Belgium and Norway, becoming so popular that Corbin added his 2012 version to his recently released About to Get Real album. Even though Lost Frequencies took him off the remix, Corbin says, “He did a great job and I’m glad it’s doing well.”