The English producer on the happy accidents behind his biggest records, and why a Las Vegas dance floor is his laboratory.
BURNS doesn’t like to force things. The English producer and DJ has built a career on putting artists side by side who would never meet on paper, then getting out of the way. He calls it “pushing the envelope a little bit.” His new single, “Energy,” is the latest example.
The song pairs A$AP Rocky, singing rather than rapping, with the R&B singer Sabrina Claudio over a warm, unhurried groove that borrows from house and soul in equal measure. It came out in late April and passed a million plays within weeks. BURNS describes it as one of the most organic records he has ever made, and he is quick to hand out the credit. “It’s a credit to both of those guys for being able to sort of adapt themselves over something like that,” he says.
For someone whose credits run from Britney Spears to Rae Sremmurd, and who holds down a residency at OMNIA in Caesars Palace, he’s easy company. He laughs a lot, and he remembers exactly how each record came together.
The story of “Energy” sounds almost too tidy. Claudio was the first name on his list. “I was a fan of hers from way back when she put out her first stuff,” he says. He played the instrumental to a friend, the mix engineer Jason Joshua, who later found himself in a session with Claudio and played it for her without telling anyone. “I didn’t even know he was going to be playing it for her,” BURNS says. “Apparently she just fell in love with it instantly and wrote to it.”
She worked fast. “Sabrina’s part was done within a day of her hearing the instrumental,” he says, with the tone of someone who knows how unlikely that sounds.
Rocky arrived in much the same way. BURNS had sent him a batch of records to see whether he liked the direction of the project. “He just jumped on it,” he says. “It was a really organic song, in the end, just sort of falling together.”
He has done this before. Last year’s “Hands On Me” put the Colombian star Maluma on a record with Rae Sremmurd. “Maluma and Rae Sremmurd was a weird combo when you look at it on paper but it worked perfectly,” he says. That’s the idea behind his solo project: to bring together artists “that you wouldn’t normally see on the same record and pull them away from what they’re typically known for doing.”
Home is Los Angeles, where BURNS settled a few years ago. Work is often a four-hour drive away in Las Vegas, where his residency doubles as a research lab. Dance music, he says, can get stuck in a bracket, a “typical commercial, brash sounding sound” that flattens a night. So he treats his sets as experiments.
I use Vegas as a learning thing for myself. I can bring what I learn there into the studio.
“With Vegas, you just have to be able to integrate the sound that people are familiar with but also integrate it with new sounds,” he says. “I use Vegas as a learning thing for myself. I can bring what I learn there into the studio. So if I’m making a record I can see what is going to make people move because I can test stuff when I play.”
He is careful not to oversell it. “By all means,” he laughs, “I’m not playing some avant-garde DJ set.”
The harder skill, he admits, is stopping. “When you’re in this business it’s very easy to never shut off,” he says. “It’s not like a 9-5 job where you leave work in the evening and forget about work until you got back in again.”
So he keeps a few rituals that have nothing to do with music. He paints. And every morning, he walks his dog. “You need those things to just take your mind away.”
Ask him to dream up the ultimate Vegas show, though, and he has ideas. “I’m all up for some Criss Angel, floating over the top of the set,” he says. Then he would call in the city’s legends. “Bring everybody out! All the Vegas legends. Celine Dion, Rod Stewart, Elton John, they’re all in Vegas.”
“I’ve got to make that happen,” he says. “I’ve got to be the first one with flying Criss Angel.” For a producer who lets nearly everything else fall into place on its own, it may be the one plan he intends to see through.
Words by Sam Farrell. Images courtesy of BURNS.
