This past weekend Atlanta got to experience the Sam Feldt experience, complete with his two band members Tariq and Q at Opera Nightclub. Their performance was nothing short of upbeat, deeply engaging, and a total new experience for fans to be a part of. He played some of the soon-to-be-classic tracks from his latest album release like his rock, tropical house fusion, “Shot By My Own Gun” and reggae inspired collab with Shaggy, “Don’t Say a Word”. He had fans singing along to his ultimate hitmaker “Show Me Love” and kept our spirits high with his bubbly “Wishing Well”. It was a night that Atlanta fans will never forget and we can’t wait for the next time around.
Just before the show, we got to sit down with Sam to talk about his experience with the Sunrise to Sunset double album release, even more music coming our way, his cofounded Fangage project and more. Check out our interview below!
RR: So how are you doing? How has the tour been so far?
SF: Good. Just arrived in Atlanta, came from Miami. Tomorrow we’re off to Chicago. I haven’t been to Atlanta since Tomorrowworld, so I’m excited. We did New York, L.A., and a bunch of other places. It’s been cool to tour with the band, of course, to bring the live band, the live horns that we released with my albums. It’s really cool to play the tracks that we made together, live together.
RR: Do you see any differences in how you run your set between these shows and your pool parties from last year besides the setting?
SF: For me, every booking is different, you know? Festivals are different than clubs, clubs are very different to live venues. It depends on if I’m with the band or just doing a DJ set. How big is the band, because we have a guitar player joining us on some dates as well now. Really depends on the venue, the crowd, the formation. Tonight, I know I want to play my own records off the album but the rest is quite blank and open still.
RR: Since we’re near the end, what have your thought been/any special moments that come to mind?
SF: Well for me, what was very special was New York. We played the Playstation Theater, so it was kind of a wake-up call or a realization for me where I said to myself, ‘Wow, this is pretty cool’. I went from playing all these small bars in my hometown and basically asking if I could play for free and playing in front of literally nobody. And then being able to fill up a good-sized theater in New York with the band, it’s pretty sick. We have achieved something.
RR: We’re excited to see the band play, how did you, Tariq, Q, and your guitarist Jordi get together for the tour and album?
SF: It’s been expanding gradually. At first, it was just me and my tour manager Faruk touring and then Dani got added to my route as my cameraman two years ago. And then I wanted to get live a bit more, I started to gig with Justin Moore here in the states. I did Coachella with him and he played the sax. Then in Europe, I started touring with Tariq and he plays the sax as well. Then we added Q on trumpet so now we have the whole horns section. The next step was to add a guitar player, so we’ve just been expanding gradually.
RR: So how did you find them?
SF: Good question! I think it all started with Tariq and he knew Q from the conservatory where they met. Then for the guitar player, we held auditions. We invited ten guitar players to audition for us and then we met Jordi.
RR: Are you planning to make this a permanent feature in your live performances?
SF: Yeah, a hundred percent. I still want to do DJ sets, but only in clubs. So for all the festivals, we are really pushing on taking the live band, taking the live experience because that is what Sam Feldt is all about. That’s what the album is made for, what the tracks were made for, to perform them live on stage. The focus for 2018 is really on the full band.
RR: You said your Sunrise to Sunset project was a culmination of two years of tracks you had written. What was that initial kick to get not just one, but two albums put together?
SF: It was also a gradual process. I started with an EP idea of, like, six tracks. I did that with “Been a While” two years ago, and I kind of wanted to do the same thing. But then the EP grew into an LP and then the LP into an album and then a double album. I don’t know, I have just been producing so much music that I didn’t know what to do with it. I could only release a single track every three or four months. I didn’t want that music to be kept on a shelf or on my desktop. I just wanted to put it where it belongs, with my fans. That’s why I’m doing the album now.
RR: That’s amazing how you have all this inspiration and can make such a large discography and such a short amount of time.
SF: Yeah, it’s just a like a process. It started around two years ago but I didn’t even know it was going to be an album yet. It was just me making tracks and then tracks began to stack up and stack up. And after a while, you’re like, ‘Wow, this could really be a meaningful album’, and then you decide to push it out.
RR: Was the plan always to have a surprise second album for fans? Was that always an idea you had when you started out that you wanted to give fans?
SF: Yeah. Well, when you have 24 tracks it’s very hard to make sure every track gets the attention it deserves. So we were brainstorming ideas of how to make that happen and one way to do it is have a full focus on the first 12 tracks for a couple months and then don’t even talk about the next 12 because if you talk about 24 tracks from the very start, people are going to get confused. They won’t know what track to listen to, it’s too much. So when you have two to three months of marketing around the first part and then all of a sudden after that album has been out for a month or so, you release the second part. Then you have a new story. Then it will get the attention it deserves, so it’s a bit of a marketing technique.
RR: This project is all about variety and it’s amazing what you have done with it. What do you think you have taken away from all of this exploring with other genres?
SF: How broad Sam Feldt music really is or can be. I’ve always wanted to stretch the genre, my brand. You know “Shove Me Love” was 115 bpm, “What About the Love” was 128. Then the song with Akon, “Yes” is 190 bpm. So some DJ’s and producers are limited to what they can make and what they can get away with. So, for example, a DJ could always be making club music and then tries to make a tropical house song. But then everyone just bashes him because they’re like where is the old this and that. For me, my fans have always been really open and open-minded about music and genres. I just wanted to test it out and see if how far I could go. I think it made it very interesting in the end.
RR: Do you see your sound possibly going in a new, inspirational direction?
SF: I don’t know, I think right now there is a big void with club music. Like a lot of the club DJ’s and festival DJ’s started to make Spotify music over the past two years. They wanted to have a radio single. I’ve always been very Spotify/radio-minded, so now for me, it’s the other way around. It’s kind of a little bit hard for me to find out what I play in my DJ sets. So I think for 2018, I’m going to be focusing on EP’s. So one EP could be ‘Summer in Mexico’, and it could contain four tracks that are very Mexican inspired and Mexican producers get involved. So it’s going to be something like that. So it’s going to be more like a story, that you might know from my mixtapes as well. It’s like a journey through music instead of just track, track, track, track. I want to take that and put it on my release schedule. It’s not concrete yet, but we’ll figure it out.
RR: So that goes into my next question. You have mentioned you plan on releasing even more music relatively soon. Do you think you are going to focus more on tight knit EP projects or also release some singles here and there as well?
SF: Yeah, I think in order to give the EP’s the attention that they need, we need to make sure they each have a strong title track. So what we can do is look at three or four singles, put those singles towards the EP. Put out the singles and with the singles push out the EP. That’s kind of how I’ve always done it for a while. Putting out a strong single with a video and then it kind of takes the other tracks by the hand and pulls it up.
RR: What artists would you like to try to collab with in the future? Vocalists, musicians, producers?
SF: I have this big list of artists in every genre. It is very broad. It goes from John Mayer, to Akon which came about. I love the guys from Arizona, so I’m working on a track with them as well. It’s very broad. I’ve recently been sent a top line from Chris Brown and I don’t know if I’m going to do it yet. There are a lot of cool artists in a lot of different genres that I’d love to see and work with. Check out how the combination with that artist, genre, and Sam Feldt could be.
It’s always a challenge. For example, on the first album I collabed with The Federal Empire, they’re kind of a country rock band, on “Shot With My Own Gun”. It’s very interesting, because you know, it’s not a usual combination between this rock band and a tropical house artist. How would that track turn out? That’s how I challenge myself and also challenge Sam Feldt to be as innovative and unique as he can be.
I think that you could put me in the studio with a very logical combination like Oliver Heldens or Kygo. It’s cool, it would make a hell of a hit, but it would make a very predictable one as well. If you were to mention it, you can already start to hear it in your head. If you say Sam Feldt and The Federal Empire, you have no idea what that will be. So that’s what I’m trying to aim for.
RR: How has your project Fangage grown over the past year?
SF: Very rapidly. I launched my first Fangage portal, Heartfeldt.me, about a year ago. So in one year, we signed up 20 other DJ’s and clients. We’ve made our first steps into fitness as well. So it’s really cool. I found that my social numbers were growing but my reach was declining. So I saw over a million fans but I wasn’t reaching those people through Facebook or Instagram. These algorithms will kind of suck nowadays. So I had to go and pay all these platforms in order to reach all these fans that already wanted to hear from me. They already pressed the button and said, ‘I want to hear my Sam Feldt’. Then I had to go pay Facebook to reach those people, it was a bit weird for me. So, I said to myself that I have to take control of that fan base and be sure to reach them directly.
Fangage is basically trading content for information. So I give free stuff for my fans, they give me their phone number so I can reach them when I want them to hear from me. They get free stuff, so it’s kind of a fair win-win.
RR: What has the reaction/reach of this platform been with both producers and fans?
SF: The fans have been very responsive to it. Also with the demo drop, a lot of producers signed up and showed me their demo for Heartfeldt radio. Also, for example, with the show in Atlanta, I can send a text message to those located here so they don’s miss out on the show. For fans, it makes sense to be informed because they want to be informed. If I release an album and they don’t hear from me, they’re kind of sad. I’ve seen that a couple times, where they have missed shows or releases because they didn’t see the Facebook posts. I can now work around that.
With other DJ’s, it was very slow at first. Getting our first client after myself was Oliver Heldens, and that took around two or three months to sign him up, explain the story, why it was necessary to start using it. Then it was like a snowball. Once Oliver signed up, four others came and then eight others came. It was like a snowball that started rolling and now it kind of doesn’t need an explanation anymore. Now we can go into a management office that we want to set up Fangage for and they already know what it does.
RR: That’s awesome! New Years is approaching, besides making new music, do you have any resolutions for 2018?
SF: Good question. On the music side, just on the album itself, I’ve just done 24 tracks. I want to focus on maybe producing a bit less and producing more quality over quantity. It’s kind of a luxury position to be in, having so many tracks. But, also, it’s kind of hard position because releasing that many tracks take a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of effort, stress from all these people involved. It’s been a very cool project but for next year, I want to focus on a few, very good tracks that really make waves on the radio.
We thank Sam Feldt for taking the time to answer our questions and the band for throwing down an awesome show in Atlanta. Check out Sunrise to Sunset on Spotify and Soundcloud now.
Connect with Sam Feldt:
https://www.facebook.com/officialsamfeldt
https://twitter.com/samfeldtmusic
https://soundcloud.com/samfeldt
https://www.instagram.com/samfeldtmusic
http://www.samfeldt.com
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