UPDATE August 23, 2016: Congratulations to The Chainsmokers for reaching #1 on the Billboard Hot 100!
We recently had a chance to sit down for an exclusive interview with DJ duo Andrew Taggart and Alex Pall, aka The Chainsmokers at Adorama Live Theater in New York City. They were fresh from their first appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon where they performed their latest hit “Roses,” a collaboration with Rozes that reached #1 on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic Chart.
You are an LA-based band, but you wrote a song, “New York City,” about your time here. Can you tell us about how the music scene in NY inspired you?
Alex: We got the song, the topline for New York City, a long time ago, like a year ago, or easily over a year ago, and it was just one of the better toplines we’ve done, and we’ve always connected to New York City, but I remember we like we made…(to Andrew) what how many versions did you end up making of the song?
Andrew: Over 10…
Alex: Yeah, easily, and then it crashed (laughs)
Andrew: Then we made a couple more. We were trying to make it super ominous, but also create a build up and make it awesome when it drops… It just took forever and so many tries.
Alex: It’s tough because you want to make it an iconic song for the city and stuff, but I think it turned out great. Everyone really liked it. It’s been gaining more and more popularity in our sets. It was cool, we played New Year’s Eve, you know, to play a song like that, that is your own, instead of playing like Empire State of Mind, or something like that…
Roses has been named one No.1 on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic Tracks, how did your collaboration with Rozes come about?
Andrew: Alex found Rozes on Hype Machine, she had another song called “Limelight” that we thought was really dope, so we called her up and she came to our apartment. We had sent her some demos, and she wrote the first verse of Roses to a completely different beat and different key, and I had made a beat for Roses and I said, hey let’s change the melody…then I wrote the hook and we both sang that together and recorded the whole thing and produced the whole track in, like, one session.
Can you tell us about the first time you DJ’d together and what advice you would give to your younger selves?
Andrew: The first show we ever did was opening for Timeflies at a sold out Terminal 5, and it was really dope. I didn’t even really know how to DJ, Alex showed me like an hour before.
Alex: Yeah, 5 bootlegs or so, it was like 15 minutes. So we only needed to string together, like, 3 songs.
Andrew: The day after that we opened for DJ Sinatra at WIP, for like 4 people.
Alex: It was the night after Drake and Chris Brown got into a fight so the club got raided before our set, so we didn’t even really have to DJ, it was the most bizarre sequence of events that would lead to where we are now. But that was cool. I mean it was a sold out Terminal 5 show. Everyone was there for Terminal 5, nobody was there for us, they were there for Timeflies, but it gave us a good taste of what we wanted to accomplish.
You have joined other pioneers (Foo Fighters, G-Eazy) of the crowd-sourced music tour with your Tilt Tour, which allowed fans to determine dates and locations of performances. Can you tell us what turned you on to this idea, and do you think other popular acts are ready to follow suit? Is this the future of music tours?
Alex: CAA works closely with a lot of those tech companies and start-ups, and this is one of the better ones. And obviously they’ve done some stuff with Foo Fighters and G-Eazy in the past and we thought it would be a great way for us– I mean we had just done this huge American tour–to find out what cities, you know, wanted us to come there. You get so much data from it because it’s basically crowd-sourced shows, so we go wherever people want us the most.
Who would some of your dream collaborators be on your next album or tour?
Andrew: I thought of a good answer to this question the other day. We usually say Blink 182, but probably one of my favorite bands is Phoenix. I’d love to collaborate with them, they are so dope. Local Natives, I’m obsessed with them, too. M-83 would be sick, too.
