11

EVERYTHING THAT SHINE AIN’T ALWAYS GONNA BE GOLD

I live my life in collaboration.

The music I make, the artists I produce, the songs I remix and reimagine … it’s a collective effort.

I cannot create in a vacuum. I can only create in concert with others. We come together in partnership, hoping to find something new in the work, and when we’re with each other there’s no telling where we’ll go, which direction we’ll take. We’re like those extra balls you put into play on one of those old-school pinball machines—you know, when you collect enough points or hit the right targets in the right sequence and the game gives you a second ball, or a third, and for a quick-burst moment you’ve got multiple balls careening off the bumpers every which way. Yeah, it’s like that.… a little bit. We bounce around for a while as one, inside the same moment, until at last the moment passes and the balls drain and our turbo-turn is over.

Best way to share what I do and how I do it is to shine a light on the Dim Mak parties we used to throw in Los Angeles. It wasn’t until 2003 that I kicked things into gear at the label and started hiring a bunch of people. Before that, Dim Mak was a loose, one-man operation. I’d go from artist to artist, handshake to handshake, putting out all these different bands I loved and wanted to promote. Sometimes these artists would pop and move on to a major label, a huge career. Sometimes they’d hit and stick with me. And sometimes they’d hardly make a ripple and disappear from the scene, maybe to resurface a couple months later with a new name, a new lineup, a new sound.

It got to where I was dropping a new release every month, and even after I’d been at it a couple years I was still doing it in the same homespun way. I’d hear about a new band and I’d check them out. If I was excited by what I was hearing, if I thought I could make some noise with it, I moved on it. Wasn’t about the money for me so much as putting something out into the world that could maybe light a spark, push someone forward, make good things happen for good people.

Those first couple years at Dim Mak, the packaging was all done by hand, on the cheap, on the fly … indie all the way. I continued to feature all those little personal touches I’d layered in with my first few releases, like the Hearts and Minds quotes I’d design onto the sleeves, the colored vinyl, the attention to detail. That became our little stamp. Along the way, I learned a couple things about distribution and scale, but other than that, it’s like I was still figuring shit out as I went along.

One of the first things I figured out was that there was a tremendous benefit in showcasing new talent, same way we used to do it at the Pickle Patch and Dashain House, so I started staging these Dim Mak events, thinking this was a good way to put a lot of artists in the same room at the same time. This wasn’t a calculation so much as a revelation. I didn’t have any kind of master strategy or recipe for success. I was simply doing what I’d always done.

Remember, you can’t engineer genuine. You can only be genuine.

Our Dim Mak Tuesdays parties were simply an extension of the Fucking Awesome parties we used to throw, and the Pickle Patch shows we used to stage in Santa Barbara, only now we weren’t playing to a bunch of kids. We were playing to people in the music business, people with something to say, people with the juice to make things happen. Just like when I was back in college, there was this tremendous sense of community sprouting up around Dim Mak, this feeling that we were all in on the ground floor of something special. We were all about the new talent, and jump-starting careers, but now we were also all about making connections, and putting together like-minded souls looking to change the culture and grow their music in new ways.

At bottom, I was the same kid who collected all that vinyl, idolized all these bands, soaked in the hardcore spirit … but at the same time I guess I was evolving. I was on the constant lookout for something different, new … special. And when I thought I’d found it, I’d try to prop it up so others could see what I was seeing, hear what I was hearing.

It was in this heady environment that I first met Kanye West—in 2006. In the history of Dim Mak Records, these were still early days for us, but we’d already had a lot of big-time successes. It was almost to the point where just having the Dim Mak seal of approval was enough to put an up-and-coming artist on the radar—like a self-fulfilling prophecy, you know. And each time one of our artists hit, the rep of our little label got a little bit bigger.

Then as now, Kanye was digging into the underground scene, same as me. He was a fixture in the clubs, always had his ear to the ground, listening for the next big thing. He came to one of our parties one Tuesday and we got to talking. I remember posting a picture of the two of us on Myspace (that’s how long ago this was!), and out of that one night we formed the beginnings of a working friendship. We talked from time to time. We traded ideas. It was usually Kanye initiating these exchanges, because he was moving on a much higher plane and I didn’t want to crowd him or come across like I had my hand out, but I was always happy to hear from him—it was an honor, really. A year went by, and then another. I could go months without hearing from him, but then I’d hear from him a couple times a night and we’d be like those two runaway pinballs, bouncing in all these different directions. He would flit in and out of my life in these random ways, always with a ton of enthusiasm for whatever it was that had him reaching out to me in the first place.

That was Kanye: he was all over you, all about you … and then he’d move on to something or someone else.

Sometime after we first got together, Kanye had this tour he was mounting with Lady Gaga, and he asked me to help him create a bunch of interstitial-type music—connecting beats or hooks that might serve as bridges between songs. He seemed to want his show to be all of a piece, all the music linked in this seamless way, and he wanted me to help him create this music. I was psyched to throw down on this, but I never really had a clear idea what he was looking for, and we never really went into the studio, but we kept talking about it and talking about it.

And then, just like that, he moved on.

That’s just how it goes when you’re working with a mercurial genius. Kanye’s mind seemed to run a million miles a minute. I hadn’t heard from him for a stretch, but then one night I was on tour in England, and my phone started buzzing. I was in the car with my manager. I noticed Kanye’s name on the readout and I was like, “Holy shit! It’s Kanye West.”

I could hear in his voice that he was super-excited. He wanted me to check out these bars he was working on—couldn’t spit them out fast enough.

Now, I’d been making music for fifteen years by this point, and no one had ever called to ask me to listen to their rap—so the simple fact that he’d reached out like this was enough to get me going. Still, to this day, no one else has ever called me out of the blue to get my take. So, yeah, I was blown away a little bit. Thrown a little bit. I mean, this was Kanye West—a big, big deal. So I put him on speaker, told him I had my manager with me in the car.

And Kanye just went into it, told me to check out his flow.

It was a weird, wild moment, to be driving through England while this mad poet-genius-rapper sat in his studio half a world away, spitting these new bars by me … and wanting to hear what I thought. But Kanye was like that, I was getting. He had this ever-changing collective of five or six people in his orbit, people he wanted to work with, people who maybe inspired him in some way, and for this brief period, if you were one of those people, you’d hear from him all the time. Until he moved on to the next group of people who led him off in some new direction.

Anyway, he killed it. You could almost feel the energy-charge in his words, crackling through the speaker on my cell phone—one of those magical kick-ass moments you just know will stay with you forever. I knew this in my bones, as it was going down. But then, before I could really say anything, he had to hop off the call, and we never really followed up on this—the song he was working on, it just kind of hung there between us, unfinished, bouncing through the sound waves over the blue of the Atlantic Ocean and evaporating in the atmosphere.

Next time I heard from Kanye was after I did my remix of that NASA song I wrote about earlier. (Another shout-out to my friend Sam Spiegel, same dude who’d lent me his turntables for my first paying gig—he started NASA and asked me to remix this song they had out that just happened to feature Kanye.) Remember, that song—“Gifted”—was blowing up in the clubs, but outside of the EDM world, it wasn’t getting a whole lot of play. I was struck by the frenzy of that song, loved Kanye’s verses, so that’s why I decided to play my remix at Coachella, and it must’ve been a good call, because that was the collision of music and moment that caught that Rolling Stone photographer’s attention.

Kanye’s lyric on that one was dope:

I’m known for runnin’ my mouth

I will not be accountable for what comes out, uh …

I dunno, I might have said it

I was kinda gone and light-headed …

I sent the remix over to Kanye, and he flipped for it. He reached out after Coachella and said something like, “Holy shit, man. That’s so sick. And what’s with the motherfucking raft?”

Soon as we reconnected over this Coachella moment, I was back in Kanye’s orbit again, and we started talking more and more about making some music together. It was all very vague—but then, before we got going, he changed his whole musical direction. He basically reinvented himself—something he’s done a bunch of times throughout his career. And somewhere in that reinvention, whatever we were supposed to be working on together was lost.

Okay, so that’s the first beat to the Kanye riff I want to share. I’ll come back to him in a bit, but for now I want to splinter off and tell the Drake piece to the same story, because the one bleeds into the other. Here’s the Drake riff: it was the summer of 2009 and we were both walking in the SLS Hotel parking lot one night in Beverly Hills, chasing the same parties. He noticed me before I noticed him. He was with his crew. As I was walking, I heard, “Aoki?” I was texting on my BlackBerry (that’s how long ago this was!), so I didn’t think anything of it at first, but then I heard it again: “Aoki?” I turned, and there he was, with his manager Oliver El-Khatib and the rest of his crew. He said, “Yo, it’s Drake.”

I couldn’t fucking believe it, couldn’t believe I’d made Drake say my name twice before turning to see who it was, before he figured he should probably introduce himself. I mean, these were early days for Drake, but he was already a big deal. Everybody wanted to fuck with Drake. He was probably one of the most talked-about artists on the scene, at the front end of a white-hot moment that’s still burning for him, all these years later.

We’d never met, but of course I was psyched to see Drake, told him what a big fan I was, all of that. He had his crew with him, and we all stood around talking. We kicked around the idea of maybe finding something to work on together, and the talk seemed more genuine than the usual Mutual Admiration Society–type bullshit you sometimes hear in these encounters. And then, when it came time to part, Oliver took me aside and told me all about OVO—Drake’s record label, October’s Very Own—and filled me in on what was going down with Drake, what was coming up. He took my contact info, and told me about this song Drake was about to drop called “Forever”—said, “Maybe you could do a remix.”

I said, “Alright, sweet! I’ll do any song with Drake. Just tell me when.”

Well, when turned out to be pretty damn soon, because Drake’s team sent over the stems that week. My jaw dropped when I opened the files. That song blew up pretty much the moment it dropped—and when Drake spit the opening lines of his rap they seeped straight into the culture: “Last name Ever, first name Greatest…”

It was iconic!

The big surprise here, for me, was that Oliver hadn’t said anything about who was on that cut with Drake. Turned out “Forever” featured raps from Kanye West, Lil’ Wayne, and my favorite rapper of all time, Eminem. Holy shit! That just made the track triply iconic. Somehow, Drake had put together a lineup that was like the Dream Team! Mount Rushmore! It was the biggest remix package I’d ever opened, hands down, and I was in complete fucking heaven.

And then, when I opened Kanye’s a cappella track, I just about shit. He was spitting the same bars he’d shared over the phone with me on that transatlantic call. I played those bars and thought, I know those lyrics!

Check it:

Big fame, big chains

I stuck my dick inside this life until that bitch came

I went hard all fall like the ball teams

Just so I can make it rain all spring

That shit is hard, man. You don’t forget lines like these, even if you’re hearing them through a cell phone, on the fly. And now here I was, hearing them in this whole new context. I was struck by the way the world comes full circle, with the way all these different artists kept coming into my life. Like those crazy pinballs, set loose all at once. It got me thinking how a lot of us keep circling the same material, the same ideas. This deal with Kanye was just the example at hand, but it was a killer example: here was a lyric he’d been working on some years earlier coming back to me now with a completely different intention. But that’s how all true artists work, right? There’s no such thing as a bad idea—only an idea that isn’t fully formed, fully realized. The great ones find a way of holding on to these little half-formed snippets of art and truth and moment and finding a way to slot them in when the time is right, when the thought is finished.

Some songs, they’re like a fine wine, or a bourbon that still needs to age. Sip from that glass too soon, and you won’t taste the full effect.

Best to let it sit until the right moment—to let it breathe … until all these moving parts come together in just the right way.

Now, you’re probably wondering how that “Forever” remix turned out, and I wish I could say it was a ridiculous success, but it wasn’t like that. In fact, just being honest, it was probably one of the most mediocre remixes I’ve ever done. It was workmanlike, efficient … but that was about it. I played it for a while in my sets, because when you have this fresh cut featuring all these superstar artists, that’s what you do, but I wasn’t really feeling it. My fans weren’t really feeling it.

I don’t even listen to it anymore, that’s how mediocre I thought this track was—but that’s how the process works for me. It never even had an official release. It ended up that we gave it away for free on my blog, but I didn’t think it was strong enough to see the light of day in a full-on way. That’s how it goes sometimes—and my thing is, I try not to beat myself up about it. I tell myself, Hey, some shit works, and some shit doesn’t. The idea is to maybe learn a little something from your hits and your misses. Me, I’m constantly learning new things, trying new things, working to become a better producer, remixing so many different tracks. You take what comes your way, you take what you can from it, put your little stamp on it, and then you move on to the next one.

By this point, I’d remixed thirty, forty songs. A lot of them we never put out, and it all goes back to what I wrote earlier, about how you never know how things will play. All you can do is grab at the opportunities that come your way and try to grow from each one. If people come to what you’re doing, that’s great. (That’s the whole fucking point!) If they don’t, you try to learn from it and move on.

Each time out, I put it to the fire. Then I wait to see what happens.

That’s kind of where my head was at when I met Kid Cudi. How that came about was I was doing a tour with my friend Atrak, who had his own label, Fool’s Gold. We put together a Dim Mak/Fool’s Gold US tour that happened to feature this hot new rapper he’d just signed who was out with his first single, “Day ’n’ Nite.” That was Scott Mescudi—Cudi!—and he was an electric talent. You could see straightaway that this kid had something special. Flosstradamus was with us on that tour, with a bunch of other acts, and we played all over the country in small concert halls and clubs, and it was one of the first tours I was on since I’d made it as a DJ where it felt like I was in a band again. We all hung out together, stayed onstage for each other’s sets, got to know each other. A lot of good, tight friendships came out of that tour, and Kid Cudi and I had this great bond.

After the tour was over, he called me to tell me about a track he’d just laid down with MGMT and Ratatat, which he said had this cool indie vibe to it. He said it had his signature sound, but at the same time it was way different from anything he’d done.

He said, “Can you remix this for me?”

I said, “Are you fucking kidding? Of course.”

This was before I’d even heard the song. I was already a fan of MGMT and Ratatat, and I would have done anything for Kid Cudi at that point—he was my brother.

So he sent over the stems and I got into it. The song was “Pursuit of Happiness,” and it’s like it came from another planet.

I’m on the pursuit of happiness and I know

Everything that shine ain’t always gonna be gold

In all, I made about sixty different versions of that song. That was unheard of for me. Typically, I’d play around with a song for a while, have some fun with it, then send it off and hope people would like it. But there was something different about this cut. It got under my skin, into my head. I built it up to where I was feeling all this pressure, so I kept going at it. The song was so otherworldly, I wanted to find a way to connect it to all these different crowds. There was this small electronic scene that I was representing, alongside the indie scene we had going at Dim Mak, up against the rapper-from-another-planet vibe that Cudi was bringing, and I was determined to connect all the dots.

I kept hacking away at it, and Cudi threw in with me and got into it as well—helping me to switch things up with the drum sounds, for example, when I was looking for the slightest shift in the kick. It took me a couple months to get it right, I blew right past my deadlines, but I told myself I really needed to nail this one.

Thing is, after all of that, I went back to my second or third version and decided I had it right from the start. The simplest line was where I needed to be. So I grabbed some elements from my later versions and mashed ’em all up into what eventually became my “Pursuit of Happiness” remix. What I liked about it was how it featured a strong sense of the rave element in the song, how Cudi’s spacey hip-hop sound came across, how MGMT and Ratatat’s indie influence really popped. It all came together in a way that left you wanting to really rock your face off to the song.

We dropped that remix and I had the highest expectations. We all did, I think. But, end of the day, it faded away. We made a little bit of noise with it but not much, and not for long. It was a bit of a sleeper, that cut—it came and went, and I started to think of it as a fail. It went into the “miss” column for me, and I was disappointed. Surprised, too, because I really thought this one would take off, but mostly disappointed.

But then in 2012 this movie came out called Project X, and the remix was featured in a prominent way, so the song had a new lease on life. And it wasn’t just a song they played over the credits, or in the background underneath some throwaway scene. No, it was highlighted in this climactic moment in the story, and echoed the whole point of the film, and when the movie took off the remix took off right along with it. People around the world started listening to my remix on the back of that movie, and a couple years after that the song got a third lease on life when DJs like Hardwell, David Guetta, Martin Garrix, and Tiësto started featuring it at peak times in their sets, all over the world. I offer this story here to show how these hits can sometimes sneak up on you. Or maybe they ultimately do happen in the ways you imagine, but it takes a while for them to get there. Some songs are like the one or two duds you find in that box of firecrackers you set off on the Fourth of July. At first they might just fizzle, and you’re waiting and waiting for them to pop and nothing much happens, but then you look away for a beat and they start exploding.

This was like that … a little bit.

And this was also a reminder that when you collaborate with all these brilliant artists, when this abundance of talent comes together in a kind of harmonic convergence, you tend to forget that you’re also collaborating with the universe. Sometimes the timing isn’t right, or the stars are not aligned in the right way.

Sometimes you need to fizzle for a while until it’s your time to pop.

A lot of people forget that I was a performer, a promoter, a producer, a record label “executive” … all before I was a DJ. For a couple minutes, I was even a manager.

Here’s that story …

Very quickly, Dim Mak Records had become my vehicle to promote new bands. It was an extension of who I was as an artist, an outgrowth of the music I’d wanted to make as a kid, laying down those first tracks on my TASCAM recorder. Like I wrote earlier, it took me a while to give up the ghost on my career as a musician—all those bands I’d been a part of, playing to all those tiny crowds … I finally took the hint. And now here I was with Dim Mak, going to shows, looking for the next breakthrough artists, trying to put my own little spin on the scene.

I wasn’t alone in this. There were a lot of folks trying to spotlight new talent. The editors of Fader magazine were among the best at identifying artists who were about to pop. They’d put people on the cover before anyone knew who they were, and just a couple months later they’d be everywhere. They were exceptionally consistent in this—way, way ahead of the curve, and almost always on point. More than any other publication, Fader sat at the crosshairs of hip-hop and indie rock culture. They understood what was happening, could see the trends as they were taking shape. When they said something or someone was cutting-edge … well, then it was so. Knox Robinson, then Fader’s editor in chief, was actually one of the first to spark to what we were doing at Dim Mak, and to shine a light our way, and out of that we developed a good relationship. They supported me, so I supported them—by making our artists available at their parties and events, by playing for them at South by Southwest when I started to DJ … whatever.

Knox called me up one day to tell me about this Sri Lankan singer his magazine had just put on the cover. She was out with a new song and Knox thought it would be big, big, big. He was right, as always. I watched the video and I was fucking floored. The artist, of course, was M.I.A., and the song was “Galang,” and it was dazzling. I’d never heard anything quite like it—a mash-up of dancehall, jungle, electronic, and world music. You could tell that M.I.A. had a certain “it” factor about her, an impossible-to-define something, a chance to become the next big pop artist in America. I loved her voice, her sound, her style … over time, I’d come to admire her activism as well. I was super-excited and wanted to find a way to support what M.I.A. was doing. After all, that’s why I’d started Dim Mak in the first place—to promote all these different artists, from all these different cultures, representing all these different types of music and ways of thinking. Like a melting pot, you know.

Just to be clear, it’s not like I came away from watching M.I.A.’s “Galang” video with all these dollar signs in my eyes, dreaming of what she could become on the back of that one single. Wasn’t like that. Yeah, money was a part of my thinking, but only a small part. The real fuel for me was giving a leg up to emerging artists who maybe needed a boost. The money was important only because it takes money to make the right kind of noise. And because money coming in would seed the process, and put me in a position to do the same thing all over again, for the next artist who came along who could use a push.

Knox mentioned that M.I.A. didn’t have a label in America, was only signed to XL Recordings (one of my favorite labels, based in the UK). His thought was that she was definitely looking for an indie label to feature her in the United States as well, and since Dim Mak was pretty well known as a purveyor of breaking talent, he thought we’d be a perfect fit. So he kindly put me in touch. Dim Mak was an easy sell—at least, to M.I.A. We’d already had some success with artists like The Kills and Bloc Party, taking these English bands and introducing them in the States and helping them to build an audience and some momentum, so I was able to make a good case for Dim Mak. We didn’t have the infrastructure back then to put out anything more than a single, but that would be enough to get M.I.A. some traction, and to help her move into something bigger. I understood that progression.

M.I.A. and I got to talking. She was down to work with us, but then when we started moving forward we got some pushback from her “small” label in England. It turned out they had the rights to her song tied up worldwide, and there was no room for an indie label like Dim Mak in her deal. That was cool. I mean, I was disappointed, but that’s just business, right? Still, I was like a dog with a bone. I wanted to find some way to work with M.I.A., because I thought she was uniquely talented. I loved what she was putting out there, wanted to see things happen for her, wanted to have a hand in making some of those things happen for her, so I suggested she take me on as a manager. It was a big, ballsy ask, but I figured I didn’t have anything to lose, so I just put it out there. M.I.A. was down for this arrangement as well—a big, ballsy move on her part—so I went to work. I met with every major label, every major record executive: Capitol, Universal, Atlantic … the same folks I’d been hitting up for Bloc Party. I teamed with a hustling A&R pro on this effort—a woman named Riko Sakurai, who used to work for Def Jam—and together we covered the waterfront, hoping to make things happen for M.I.A. in the States. Dim Mak was a known entity by this point. We had a bit of a rep, so I was able to trade on that to get these meetings, while Riko called on some big-time connections of her own, and M.I.A.’s obvious talent did the rest.

Our thing was to sell M.I.A. as the next Madonna—that was the hook. She was international. And so for a couple weeks I was running around Los Angeles, taking all these meetings, and the whole time M.I.A.’s UK label was giving her more and more pushback. They wanted to know who this Asian kid was in the States making all this noise on their artist’s behalf. They had it in their heads that they would be handling her worldwide, and they were pissed that this nobody with an upstart indie label was going around blowing all this smoke about someone they thought was their artist.

These guys fucking hated me. Hate is a strong word, but here it applies—they hated me, thought I was irrelevant, an irritant, something to get past. Mostly, it was M.I.A.’s UK manager who hated me, thought I was just some punk. Who knows, maybe they were right to call me out on this, but M.I.A. had my back. She loved that I was so passionate about her music, about her career. She loved the hustle I brought to the table. So she stood up to her manager, for a while. Until she couldn’t. In the end, the suits kept me from continuing on in this role, but for a couple months I think I helped get M.I.A. out there and noticed and talked about in the industry. It laid the groundwork for the reception she’d find in the States. Of course, she’s so enormously talented she would have no doubt popped on her own, without my rookie efforts, but I like to think I helped her along, even just a little.

The great takeaway for me out of this one brief experience I had as a manager was that when you’re passionate about someone or something, it can bring you to great places. But in the end, passion can only take you so far. It might be enough to get you the gig, but it won’t let you keep the gig. For that you need a whole bunch of shit to fall your way. You need a team of people around you who believe in you and what you’re putting out there. You need experience.

You need folks working with you instead of against you.

Basically, you need to play to your strengths, instead of to the best-case scenarios you have in your head. It took me a while, but I figured it out. Just look to the hip-hop album I released in 2017—Kolony, featuring young artists on the verge of cultural explosion. That was always my thing, trying to spotlight talent a couple beats before an act broke in a big-time way, so here I lined up a bunch of artists who were about to take off on this massive career trajectory—like Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Yachty, Rich the Kid, Migos. There was also room under this tent for collaborations with established hip-hop stars or veterans in the field—like Ma$e, Gucci Mane, T-Pain, and 2 Chainz …

Before Kolony, an entire album of EDM-infused hip-hop was unheard-of. Yeah, artists from both worlds have gotten together on songs, onstage, but not on this kind of scale. As concept albums go, this one was pretty high-concept, but as soon as we got the idea for it we were running with it, hard. Wasn’t a hard sell to get these artists to work with me on this—I’d worked with a lot of them already, so it was just a matter of creating the right material and coordinating our schedules. The key to making a project like this work is the excitement that happens in the combustion of these two different worlds, but that’s the kind of thing that gets me going. When I team up with other artists, it’s like I slip into an extra gear. I’m like a kid again, a fan. I try to find a way to make the music matter most of all, and the business side of what we do falls away. My creative juices start to flow. And this is especially so when I tap artists who work in entirely other genres—like the song I wrote for a 2015 collaboration I did with Linkin Park, “Darker Than Blood.”

Darker than the blood

Higher than the sun

This is not the end

You are not the only one

That was definitely a career highlight—for the chance it gave me to work with a band I grew up listening to. From Hybrid Theory on, Linkin Park was essential listening, the soundtrack to a ton of key moments in my life. For years, whenever an interviewer would ask me if there was one singer I wanted to work with, I’d say Chester Bennington—so when it finally happened I was over the fucking moon. And now, with Chester gone, I look back on the music we made together and I’m so, so grateful we had a chance to collaborate on something so, so meaningful. I just kept putting it out into the universe until it finally happened. It was beyond a dream come true, and when we were in the studio together I took a moment to step back from what was going on and consider the career I’d managed to build from my lifelong passion for music … all kinds of music. The ways I’ve managed to work with so many different artists, from so many different genres. We share the stage, we share our audiences, we drop these songs together and give each other the room we need to do our thing—separately, together, whatever …

Pretty fucking cool, huh? And, way more effective than trying to shoehorn my way in as a manager.

One of the other shape-shifting lessons that found me as I began to collaborate with artists is that there is a wellspring of power to be found in the ways we take care of each other and lift each other up on the back of our efforts. When I was coming up as a producer and DJ, it was so incredibly validating and humbling to me when next-level artists like Kanye West and Drake reached out and said they wanted to work with me, and I think the young artists I was trying to promote or advance at Dim Mak, like M.I.A., felt the same way when I reached out and said I wanted to work with them.

Underneath all of that, there’s often another element at play that makes these collisions of talent so rewarding … and it finds us in the form of basic human kindness. What do I mean by that? Well, it’s probably best to show rather than tell, so I’ll share the story of the time I connected with the outrageously talented producer Brian Burton, better known as Danger Mouse, who burst on the scene with his pioneering mash-up of Jay-Z’s The Black Album and some instrumentals from the Beatles’ White Album. Slam those two classic albums together and what do you get? Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album, an experimental piece Brian put out in 2004 that became one of the most talked-about albums of the year. What a lot of folks forget about that album was that it was a bootleg. In a lot of ways, Danger Mouse made a name for himself on the back of this album but never put it out in any kind of official way. He didn’t have any of the licensing in place, but he was still able to make some serious noise with it—that’s the DJ culture, on full display.

Really, I can’t overstate the impact that one album had, all over the world. It was exciting as hell … especially to me. See, I was still finding my way as a DJ, and I’d been stoked by all these genre-bending mash-ups that were coming out around that time. They weren’t remixes, exactly. They were something else … something new. There were these Belgian brothers I was following back then called 2 Many DJ’s, and they’d mix Beyoncé with Nirvana and Dolly Parton—clever, genre-bending, time-hopping stuff. They were elevating DJing and mash-ups to a whole new level in an incredibly witty way … totally fresh. I just loved it, tried to incorporate some of that technique into my sets, so when Brian came out with his first bootleg version of The Grey Album I reached out to him, to see if we could connect on a project.

Brian knew the Dim Mak brand, knew what we stood for. We were breaking a lot of young artists in those days, especially in Los Angeles. We had a ton of cool indie bands in our lineup that were just blowing up, so we were on people’s radar. At the time, Brian was putting out music on a bunch of different experimental hip-hop labels, like Warp Records. I was trying to think of some way to release his music on Dim Mak, but he was already signed to this legendary label, so I got the idea to team him with an indie band I was really into at the time called Sparklehorse, led by a guy named Mark Linkous. Mark was making very eccentric, very spacey music that seemed to fit with the fusion-type music Brian was focusing on. If Sparklehorse was into the idea, we could get them with Brian and they could perform together as Danger Horse.

(The other option would have been to call this side project Sparkle Mouse, but Danger Horse seemed so much darker, more mysterious.)

Turned out Brian loved Sparklehorse, so he was down, and once Mark Linkous and them were on board I told them I wanted to do it as a Dim Mak release. In my head, I worked it out that since Danger Mouse was already signed to another label and Sparklehorse was signed to Capitol Records, this mini-super-grouping would be Dim Mak’s way in.

Turned out, too, that there were a shit-ton of hoops we had to jump through to get both artists cleared to work on this project, but somewhere in all that hoop-jumping Dim Mak was squeezed out of the deal. The Capitol execs were all over this idea, but they didn’t want Dim Mak involved. They essentially said, “Look, Sparklehorse is our artist. They’re not signed to you. And Danger Mouse isn’t signed to you, either, so you don’t belong in this project.”

But that’s how it goes sometimes, right? You set all these wheels in motion, and they end up rolling away from you. In big-picture terms, thinking globally, I was pumped that this one idea would actually grow into something, even though I was bummed, thinking locally, that there was no room in the project for Dim Mak. I didn’t even get a production credit out of the deal, but I told myself that was cool, too, because these artists I loved got to work together in this compelling new way.

Of course, that was the public spin I put on the deal. Privately, I was pissed. The entire project had been my idea, and even though I’d come up in the music business in a kind of DIY way, even though my early efforts had been all about seeding and feeding the community and not turning everything into a money-grab, this one left me a little steamed. It told me that despite whatever success I’d been having, whatever success I thought I’d been having, I still didn’t have the power to make things happen on my own. I was still just the little guy, and the little guy always gets stepped on, right?

The Danger Horse album didn’t do a whole lot of business, didn’t get a whole lot of publicity, but a lot of people came to believe that Brian’s work on the album elevated him to a whole new level as a producer. The collaboration allowed him a platform to show what he could do in the studio, and out of that he became one of the top producers in the music industry. Understand, that transformation-elevation didn’t happen overnight, but it happened over time. Just look at the artists Brian has produced over the years, in addition to his own side projects as Danger Doom (with rapper MF Doom), Gnarls Barkley (with CeeLo Green), and Broken Bells (with the Shins’ frontman, James Mercer): the Black Keys, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Norah Jones, Gorillaz, U2, Portugal. The Man, and on and on. Dude went on to earn nineteen Grammy nominations, including a sick total of five nominations as Producer of the Year. (Oh, and by the way, out of those nineteen nominations, he’s walked home with six Grammys, including a 2011 Producer of the Year nod—huge!)

Okay, so that’s all in the way of setup for the story I really want to tell about Brian Burton. We’d stayed in touch in the couple years since we tried to get together on that Danger Horse project. I followed what was going on with him, he followed what was going on with me, and it was all good. And then it just worked out that we were getting on the same plane, headed to London. We ran into each other in the airport. I was flying to one of my first big shows as a DJ—things were really starting to happen for me, so I was excited to fill Brian in. And he was eager to tell me what was going on with him in the studio, what he was listening to, who he was working with, all of that. Trouble was, I was headed to the back of the plane, in one of the last rows in coach, while Brian was seated in business class—that’s kind of where we were in our careers. But Brian seemed to want to keep the conversation going, was maybe looking for someone to keep him company on the long flight, so he told me he’d stow his gear and his guitar in business class and work his way back to me at some point.

Next thing I knew, before takeoff, he was offering his seat to the guy next to me and sitting down in his spot so we could keep talking—only we didn’t talk all that much, once we took off. It was more about hanging out than catching up. Still, he stayed there the entire flight, and it struck me as one of the sweetest, warmest, most genuine gestures I’d ever seen from an artist of his stature. To give up his business-class seat to hang with me, in a shitty-ass seat in one of the back, back rows, practically in steerage … that kind of thing just isn’t done.

Think of it: Brian’s guitar flew to London business class; the complete stranger who was meant to be sitting next to me in coach flew to London business class; and Brian sat his ass down at the back of the plane. And like I said, it’s not like we talked the entire time. I drifted off to sleep at one point. He drifted off to sleep at one point. And whenever I’d startle myself awake and catch my bearings, I’d look over to Brian and think, What the fuck is he still doing here? The whole thing was just so remarkable, so outside my experience … so validating and humbling.

It’s the little things, right? The small, sweet gestures that remind you we’re all just trying to connect with each other on a basic human level. That’s where kindness kicks in. Decency. Generosity. The good turns we find it in our hearts to drop on each other, they stay with you. This totally surprising, totally unnecessary gesture from Brian Burton, it stayed with me. Same way it stayed with me that time Kanye West started rapping to me over the phone, just to get my take. Same way it struck me how M.I.A. didn’t really know me or all that much about me, and yet she liked the energy and enthusiasm I was putting out so she decided she wanted to work with me.

Where’s the blue in these stories, in this message? I’ve got no fucking idea. Maybe it has to do with the water we need to help all the seeds we plant in our lives and careers to flower into something meaningful, purposeful. Yeah, let’s go with that. Let’s go with the idea that when we sprinkle all these prospects all over the damn place, when we nurture all these different relationships, it sometimes works out that they just don’t work out. Or that we’ll never get to see if they grow into what we’ve imagined, never know if other people might happen by and start to water or fertilize or tend the area where we were working and take it on themselves to grow the thing into something they’ve imagined, like the world is some community garden. But when we do get to see what we’ve sown, we can step back and smile and think, Just look! Behold this beautiful thing!

No, I cannot create in a vacuum. I can only create in concert with others … and sometimes this is how those concerts happen.