Today’s song comes to us from my eldest daughter, Leah. Leah is in her final year of high school. She has already been accepted for university in the fall. Because of a quirk in her highschool schedule this entire year, Leah has found herself at home almost as much as she has been at school due to having online course work or else actual spares. To my way of thinking, this extra time that we have been granted before she heads out into the world is like found money. It is time together that I treasure. I am not wishing any of it away. I am enjoying every last moment. Which brings us to today’s song. Last week, as I was putting together my writing schedule for this week, Leah was working away at our dining room table. When it came time to select a song for Reader’s Choice/Tom’s Top Tunes I thought that Leah might have a song that she wanted me to write about, so I asked for her input. She replied that I should finally tell the world the story behind “This Is What It Feels Like” by Dutch DJ Armin van Buuren and Canadian singer Trevor Guthrie. She said this with a smile on her face and a chuckle in her voice because, being a storywriter like me, she knows that the two of us share a story with regard to this particular song. So buckle up and get ready! Here is the story of a song that raised my hackles like no other. Here is “This Is What It Feels Like”. Enjoy.
Most days I would consider myself to be a very humble, grounded, easy going kind of person. However, there are times when, admittedly, I throw my hands up into the air in complete exasperation at the state of our world. If only…if only…if only the rest of the world would see things the way that I do, our lives would all be so much better and so much more enjoyable! Society would function with greater efficiency. Our cities and towns would be oases of justice and equality. Stupidity would vanish, and everyone would live in harmony. The sun would always shine (except when our lawns and gardens required rain and our psyches required rainbows). If only people thought the way that I did, all would be well with the world. It was while I was in one such mood that I originally came up with the idea of writing blog posts that tell the stories behind the songs that make up the soundtrack of our lives. The origin story there is that years before I retired, my family and I would all drive to school together. During these early morning drives, our local radio station would be playing the hits of the day. Many of these hit songs involved drinking at the club and/or sexual attraction. As these songs played, my much younger daughters would be bopping away to the beat in the back seat. It always bothered me that they would do so to songs such as “Break Your Heart” by Taio Cruz. That song is about a guy in a club who is promising the girls he is picking up that he is only there for his own pleasure and will, most definitely, end up breaking their hearts. My girls would be dancing and bopping to this song. One day I had had enough and asked them if they knew what that song was about? They hadn’t been paying attention, so they admitted that they didn’t know and truthfully, that they didn’t care, either. This attitude almost made me lose my mind and helped plant the seeds within my head and my heart that some day I was going to uncover the hidden and not so hidden stories behind songs like “Break Your Heart” and publish my findings to the world! That would show ’em! So when I retired from teaching and did have the time to write, that’s exactly what I did! But a funny thing happened on the way to me exposing the slimy underbelly of the music world. For the most part, that slimy underbelly didn’t exist. Since I began writing about music, I have published almost one thousand posts. Of those, by far and away, the vast majority chronicle stories of creativity, passion and inspiration that I have been proud to tell. There have been very few “Break Your Heart” exposés. The evolution of my mindset is one of the reasons that I remain as humble as I can. Despite how I sometimes feel, the truth may be that I don’t always have the answers for all of the world’s problems and that sometimes I actually don’t know what I am talking about. Time to dial back my sense of righteous indignation a bit. So, when I asked Leah for a song recommendation, she knew exactly what she was talking about by selecting “This Is What It Feels Like” by Armin van Buuren ft. Trevor Guthrie. This is one of those songs that has always pushed my buttons and gotten on my very last nerve when it has come on our local radio station. I have always had something to say about it when it does come on the radio. Since I spend more time with Leah in the car (driving her to and from her two jobs) than anyone else, she has gotten to listen to me spout off about this song for a long time. However, as it turned out, my rantings and ravings were completely misinformed, and I didn’t know what I was talking about. Thus, this post is a lesson in humility for yours truly.
One of the things that always bugged me about “This Is What It Feels Like” has nothing to do with the song itself. Instead, it had more to do with how modern Pop radio stations tend to program the music that they play on air. The song “This Is What It Feels Like” was written by a Dutch DJ named Armin van Buuren. Armin van Buuren is a hugely successful DJ in the world of Electronic Dance Music. EDM is a genre of music that evolved out of the early days of Hip Hop. In the world of modern Electronic Dance Music, DJs stand high above the crowd, with an array of computers and turntables before them. They create songs that are beat driven. The tempos of these songs rise and fall in highly controlled and orchestrated ways. The music, in combination with pulsating lights and lasers and other forms of visual stimuli, help to transport the audience into another state of mind. An EDM concert is a sensory experience like no other. In the genre of Electronic Dance Music, DJs are kings. People like Steve Aoki, Avicii (when he was still alive), Tiësto, Calvin Harris, Skrillex, David Guetta, deadmau5, Darude and Diplo are just a few of the big names in the world of EDM. You can add Armin van Buuren to that list as well. In addition to being voted as one of the top five DJs in the world well over a dozen times, van Buuren runs his own radio show devoted to promoting a form of Electronic Dance Music called Trance. The long and the short of it all is that folks like Armin van Buuren are multi-millionaires many times over and are highly respected within their own industry. If you are hearing his name for the first time today, it is no fault of his but rather a statement about how middle of the road Pop radio stations operate.
Most radio stations that I am familiar with have playlists that are created days or even weeks in advance of when they actually go on air. These playlists are not random lists of songs that the radio station programming director happens to like or that listeners are requesting, either. Instead, the playlists are composed of categories of songs. The frequency with which a song from each category is played depends on a variety of factors. For example, a certain percentage of songs played each hour on a Canadian radio station must be by Canadian artists. A certain percentage of songs played each hour must be from the most recent Top 40/Top 100 song charts. Smaller categories such as “Oldies” (songs that are 10-20 years old or older) get played once in a while, as do songs from the worlds of Hip Hop, Country, listener requests or even Electronic Dance Music. This is why on my own small town local radio station, we hear songs by Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift and P!ink a lot. They are from the Top 40 chart category. It is why Michael Bublé’s latest gets played every day. But it is also why a song like “Hotline Bling” by Drake gets played over and over again, as if that is the only song of his that has ever been released. “Hotline Bling” gets played a lot because it satisfies the requirement for an occasional Hip Hop song while also being a Canadian song that checks that quota box. When it comes to including songs from the world of Electronic Dance Music, the two songs that I hear on my local radio station ad nauseam are “Wake Me Up” by Avicii and “This Is What It Feels Like” by Armin van Buuren ft. Trevor Guthrie. In a world in which there are sooooo many great EDM songs out there, the fact that two songs are plugged in on repeat strikes me as lazy programming, and it has always bugged me. So, without even discussing the song itself, the mere sound of it being played repeatedly on my radio was enough to get me going. But then, we had the song itself.
“This Is What It Feels Like” is a song that came out in 2013 from Armin van Buuren’s fifth studio album called Intense. In order to promote the crossover capabilities of Electronic Dance Music, many DJs have collaborated with Pop and Rock singers over the years. In the case of this song, Armin van Buuren tapped Canadian singer Trevor Guthrie to sing the lyrics while he supplied the beats. The song went to the top of the charts around the world and stands as Van Buuren’s highest charting Pop/Rock song in his career. The funny thing about that is that this song is also a bit of an outlier in terms of his career. Armin van Buuren is so successful in the field of EDM that he doesn’t require success on the Pop charts to earn validation as a legend in his field. So, “This Is What It Feels Like” stands alone as a Pop-oriented offering. Thus, this is often the only Armin van Buuren song you are likely to ever hear on a Pop radio station. That having been said, the song starts off with two verses that play rather slowly. These verses speak of personal relationships and of loss. The second verse discusses the pain of being without the one who was loved and ends with the line, “This is what it feels like”, and then, like fireworks going off, the song explodes in a cavalcade of electronic beats, and it seems like the greatest dance party in the world is erupting before our very eyes and ears. That never made sense to me as I listened to the song while driving Leah to work. Why did the loss of someone you loved result in a dance party? So that, combined with the lazy programming aspect that caused this one EDM song to be played on repeat as the default EDM song on my radio station’s playlist, caused me to almost lose my mind. Poor Leah! She had to endure many instances of me acting like the stereotypical old man who shouts at clouds whenever this song came on the radio. And it always seemed to come on the radio when we were driving together. It almost became a running joke between us. At times, we called it “our song”. And we laughed about it, except that I didn’t really find it funny. The song was driving me around the bend, quite literally, as we drove around the bend on the way to work.
Then one day, I waved the flag of ignorance in front of Leah and we set off on a voyage of mutual discovery. The flag of ignorance that I waved was in the form of a statement in which I said that I was certain the male lead singer of this song was Chris Martin from the band Coldplay. Leah assured me that I was mistaken. But, in my occasionally stubborn way, I believed that I was correct. So Leah whipped out her phone and announced that Coldplay was not involved in the song at all. In fact, it was a song by a DJ named Armin van Buuren that featured a Canadian singer named Trevor Guthrie. This was news to me. Then she went a step further and said that the song is actually meant as a celebration of life for a friend who was dying of brain cancer. That was news to me, too. Suddenly the wind left my sails and my whole sense of outrage subsided. “This Is What It Feels Like” now made more sense. It was a song that acknowledged the sadness that comes with loss but also the joy that the relationship had brought in the first place. Accordingly, a dance party in the middle of a song about death seemed like the sensible play after all. Leah put away her phone. I loosened the grip I had maintained on our steering wheel and we went on with our drive in peace. Lesson learned. Humbled status regained.
This is what it feels like to have a wonderful daughter like Leah who lets me rant and roar but then reels me back in before the embarrassment becomes too public or too great. It shouldn’t be the responsibility of the child to control the moods of the parent, but that is something that often happens in most families that I know. I take it as a sign of the growing maturity of my daughter that she knows how and when to step in to cheer me up or calm her mother down or to make a wise suggestion that neither of us may have thought of. The transition from dependent child to dependable partner in life is one that Leah is making great strides in achieving. To have been able to witness this growth up close this past year while she has had scheduling breaks from school has been a blessing. Soon, Leah will head out the door for university. It will then be her younger sister who is the one needing drives to and from the site of part-time jobs. What discussions will we have together? What songs will become, for better or worse, “our songs”? The one thing that I do know is that my youngest daughter has her own playlists of Drake songs that she listens to using her Airpods. At least she knows, as I do, that Drake has more than “Hotline Bling” to his credit. I am looking forward to hearing her take on things as time goes by. I wonder what lessons I have in store for me then? Luckily for me, we have time coming to us and memories to be made as a result. I can’t wait for those moments. I only hope that the music accompanying them is good.
The link to the official website for Armin van Buuren can be found here.
The link to the video for the song “This Is What It Feels Like” by Armin van Buuren ft. Trevor Guthrie can be found here. ***The lyrics version is here.
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You are incredibly open minded Tom! It’s very unfortunate that airplay situation but it’s been forever thus I think. Can con was well intended but execution is another matter. I have to say i was pleasantly surprised that I liked the song.