And The Writer Is...with Ross Golan - Ep. 229: Zedd | Inside the Mind Behind a Decade of Anthems

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

Today's guest went from making songs on a floppy-disk keyboard, sampling off a Kellogg’s cereal box DAW, and sending blind MySpace messages… to producing the some of the biggest crossover dance anthems of the last decade. And The Writer Is... Zedd!What makes this conversation special isn’t just the hits — it’s how brutally honest he is about the craft, the obsession, and the unexpected moments that built his career.A special thank you to our sponsors...Our lead sponsor, NMPA aka the National Music Publisher's Association. Your support means the world to us!And @splice -- the best sample library on the market, period.Chapters:0:00:00 – Teaser 0:01:06 – Welcome & Episode Intro 35:58 – Zedd on Never Thinking He’d Be Successful 25:41 – Growing Up Poor & Studying One Album a Month 18:01 – The Kellogg’s DAW That Started Everything 15:33 – Learning Music on a 16-Track Floppy-Disk Keyboard 30:44 – Why He Thought EDM Was a Joke at First 38:12 – The Skrillex MySpace Story That Changed His Life 31:25 – Finding His Sound Through Curiosity & Obsession 47:14 – The “Lightning Moment” Behind Clarity 59:34 – Being Wrong More Often Than Right 1:03:03 – Why Most Music Feels the Same Today 1:03:37 – Extraordinary vs. Average: What Listeners Actually Feel 1:00:08 – “All I’m Doing Is Chasing a Feeling” 56:26 – The Chaos Behind Making The Middle 1:00:47 – Realizing the Scale of His Own Success 28:23 – What It Takes to Stay Inspired 6:48 – The Creative Principles He Still Lives By 41:22 – The Fastest Way for Artists to Get Noticed 1:05:23 – Zedd’s Final Advice for Musicians 1:07:19 – Closing ThoughtsHosted by Ross GolanProduced by Joe London and Jad SaadWatercolor by Michael White Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I never thought that I would be successful. I never thought it would ever matter. I'm wrong way more often than I'm right. To me, it's still one of the best ways to get noticed, the quickest and easiest way. Let's go back to the beginning of your story a bit. I grew up pretty poor. Kellogg's came with a music DAW. It was a CD inside of a box of cornflakes.

Amazing. And that was the first time I was able to record things. It was like this lightning came out of my head and it was like, oh my God, this is it. If you were to give advice to musicians watching you now, be as fast as you can between having some light bulb in your brain turn on of like, oh, this could be cool to being able to audition that. To me, it's still one of the best ways to get noticed, the quickest and easiest way.

You take a song everyone loves, you make a remix out of it, you give another reason for people to love that song, and love you at the same time. This season is presented by NMPA, the National Music Publishers Association, Champions of songwriters and publishers everywhere. Welcome to And The Writer is. I am your host, Ross Golan.

Today's electronic music maestro has topped all of the charts. This classically trained pianist traded concert halls for festival stages. And somewhere along the way, produce hits that defined a decade. From clarity to stay the nigh to the middle, he mastered the science of making us cry on the dance floor. He's won Grammy, stacked billions of streams, and somehow still finds time to argue about sound design on Twitter. All the way from all over the world, this DJ has landed in the seat across from me, and the writer is Zed. Hello, hello.

Hello, hello. Thank you for having me. Donut shops and coffee. Let's get into it. Love it. I love it both very much. Yeah, you're a coffee snob, huh? Yeah, I became one.

I wasn't always one. When did you become a coffee snob? about maybe three years ago. Pretty recently. It was cold in L.A., whatever our version of cold is. My friends from Canada where it actually is cold came to visit, and they wanted coffees. So I had a little an espresso, I would make them coffees, didn't really drink them myself. And then I sort of enjoyed the warmth, coziness.

It's more the feeling than the taste, the ritual you could call it. So I was like, oh, let me. look up what pods there are. So I got every espresso pod, tried them all out. Didn't like love them, but I got curious, and then I got a super automatic, you know, because I don't want to be the guy spraying my beans, you know? I want to press a button and get my drink.

So, latte, bang, bang, bang, drink it. I'm like, this is pretty good. Started a Google spreadsheet with north of 100 different beans and rated them and ranked them and sort of tried my best to extract each note. of each bean just to learn about it. And then I flew to Australia for a show, and I realized their coffee's way better.

Everywhere at the airport, like at a coffee shop, at a restaurant anywhere, their coffees were so good. And so I came home with the realization that my super automatic is only going to get me so far. I need to go and spray my beans, you know, for lack of a better word. And then I got into the manual making of espresso, and that's a rabbit hole.

Anybody who's obsessed with espresso knows once you start, you're going to likely go deep. Why is the coffee in Australia so good? I think they just take it really seriously, like the flat white as far as I know is like an Australian thing. A lot of like YouTube channels about coffee are Australian. A lot of testing and stuff is all in Australia. So I just think they care more about it. I think American coffee culture is more like quick, quick, quick quantity. overburned, either too hot or too cold.

What's the perfect temperature for coffee? I mean, it depends on how you drink it. I just looked this up actually yesterday because I was gifted a little pour over kit. And it's set like depending on the light roast or medium roast or dark roast, whatever, being you're using, it's anywhere from, what was it, 192 to 194, 195 to 197. Yeah, the ratio of, I think it's 13.1. grams of water to a gram of coffee for pourover. Do you do pourovers?

Yeah. Oh, really? Well, it depends what people want. Okay. But when we built the studio, there were two things that people said that they wanted. They wanted, like, they wanted, you know, fresh light, natural light, and they wanted good coffee. Nobody said, oh, man, I want to know the best preamps. Like, we need to have tube texts.

We need to have. Nobody says anything like that. It's all about natural lighting coffee. And so I got really, that's when I got into coffee. Do you like it yourself or do you just want to be sort of able to give it or make coffee for others? No. Well, I like coffee. I actually enjoy the taste.

But I really, I think there's some sort of almost magic trick kind of thing. When you start making pour over in front of someone while you're having a conversation. So when you have a meeting and you're in and you offer coffee and you start to. measure it out while you're talking because it's so secondary and they see what you know what you're making for them yeah i think it tastes different and i think it it looks different and i think it it it is like uh uh it's it's an amazing offering for somebody yeah it is it is almost a display of care i would one of the things that i said in a studio why coffee matters that kind of coffee is that I think it shows the kind of detail you should expect from lyrics,

from tuning, snare drums. Yeah. You know, my guess is that you do spreadsheets for your samples similarly to you. I wish my samples were as organized as my coffee beans. I think I took my coffee obsession to a whole other level. I think I'm not surprised in retrospect how obsessive I became over coffee extraction or espresso extraction. Given how I am with music, it's the same correlation.

But the one difference, and maybe one day I'll reach that point with coffee as well, is when it comes to music for me, and this is in regards to production, is to be as fast as you can between having some light bulb in your brain turn on, of like, oh, this could be cool to being able to addition that, whatever that is. Right. So fast, fast, fast, fast means like sample, sample, sample, drag and drop, da, da, da, where did that come from? I have no clue I'll figure it out later. Of course, I'll never figure it out later because you don't care anymore.

But I am not organized at all. And without my engineer Skinny, who for 14 years has been backing everything up, labeling everything, exporting everything in a clean fashion, uploading everything. So if anybody's like, hey, do you have that stem of that song? I was like, yes. I would never know where that is, but he does that for me when I'm done with everything. That's the only reason I even have a remote level of organization. What does your studio look like?

Well, I have a brand new studio as of like, I don't know, a month maybe that I just finished. Congrats. Thank you so much. That's why I was looking around here. It is incredibly minimal. So my main room is all, you said all the words, light was the number one priority without compromise in sound, which is tricky, which I'm sure you know all about.

But essentially the theory in my studio was that in mixed position to my left and to my right symmetrically are the two surfaces of glass. That's where when I speak, I wouldn't mind some reflection because I don't want to feel like I'm in a dead room. So I have glass, glass, glass on my left, pretty much like floor to ceiling, looking into the DJ booth, into the vocal booth. And to my right, I'm looking outside. So I get the best of both worlds.

I get direct connection to the singer, but I also have direct connection to the outside. And then everything is the same white oak, the floors, all furniture. I had custom built to my height, which I'm not a tall guy. And I think all of our chairs and tables are way too tall, like across the board, America, like lower.

everything in my opinion like how low should it be it should be so low that when you sit down you have a 90 degree angle in your knees and if i look at most people they put their feet on the on the chair legs like if you just observe without mentioning that you'll notice a lot of people sit like not how i think it's comfortable to sit so i was like i know that's the standard but i think it should be lower because i don't want to feel like i have to raise my head to be a mixed position i want to be comfortable with a 90 degree angle. And then my knee depth is the depth of the sort of, what do you even call it? Like the credenza that my keyboard is on, that all the equipment is beneath. So when I sit and play, my knees don't touch anything, but there's no wasted space because my knees likely aren't going

to grow anymore. So we measured it and wanted it to be in a way where I can play comfortably without feeling like anything's there. But the equipment is no further than it has to be if you ever need to reach it. Yeah, so that detail sounds pretty similar to how you measure beans. Yeah, it's a little bit on the complex side, I guess, but visually, incredibly simple. The desk is one flat white oak surface, like no cabinet's nothing. One flat piece. I have my keyboard, my mouse, a monitor, just one. I mean, there's, like, when you look at it, it looks like nothing is in the studio, which I don't have anything I don't need. That was the thought.

We'll get to this how you started on it, but do you still use Cubase? Yeah. Still on Cubase. 22 years since Cubase 2. Why Cubase? Because when I started producing music, we won a band contest. And the price was that you get to spend three days with your band in a studio and record an AP. And the studio was using Cubase.

So I was like, oh, okay. and learning, learning, learning. Okay, I'm on QBase now, and I've just stuck with QBase ever since. I actually think QBase is really incredible. You record vocals, everything in it? No, we record vocals in Pro Tools and Comp in Pro Tools, but as soon as possible, get out of there into QBase.

Like any production, mixing, it all happens in QBase. So when everyone else is using Ableton or Logic in the DJ world, it feels like those two seem to be pretty prominent. Yeah. Or FL. Or FL. Do you feel like you have an advantage by not using any of those? No, not at all.

I think you could probably find ways to argue that I have a disadvantage besides collaborating being significantly harder because you can't share project files. I do think QBase is just a little more tedious. It's a little bit more complex. Routing is a pain, I'll be honest. It's maybe not ideal in everything, but it's incredibly detailed in other ways. Like, I think the, like, visual representation of what the DAW does informs how your productions likely are going to go. Like, if you always have an EQ, like, open, like, enabled most of the time on the bottom, you'll probably just use it a little bit more often than if you have to open a plugin and load it in, you know, your laziness, like, we're lazy inherently.

And the faster, that's going back to what I said first, the faster you can make. things happen, the more you're likely to use them. And that window of EQ, typically, in my opinion, is like really broad. Like, how many numbers are there that are telling you where exactly you're cutting? Or I was working with somebody who was an FL. And I was like, can you lower that by like, make that a little bit quieter, that sample? And then there's like a wheel. He's spinning it. And I'm like, well, it didn't say where it was it. It doesn't say where it is now. Like, how much was it? Like, I'm not sure exactly. And it's hard to go back.

Yeah, yeah, right. Like, I get immediate terror for me. Like, I need to know exactly how much it was now, how much it is now, how much it was before. And I just feel like, and I, by the way, before I get a bunch of shit, I know there's a way to see it at the top left corner of FL. I know. But it's not in front of you.

And my point is like, the design of a software is really critical and will inform what decisions you make along the way without ever thinking about them. Let's go back to the beginning of your story a bit. I want to hear how you get, getting to the competition where you win it for a free QA's studio. You're Russian. So where were you born in Russia? I was born in Saratov. Okay.

And then basically moved to Germany when I was four and lived there until I was about 23. Are your parents Russian, were they born in Russia? Yeah, they were both born in Russia. My mom has German. In her family, my dad is just purely Russian. And they decided that when my brother and I were born, they wanted to have a better life. So they decided to leave Russia for what ended up being Germany,

which they wanted to offer their kids a better future. What was the music influence in your childhood? My music influence was all my dad. Honestly, it was Genesis, King Crimson, Deep Purple. Like, whatever he listened to was what I, like George Benson was huge. whatever he listened to was what my brother and I listened to. Is your brother older or younger? He's older, but he looks younger.

Is he in music too? Yeah, we used to be in a band together for... Was that the band? That was the band. What was the band called? Dioramic. When did it start? I turned 12, so he was 15.

What instrument were you playing at the time? I was a drummer. Okay. Yeah, because he started a band with our bass player. They were like, we need a drummer, and I was playing video games next door. I'm like, I could play drums. If you want me to. Sure.

All right, you're in the band. That was sort of how that happened. What's the first step of we're going to create our own music versus doing covers? Like, what's the first song that you wrote? Well, this is a little bit hard to say because we started writing music when we were like four years old, essentially. What do you mean? Like, way before our band, we made music and wrote pieces. Like, we started with my dad bought us a keyboard that had a floppy disc and you would have up to 16 channels, like a Yamaha.

And so that was our first exposure. Did he want to do music? I mean, that's a pretty... My dad? Oh, he was a musician too. He was a guitar, piano-based teacher for a living. And same with my mom. They were both instrument teachers.

Got it. So they were our first teachers when we were essentially babies. Like, there's, you know, photos of us being a year and a half at instruments already, like, fiddling around. And so as soon as we have that keyboard, while they were at work, my brother and I essentially just every day would make a song recorded on that floppy disk. And then when my dad comes home, we show it to him. And he's like, well, see the bass. That note doesn't really work with that chord. Or like, that new part needs a crash on the one.

And we're like, okay, take note. We'll do better tomorrow. or do something new tomorrow. So every day we would just write songs on that keyboard. Do you still have those floppy discs somewhere? Yes. The funny thing is we, my dad collected all the floppy disks,

and then we couldn't play them back. So we bought that same keyboard, that same Yamaha on eBay. So now that we can actually record all the songs. Did you sing on them? No, there was no microphone input, or at least we didn't know about it. It was all instrumental.

And instrumental music really is still where, you know, most of my heart lies, probably because I grew up this way. But it was our first exposure to like layering, right? You only had 16 tracks. You kind of have to decide what takes priority. And that was, I would say, our first exposure to producing music. And then, I mean, this sounds completely ridiculous, but it's true. The next two steps were there was a PS1. one game that was essentially like, think FL, blocky, you can pull samples in, there's velocity.

You could call, I don't know what it was called, probably in chat, GPD can tell us, but it's an PS1 game that was essentially a DA. That was my first DAO experience. And the second was, there was a thing, I believe it was called Kellogg's music maker. Okay. there was a CD inside of like corn flakes, a box of corn flakes. Like it was taped onto it. Amazing.

And is this in Germany still? Yeah. Okay. I don't know if that was a thing in America as well, but essentially your catalogs came with a music daw. And that was the first time I was able to record things. So on the PC, you know, that little, like, beige, thin microphone that everyone used to have in their offices.

So that's what we recorded everything with. Amazing. And then, so that was my first DAW, if you want to even call it that. Obviously, super minimal. And then the next step was Cubase. When did you learn English? In school, in Germany, you spent more time learning foreign languages than you, or at least when I was in school, we spent more time learning foreign languages than your own.

How many languages do you speak now? I speak three fluently and like I learned French, but genuinely. don't remember a thing. Right, right, right. Do you think in Russian, German, or English? I think at this point, this is a question I get asked a lot, and I actually don't know how to truthfully answer it. I think at this point, conveying a complex thought

is easiest in English, because I speak it all the time. When I go back to Germany, it takes me a second to readjust, and then I'm fine, but I feel like I'm not practicing my German as much to have a really, really, really. nuanced conversation, even though, of course, German is technically my primary language, because I spoke most of my life. Russian, I understand everything. I speak reasonably fluently, but it's definitely not like, yeah, I wouldn't say that

that's... Have you released any features in Russian or German? No. No, neither. That one in Japanese. Why? I actually think both languages sound extremely harsh. I don't know what a language

Well actually I do know But I don't know what German sounds to somebody Who doesn't speak German To me it feels really rough And like harsh and squarish Same with Russian actually They both sound pretty

Like you're always angry And I think English sounds much softer Like I think French is beautiful I think Italian is beautiful I think English is beautiful I don't think German is a very pretty language personally But I don't know how it feels To people who don't speak it

No, that seems pretty accurate. So let's go back to the band. So, you know, you guys are recording on a PC using that microphone. You know, what's the first song that you remember writing? I can pull up a video for you if you want. I don't have it on me, but my dad has a video recording of us. Basically, every once in a while, my dad would rent this, like, VHS camera. And he would record all of the songs that we wrote, my brother and I.

So that song still exists somewhere out there. I don't know if we have it, but we can definitely get it. So it would be like, it was keyboard music, right? It was sometimes for two people, so my brother would play the bass. I'd play the melody in chords or the other way around. And then at some point we got an organ, which was super fun. Like a B3 thing? I didn't even know what it was called, but you could play two hands at the same time,

as in like two different sounds. So we recorded some songs there, which I think I posted. at some point I posted a little clip Do your parents still have the instruments? No, we don't have the instruments, but we have tapes of it and... So there's proof.

There's proof. Those would be the first like sort of pieces that we wrote before like actually taking music seriously. We've always like joked around. The band was when we started making like serious music that mattered.

What was the conversation? I was like, no, this time let's make music that's serious. Well, I think it was my brother. really. It was his band. He was the main writer. It was his vision. I wasn't even into rock music as much. I think I didn't really get into rock music until later. Obviously, I listened to what my dad listened to, but myself as like exploring my own path in rock, that wasn't bands that my dad showed me, didn't come till theater, which is a British rock band that I got into through playing a video game because they were on the soundtrack. And I think I connected

It was this racing game called Grand Turismo, which had an amazing soundtrack, so good. And so I really got obsessed with theater. And then slowly but surely my brother's taste, which was incubus and like muse, morphed with mine. And then we got harder and harder, Michigah, Zalai, and Die Gillespiech,

you know, that realm of music. And that was the majority of our sort of musical band career. So you guys win this competition. you guys get to go record yeah was that your first time in a studio yeah that was the first experience with like an actual studio

and being in that having that music recorded what was the purpose of it after that did you guys sort of sell it or were you guys trying to get a record deal yeah that's the that's the hard part so the price was sort of like this recording essentially and we recorded our EP

and I learned so much throughout the process I've never like had to I never knew the difference of a mic positioning. I've never heard of doubling a vocal. Like, I remember vividly when he was the producer in the studio telling my brother to sing it twice so that we can double it.

I'm like, okay. And hearing that sort of choracy, like wide, it sounded professional. It's like, oh, that's what they all do to make it sound so good. Like, I just learned a lot. And Q-Base, you know, that was our first exposure to it. So then we had this EP,

which we released sort of through this, organization that was doing this competition we eventually went on to do the German competition version of it where each state sent a band and then there was like a winner of all the states essentially which we won our little state that was a competition yeah and yeah that was that was fun what from being in a band having you know, parents that are in music, the kind of music it sounds like your brother was into, none of it makes me think electronic music. No.

So what's the introduction to that? The introduction to electronic music probably gently happened through, let's just say, muse having arpeggiation here and there, right? So little bits in here. There's this band I used to love called Sky Eats Airplane. Okay. And they had, like, quite a lot of electronic elements. but like a lot of bands back then had like a sprinkle of electronic here or there.

So that was like my little bit of interest. My real introduction into electronic music was deaf punk. One more time on MTV, you watch the music video like, I don't know why I like this, but I like this. It was this weird feeling, you know, when you're, I don't know how old I was, early teens, you don't really want to like something that isn't what you told the whole world that you like. And electronic music wasn't my thing, but I really liked one more time.

So I went to a store where you can pick up an album and you would say, can I listen to this? And they give you headphones and you get to listen to the album. So that was the first time I asked if I could listen to an album at a store, which was Discovery by DefBunk, listened to it and I was like, damn, I like this. I'm going to buy it. And just for the people who don't know,

the way my life worked back then is I would have an allowance of, well, what would be now 15 bucks a month, which was the price of an album. So each month, essentially, my allowance would go to buying one album. That's why I would spend it on. So that was a big choice. It's not the luxury we have today

where you have every album ever, forever. It's like you pick carefully and then you better listen to it and discover everything there is in it because you paid for it and you're stuck with it, you know? So if you don't like it on first listen, you might listen to it again.

And maybe give it the benefit of the doubt that the people working on that piece of art have thought through this and that you as a one minute listener maybe haven't gotten it yet which we have so lost today which i'm so bummed about it is really you know it's it's hard to really go into an album listen to it more than once without jumping ship do you still listen with the same practice no i don't think so to be completely transparent like i miss it because i remember how it made me feel and how almost like the equivalent of reading a book versus like watching a show while you're on a treadmill. It's hard to argue that they both have the same inherent value, right? And I used to,

like my brother would buy a CD and, for example, Diorama by Silverchair, which is probably the most influential album to my life. And we sat down, put the CD and we sat on the couch and didn't talk for 45 minutes and listened to the album and then we would talk about it. Like, that's just not something that I do anymore. And I do miss it. Silverchair was such an interesting thing because it was the first band that came out where it felt like, you know,

I mean, the guys in the band were our age. Or they were young. Like when they first came out, they were 14 or 15 years old. So it was always, well, they can do it. And I think attainability is a big thing in being young. And I think that band had specific influence.

If you were to give advice to young musicians who are watching you now, what are three albums they should spend a month listening to? Whoa. Of any genre? Sure. I mean, what are the three albums? You just mentioned Silverchair.

Yeah, Silverchair diorama is a huge one. I would definitely say, listen to that. Let's put it this way. If I'm feeling uninspired, and I feel uninspired all the time and I would say more frequently the older I get the more frequently I feel uninspired

but what's going on I can listen to diorama right now and immediately feel inspired every single time so that's a pretty good vouch so diorama by Silverchair one of the most inspiring albums ever listen to that I would say

Justice Cross not just amazing because it is sort of musically connected it has one DNA, one sound. Well, there's still like nuances from song to song. It has one aesthetic. It still is one of the best sounding albums. When did it come out?

20 years ago, probably more than 20 years ago, I'm not sure. But it still sounds better than the vast majority of electronic music. That's pretty good. And what would be the third album? I mean, for me, this is a personal one. George Benson the best of instrumentals. It's this orange, yellow,

gold, white-ish cover with him sitting there with a guitar. That's probably my most listened to album of my life. And there's not one word in that album. It's so good. Going from being in a band

to, you know, now you're starting to discover electronic music, when do you start writing electronic music? When do I start writing electronic music? music. Well, it kind of depends, right? Because I've been messing around as a joke with electronic music to learn sort of to make electronic music along the way, to learn Dawes. The first, and I'm just going to call it like Zed song, it was called Pocolor.

And the story was, again, I grew up pretty poor. Besides that one album, I couldn't afford anything beyond that. So one side hustle, some of my friends and I would have is Pocolor. This is back when like poker stars was legal. You could play online with real money and win real money. This is before AI would just scam everyone. So we would sort of play poker and make a few extra bucks. And we would play these tournaments with thousands of people where you can actually win a few hundred bucks or a few thousand bucks. And we would sit next to each other and like whenever there's a complicated hand, we would kind of discuss it.

So two computers, two people. And I was out after like 30 minutes and those tournaments are like eight hours long. And he's in my bedroom. So I'm not going to go to bed. So I'm like, so much time to kill. I'm just going to make an EDM song. And this is like Benny Benassi satisfaction, right? This is that time.

And so I make a song about poker that is EDM just as a joke. And I've never done like an EDM song before. I don't even listen to it. I don't like it. And I have no way to gauge if it's any good because it's not what I'm doing. in a rock band. So I make the song and I just give it to all my friends, call them the Germans, all my German friends.

And they were like, dude, this is sick. You should make more of that. I'm like, really? Because this took me like three hours to make versus like spending weeks on a song. I can definitely make more. So I embarked on this journey of making an album where each song leads into the next.

So I would make a song, then I would take the end of a song, import that into the beginning of the next song and figure out how to go from there. In a sense, that's exactly where I ended up with my last album. But that was my first sort of experiment. And with each song, I would learn something new. Like there was a song called It's Automatic. The only purpose of the song was how much of a song can I make simply with automation?

Like three sounds. And everything has to come from automating it. Like Bit Crusher, Pit Shift, da-da-da. So I just was like, let's see how good I can make a song just with automating. almost like a learning experience. Then I discovered sample packs, I think, on song number six, and I didn't even know sample packs existed. It was all like since.

So I was like, oh my God, like this is starting to make more sense how people sound so good. So I started using sample packs all of a sudden my music sounds way better. And so I made this whole album that I never released, which was kind of like there to teach me how to make music, at least that kind of music. And shortly after I was like, now I'm actually like, good at this. Did you like it at that point? NMPA is our lead sponsor yet again.

What is the National Music Publishers Association? What do publishers have to do as songwriters anyway? Well, unlike artists who can be unsigned artists, there is no such thing as an unsigned writer. You can be a self-published, a co-pubisher, a published writer. Publishers only make money if songwriters make money. So NMPA goes in fights for you. They go to Congress.

and support the community. They fight DSPs to get you paid more. That's what they do. They fight for you and they fight for this podcast. So thank you for fighting for songwriters NMPA. Thank you for fighting for us too. Okay, so I use Splice. And I'm pretty sure every producer who listens to this uses Splice.

But if you don't, you need to start using Splice. They have the most incredible licensing library that you can go through for any kind of samples you can think of. but they take care of their original creators. In fact, they just came out with a beta version of their AI suite. Unlike its competitors that we know that may not take care of the original creators, every time you use Splice's AI tool, it triggers a licensing event for those original creators. So there's not a better company that I can think of right now that you can use,

where you can use the efficiency of AI and also know that you're taking care of their creation. creators and that is Splice. Did you like it at that point? Yeah, I really got into it. I discovered the moment you started liking electronic dance music. Well, besides Daft Punk and Justice, which were two outliers, Def Punk just pulled me in and justice reminded me of Daft Punk.

So somehow something was there. I just had to drop all my, like, I'm a metal guy and openly enjoy EDM. some of the key songs were and this might even sound cheesy this song called Infinity Clause remix from 2000 something that pulled me in

David Geta was like one foot in pop one foot in EDM and I was kind of like enjoying it it was fun and that mouse I remember that song to me was like ah you can make emotional

sort of vocal driven pop-esque EDM that feels real, like real music. I really like listen to that song so much. Those were like really inspiring songs for me to embark on my EDM journey. And then from there, I essentially kind of did the same thing I did with the band. I did a competition. But this time as Zed, not as my band, which was a remix contest. I mean, I'd never put together why Zed was called Zad, you know, but it's pretty clear. You know, your last name starting with a Z. Who started calling you, like, where does Zed? Because in Germany, that letter is pronounced Z. Yeah, yeah, course. It was just my, one of my best

friends, the one I played poker with, his name is also Anton. And in school, we're sitting next to each other. The teachers like, Anton, and we both, you know, not paying attention, looking at the teacher, and we got annoyed by it. So our friends gave us B and Z for the first letters of our last names. Those were just our nicknames given by our friends. And again, I never thought that I would be successful. I never thought it would ever matter. It was more so like, just so we all know, this is him, this is me, I'm Zed. It still works. It still kind of works. Do your friends still call you Zed? Yeah, it became progressively more weird because it was my nickname. So of course everyone called me Zad, but then when the whole world started calling me Zet,

it was like, it feels a weird, indirect, if you guys now started calling me Zed, it was like, it feels a weird, indirect if you guys now start calling me that so you know we kind of have he still be now you're anton now i'm back to anthony exactly but yeah i mean i you know it doesn't bother me it doesn't really matter to me what people call me i think um but it did start becoming a little more weird i think for my friends to call me by my artist's name so the the competition you you you bring this new project to this competition how'd you do in the competition i ended up winning the competition And what did that lead to you? What was the prize for that?

The price was like a few hundred dollars gift card for Beatport, which was huge because I was like buying music and that was amazing. And a release on like a pretty reputable label. It was called Strictly Rhythm, I believe. Is that the label? I forget. This is a long time ago. And the most important part of the sort of the competition is that all my MySpace messages to labels that were completely. completely rejected, all of a sudden people are like, oh yeah, sure, send us your song.

I'm like, wow. So I won a remix contest, and all of a sudden, everybody is willing to listen. And before, they didn't want to listen to that same song. So that was the biggest kind of boost, I would say, at that time. And then I was like, okay, we can do this again. I did another remix contest. I've won that one as well. That one had like a legitimate price worth in the thousands, which again, for somebody who has literally no money at all is huge.

You know, that was like life-changing. And shortly after I met Scrilix through the same sort of randomness where I was working on the song. I had this idea to make a song with as many samples, different samples, as I can possibly logically fit into one song and not just throw them in, but like the samples were supposed to connect into some sort of melody, some sort of logical way. And I had this idea and then I heard Scrillix. And it felt to me like he just did what I was going to do much better. And I was like, damn, I'm not the first anymore. Well, I'll just send it to him. And I send him a MySpace message.

It was like, hey, dude, your music is incredible. I feel like you will understand what my music is about. Check out this song that I'm working on. And the coincidence was that my message was first because I was the last person to message him. He happened to open Myspace that moment. clicks on the first message which was my song listens to it and is like

dude this is amazing like can you send me the full song I want to play it in LA tonight and I was just like and this was when Skrillix was sort of taking over the world when he was exploding so

he asked me to make a remix for him which was like yeah of course I would be honored to make a remix for you made a remix and he put it on his MySpace like when you go into his my space it's the song that plays so I had an unbelievable amount of place just because he put it on his my space and gave me so much

exposure. And then he was like, dude, you got to meet my manager, Tim. He's got to manage you, which is Tim over there, who's still managing me. So I flew to England and met Tim and Sonny and essentially been working with Tim ever since, which has been like 15 years or something like that, or more, like almost 16 years. It's amazing that the DJ culture is really, really good about when it's when it's good it's good about um sort of elders bringing in the next generation bringing the next generation you know that's um that isn't true in rock music that isn't true in pop music necessarily right some pop musicians but it's not true in other genres it's really true in edm um who are the DJs that you see in your position where you were

with Skirlix. Man, there's so many amazing, talented up-and-coming producers who are so much better than I ever was and ever will be. Like, some of those people are Ellis, who is so good, so musical, but electronic, but also organic at the same time. Mesto is an artist that I love and have been working with. Gray, obviously I ended up working with Gray a lot. We made the middle starving, adrenaline, shanty.

Like we ended up working on a bunch of music. Eleganto. If I had my laptop, I could probably name you a bunch of them. But there's so many amazing and talented artists out there. And I try my best to like, I don't have as many platforms as I wish I did. I have Zed in the Park, which is my big L.A. show, which every year I do that, I try to put those artists on, which I think last year I actually had all of those artists on. or bring them to certain countries and, you know,

open them up to remix. It's sort of the same thing I did when I grew up, which to me is still one of the best ways to get noticed, the quickest and easiest way. You take a song everyone loves, you make a remix out of it, you give another reason for people to love that song and love you at the same time.

I mean, part of what you mentioned about the EDM community is really good at lifting up others. Part of it is based on, the fact that the core of EDM is sort of remixing and playing other people's music that you love. Like a DJ traditionally was the guy flying around the world, finding rare vinals with amazing music, bringing them to his home country and spinning them to people that have never heard the song before. Right?

It's not so much, let me show you my new song as it is, let me show you this artist that I love. So a lot of the core principle of EDM is like based on supporting each other. And I remember, especially at the beginning of EDM's, I was just called Explosion, Ultra EDC, you name it, those big festivals, you would go from stage to stage and watch everybody set and like support everybody. If they play your music, you jump on and like sort of give them a shout out, that was so cool. I don't know that that's even really possible as much with bands just because of the infrastructure of like a whole band. Like it's not like you're going to bring your drum kit to the next stage while somebody else is playing. But as a DJ, it's really easy to just hop over and jump on for a song.

And it's fun. It's fun to be surrounded in an environment that is inherently supportive. How did clarity come out? Well, Clarity was just a song on an album I was working on because I had finished sort of working on Lady Gaga's music. That was the whole reason I was in L.A. at the time was to work on, this is pre-art pop, Lady Gaga art. pop and I was there to work on her album with her but her schedule changed and essentially

I had prepared 10 songs for her before I ever got to like actually work with her so at some point I was like okay well this really not much more for me to do before I get a little bit of feedback and Gaga gave me sort of the direction of the kinds of songs that she envisioned for her album which I've sort of checked off one of one at a time so I was like I might as well start like like making other music. So I started working on the album Clarity, which at the start wasn't even really meant to be an album. I was just making music.

And were you referring to the album or to the song? Both, but the album is sort of the first big album. Yeah, the album was not planned. It wasn't like, let me sit down and make an album. I was just making songs and songs that sort of, when you make your first album as an artist, your whole life goes into that. It's so easy.

Like, it's so easy because you've never done anything. So everything you make is new. So everything was every emotion, every band, everything I mentioned from Silver Chair to Daft Punk, all went into this one album. And I think five or so songs in, I was like, there could be an album if I, like, connect all of these songs and, like, fill the gaps. So I started sort of building a skeleton of like, well, this feels like a song number one. This feels like a song number six. This could be a perfect last song. and now I need like a hit

I need like this sort of connector I need this and I started actually working on like making this album and clarity the song started as a collaboration with Porter Robinson and we were going on tour together

it was called the Poseidon tour and for the tour we wanted to make a song together so he flew in we spent a few days wrote the chords sort of started the production there wasn't much sort of of a plan behind it. And then he had to go back to North Carolina.

I had to go back to Germany. And in the meantime, I'm working on my album. So I'm like continuing to work on it. I made the job for clarity, which was cool. And I kind of kept working. Eventually, I kind of made the whole song. I finished the whole song from the verse that we had at the beginning when he was there. And then I was just curious how a vocal would, because there wasn't a vocal.

It was just an instrumental. And so I had this sort of. pool of vocals and I just started dragging songs onto clarity just sorry not songs vocals just to like get a sense of like am I overproducing it because that was my big fear sometimes when you strictly work instrumentally you end up wanting to fill every void that there is for no like lack of emotion but then you put the vocal on top of it and you realize everything's fighting so that was the point in clarity where I was like, let me see what a vocal would sound like on it. And Matthew Coma had written the top line for clarity on top of Lost at Sea, which is another

song on clarity. And the vocal was so strong. And the track was sort of so, I'm just going to call it chill to make it easy to understand. I told him the vocalist far too emotional and good for the purpose of Lost at Sea, which was sort of a chill song. It wasn't like the hit. It was, you know, I told you like I wanted the album to have like a journey. It felt misaligned.

So it was like one day I will make a song with that vocal because it's so good. It just doesn't fit Lost at Sea. So I just drag it onto it. Pitch it up by a semitone. And I had this moment of like, oh my God, this is like magic. There's something that happened between that vocal that was really good. Because it wasn't intended to be. No.

And the vocal was good and the track was good. but it wasn't insane. And as soon as they both were on top of each other, it was like this lightning came out of my head. And it was like, oh my God, this is it. Like, this is what we need. So I sent just a rough demo to Porter. And I was like, Porter, I think I found the perfect vocal.

This is incredible. And at that time, Porter in his own career was kind of going a slightly different direction. He was like, he essentially didn't really like the vocal. And I was like, man, you've got to listen to this again. this is so good. It's like, I just don't, I just don't like how the vocal fits on the song.

It's too pop. And he wanted to go a different direction. It was completely fine and completely respectable because he had a vision. And I was like, okay, well, that's really tricky because now I have a deadline. Like, I have to finish my album. And, like, I don't know where I'm going to

magically pull something together. It's better than this. And it's like, then just finish the song yourself. Like, we'll do another song together. So I was like, Okay, great, because this is perfect. And so the vocal ended up on clarity. And we sadly never made a song,

which really would be about time to get back into it. Yeah, now's a good time. Let's just go through a bunch of these songs because then it kind of opens the door. You have, you know, this insane run. And, you know, going back to what makes EDM so amazing for a songwriter is it's a place. In this era, when everybody is too cool for school,

it's a place where you can really go and sing melodies, like, you know, whether it's clarity or it's starving or it's... These are, like, real song songs that in other eras, you know, the George Benson era, like, you could get away with, like, real songs, the real melodies on real chords that are not, you know, like you can do some cool stuff. You just can't get away with it. here's like a string of these songs. So tell me, you know, a story about each of these.

Let's start with Stay the Night featuring Haley Williams. So Stay the Night came after clarity. And I was like, how the hell do I sort of follow up what clarity just is becoming, still becoming? So the vocal existed without a track. And I wanted to sort of mold a track. And I wanted to sort of mold a track. around the vocal. Similarly, like in a way, clarity, the vocal existed before the track, and I was able to like marry them together. Stay the night was a little bit more like, let me write something around a vocal. And I'm pretty sure I had a flight to catch in the early morning. And so I just was like, I'm going to stay in the studio until I have to go to the flight, go straight from the studio and take my flight. And it's something about that having a heart out

made me just quickly make the best thing that I could. And so the entire piano line of Stay the Night was just me sort of riffing on the piano, playing around and then recording it and then be like, this is actually kind of good. It's still on the song. The entire was just sort of the recording of me just jamming on the piano,

which became like half of the instrumental of Stay the Night. And Haley is like going back to where I can. came from. I was going to say. It's like real rock band. Absolutely dream come true. I never thought I would get to work with all these people that, you know, were such big inspirations.

But yeah, she obviously makes the song. Break free. Break free was a string of multiple songs I was making another sort of challenge I said myself. And I thought that break free had something. So that song I just started with the instrumental. And I sent it to Max Martin. who is to me, like, one of the greatest routers ever. And I was like, Max, I feel like you would crush this.

This is so good. He's like, oh, I love it. Let me work on this. So he recorded a vocal, and we left it at that. Like, one day we'll find somebody to give this song to because it didn't fit me for Zed at that time. And then at some point he was in the studio with Ariana Grande working on her album.

And he called me up and was like, I'm in the studio with this artist, Ariana Grande, have you ever heard of her? This is a while ago. This sounds silly to say now. And I had heard of her and I thought she's so awesome because she was making real music with really awesome chords and has this insane voice.

I'm like, yeah, of course I know, Ariana. Would you be open to letting her cut it? I'm like, yeah, of course. So we just have to change the key by like five semitones, like the near worst case scenario. And yeah, then she ended up on the song and obviously the rest is sort of history. Stay, let's hear, Carla.

Stay was the first song I made after my first sort of burnout, I would say, after not taking any time off and being in the studio every single day and if not in the studio on stage. And so my Germans, my German friends, they flew in. And besides like one Vegas show, I took like five or six weeks off, just living life. and once they left, I felt refreshed, and I felt like I'm ready to start again.

And that was the first song I made after sort of an extended break. And you will probably know it sounds noticeably different than most of the songs I did before. It sort of started a new era, my first non-album era, which was a string of songs. You might mention more of them. But this was the first sort of song. The thinking was, I want a diverse. to be super wet, imagine like flying or swimming through something,

and then grab your attention as much as possible by cutting all reverbs out, and all of a sudden there's this giant vocoder and vocals, so essentially just vocals only for the pre-chorus. And that was the first of a string of songs that ended up sort of following a similar pattern. This is out of order, but their studios down the street, so I have to ask about starving. Starving. So Starving wasn't a song that I initially...

was even a part of. It was a song that Gray has been working on. And I just was going to help out on it. So I recorded, we thought that Haley, which I want to say like sort of started her musical journey around that time, would be a perfect vocal. So we recorded her, calmed her. And I was just going to sort of be on the sort of behind the scenes like with break free or beauty and a beat where I'm just a producer, not really the artist. And everybody ended up wanting me to be actually a part of the song. And yeah, it started with the guitar rhythm that Gray just made into this amazing, amazing drop.

And honestly, the majority of the work was done by the voice. I just came in with the vocal in the vocal production. I want you to know Selena Gomez. So that song was started by Ryan Teter, who was another one of those. artist that I've always been wanting to work with. And he had this, we got to find the demo somewhere, but he like sang this, I want you to know demo, which was just pretty much that snippet of the chorus. And he said that he feels like there's a lot of potential in there. And we all heard like, this could be really amazing.

So I started producing a song around it. And the way I met Selena and the way she ended up on the song, all these stories sound so stupid, but I was furniture shopping in Santa Monica and I had to pee. This is a true story. And I recognized where I was in Santa Monica, which is pretty much where my studio was at Interscope. So I was like, oh, I don't know where to pee, but like my studio is right there. So I'm just going to stop by and pee there.

So I stopped by and I was going to walk into the studio just to use the restroom and John Janik, who is the head of Interscope still today. was walking out. I'm like, oh, what's up? Is that? What are you doing here? I'm like, I'm just here to pee. I'm furniture shopping.

It's like, have you, literally the next thing, have you ever met Selena? She's in room, whatever, A, B. I'm like, no, I don't think I've ever met her. It's like, let me introduce you. So from having to pee, it went into like him just randomly introducing me to Selena who's working on her stuff. And we like chatted, exchange information. And I went on to peeing and doing my furniture shopping.

and then like a few days later I was in the studio and she came by my room and so we started chatting like listening to music yada yada yada yada and long story short she ended up being the singer

when I want you to know that only would have never happened if I wasn't furniture shopping in Santa Monica and had to be did you ever get the furniture I don't even know if I ever got the furniture to be honest with you but I got an amazing song on of it

the middle is an insane story because of how many features notoriously people cut it. What is special about Merrin Morris? I mean, first of all, having worked with a lot of singers, and you will know how that feels, some just are better to work with than others. And Marin is such an amazing singer to work with,

so open to sort of trying to sing things different ways, giving you 15 takes if you need 15 takes, being sick still showing up and like giving her all she sort of has the best of everything she has like the country raspiness she has the pop sensibility she can she has an incredible range um and like you mentioned that song went through so many singers i could make the middle of the album if i wanted to at this point maybe should but a lot of it was crazy because it was at some point i remember like saying that I think the song will just never come out. We are so many singers in, some of my favorite singers,

some of the artists I've always wanted to work with, and nothing makes me feel the way I want to feel when I hear that amazing top line. And so we ended up recording a vocalist, and I'm not going to name anyone, but I recorded a vocalist that I thought was really good on the middle. Finally, after like eight that I was like, this just isn't it.

And then she jumped off the song. And she didn't, she felt like she didn't want to be on that song anymore, which was like, well, either the song sucks or her judgment is really one or the other. But it left me like sort of, I don't know what the right word is, but insecure in a way. And then we found another singer. And, you know, I take comping extremely seriously. Like recording is one day. But then I will spend four, five, six days comping one single. vocal. So just recording another vocalist isn't just another day. It's essentially another week.

And then, so I finished comping that entire new vocalist. And I'm like, I think this is even better. This is like, I'm so glad we ended up here. Singer jumps off the song. And at that point, we already have locked in a whole performance at the Grammys, a whole commercial with Target based on a song that doesn't have a vocalist. So it left me in this really, terrible space because I've had all these plans and now I'm sitting there with no singer. So we kind of went back through all the people we've auditioned. And I don't know if I had even heard Maren's version until then. And so my manager sent me the version.

I was like, well, it's not sung the way I want, but her voice is incredible. Like, I don't know enough about her until I actually try. and so I flew to Nashville as soon as possible recorded her and within a few minutes was like this is the one this is going to be the one

and then she ended up being on it and probably would have not been the same song without her are you ever wrong about what song should have been the single oh I'm wrong way more often than I'm right but at the same time

music isn't really a science I've been making music the vast majority of my life, including my childhood. I've been doing this for 30 years. I still have no clue what I'm doing. All I'm doing is I'm chasing a feeling. And whether a single is picked correctly or incorrectly is like based on a bunch of things that are happening in life,

in the world and how people perceive them. I think I've had some songs that deserve to be way bigger. and I had some songs that had huge successes that I didn't even know anything about because I'm not like, it wasn't like a hawk looking at the numbers. Like, I love Happy Now. I love that song.

I had no idea that song had like, 400 million place on Spotify. I just, it was never on the radio. So I just assumed that the numbers probably wouldn't be so crazy until at some point I think I was playing in another country and sort of trying to decide what to play in another country, which is a whole different, universe essentially. And I realized how big that song was. I had no clue. I had never even played

break free myself for the first four years until I heard another DJ play it. And I saw the whole crowd sing along. And I was like, oh, I didn't know that song was so big. And another one is beauty and a beat. I started playing last year, like 12 years later. And the reason is Porter Robinson who got married and invited all his friends and DJs and asked everybody to play one song that was really meaningful to him. And he was like, will you please play Beauty and a Beat? Because he loves that song. He was there when I was working on it. And I was like, of course, this is your wedding. I'll play whatever you want. And I played Beauty and a Beat. And I looked around and everybody was singing along. The bartenders were like mixing, drinking, singing along.

And just, I don't know why, but for some reason, I never think that anyone knows my music. Like, that's always been this inherent feeling I have since I was a kid, maybe scarred by the band. I don't know what, but my initial instinct is nobody knows anything I'm working on. And so it wasn't until 12 years later that I saw that everybody knows the song that I started playing literally last year. Are you where you're supposed to be right now? At this interview? Sure, but do you have imposter syndrome? I was asked this question, and I had never really heard about imposter syndrome.

I was asked this exact question in my last interview. And I feel like I do to a certain extent. You asked me earlier if there are people like where I was back then. And what kind of bums me out, to be honest, is like there are all these people like Ellis and, you know, the ones I mentioned earlier, that are so good and so talented. it and I feel like I'm not really able to convince the world of how amazing these artists are. And it like, I don't know what the right word is. It definitely bums me out because I have the feeling that when I started being a DJ, if you made something extraordinary, you would get hurt.

Like it heard, not hurt. It would cut through. And I remember like on the SoundCloud days, I would upload a song and it was good. it would get good place. I would make something that's amazing and it would get amazing place. It was like a direct correlation of quality.

If you really are good and unique, everybody will want to share your music because it's so special. Fast forward, I feel like we live in a world that is so severely overstimulated with average music that your average human doesn't even know

how to differentiate something that's extraordinary and something that's just completely boring. I feel like a background to a video will give more energy to a song than the quality of the music itself. Telos came out and has such an amazing variety of features, but even going through all those songs that I listed, you know, it seems like you do really well

with female vocalists. Why? That's not the first time I'm being asked this question. I've never had an answer. I think my best answer is that most female ranges are higher than guys' ranges. And so to me, inherently, guys' vocals tend to be a better fit for, like, a more rich, warm, like, think John Mayer. Like, a girl in that song doesn't make sense, in my opinion. but when I want that feeling of like I'm yelling from the top of a mountain, I want everyone to hear me,

I just feel like a girl is typically going to have that voice. Or somebody that has an extremely like a Benson Boone who has a range that rivals certain female voices, you know. And something about my music, it's possible, and I'm literally not scientific about this at all. But maybe my first hits were with girls. And so now people associate Zet music with a few. female vocal, it's totally possible, but something about a female voice on my music just feels right. Tell me about the Philharmonic version. Of Clarity?

Of Telos. Of Telos. Well, okay, so it's not the LA Philharmonic version, but essentially it is a, to backpedal just a little bit, diorama by Silverchair, wildly inspiring album, has a rock band almost grudge before, or now all of a sudden having a full orchestra on their album. I was like, that's so awesome. It pulls on strings that just rock music can't pull from me. So I was like having this vision,

what would it be to do the same thing with an electronic album? Because that's my deep inspiration. Like, that album means so much to me. And Telos is sort of my autobiography of working with the artists that inspired me. And Diorama was such a wildly inspiring album that I wanted that same connection. So all of Telos has an orchestra all over it. And I felt like in the process of making Telos,

oftentimes I had to decide on what takes priority. And in electronic music, sometimes the kick just has to have the space, everything else has to be side-chained, and a lot of the intricacies of the orchestra got lost, which is totally fine and intended for the regular version of Telos. but I wanted there to be a version of Telos that is just purely focused on the,

I call it the music chart. Like, what's the music, what's the DNA below all the sounds? And to me, the best way to express that would be just purely with an orchestra that plays every single instrument in its full glory. And that's my next big project. It's sort of, hey, did you like Telos? Yes, you're going to love this.

Did you not like Telos? listen to the orchestra version, you might realize there's a lot more on Telest than you've sort of heard at first attempt. Well, thanks for doing the podcast, man. I mean, you know, when Clarity came out, when the album came out, I remember looking up the inversions, not like the chord changes, but the inversions. You're like, man, this stuff's so beautiful. So much of it was so beautiful.

And so, you know, It's easy to, for people to have assumptions and kind of cliches about what certain kinds of music is. But it was nice to hear, like, you want to sing on those songs. So it was, it was a pleasure to see going from like, well, what happens if you make beautiful music in this world and see where it's gone? And now you've, you know, headline every festival in the world and done all the things, all from, starting from a place of making beautiful music. So I appreciate you being on the podcast, man. It's my pleasure.

Thank you for having me, man. Yeah, congrats. Thank you so much. We hope you enjoyed this episode. It was produced by me and Joe London in association with Mega House Music Group. If you like this episode, go give us a rating at wherever you listen to your podcast.

And make sure to follow us at And The Writer is on all your socials. We'll see you next week.