It was an absolute pleasure to interview Lucas & Steve. The duo sat down with us for a chat on their latest releases, life during a pandemic in the Netherlands, and working with Grammy-winning act Blackstreet.
Lucas & Steve is a Dutch DJ duo consisting of Lucas de Wert and Steven Jansen. They’ve been making music together since 2010 and signed to Spinnin’ Records in 2014.
Last year, they had to reschedule 150 shows due to the spread of COVID-19. While the duo is eager to be able to tour again, they have been keeping themselves busy in the studio meanwhile: they released a 17-track debut album, Letters to Remember, in 2020. Most recently, they released a brand new single earlier this year––“No Diggity,” with American R&B group Blackstreet.
Lucas shares what it was like collaborating on “No Diggity” during quarantine: “We arranged the recording from a distance, using FaceTime. It is really strange to do such a recording on such a distance. If you’re not really in the room, you must listen carefully to the audio that you get sent on FaceTime. To see if everything is done in the way as we expected it and hoped it to be. But in the end, it worked out amazingly well!”
It worked out amazingly well for both the artists and the fans: the song has been out for less than a month and already boasts over three million streams on Spotify. It is a rework of the original song released in 1996 by Blackstreet, featuring Dr. Dre and Queen Pen, which won a Grammy Award in 1998 for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.
The remake comes only months after the release of Lucas & Steve’s debut album, Letters to Remember. When asked what the main sources of inspiration for the album were, the duo answers:
“Avicii, of course, has always been a big inspiration. I think he might have been the one who had the biggest influence on exactly that intersection point between dance music and pop music…. Besides that, we went quite wide with the variety of music on it. There are definite pop tracks on it, some really slow tempo songs, and some songs which are more EDM-minded. We just wanted to explore all of that and that’s the beautiful thing about an album, you don’t necessarily have to stick to one specific genre or one BPM range.”
When music comes from the heart, as is the case with these two passionate DJs, they draw inspiration from their personal experiences to make tracks. As for Lucas, he got engaged last October. When asked if the proposal inspired the album or if the album inspired the proposal, Lucas replies, “It might be a little bit in the middle. I was planning to propose anyway, but still there’s one song in the album that really reminds me of her, and that is ‘I Want It All.’ If you listen to the lyrics, you’ll know why.”
To learn more about Lucas & Steve, including a retelling of when Chauncey of Blackstreet pulled out a Grammy during a recording session, listen to our interview with them below.
Interview By
James Bowers
