Tiesto & Junkie XL — Obsession. Brief story behind the track

Junkie XL talked about how he recorded Obsession with Tiësto. He didn’t say much, so I’ll remind you of the context. Tom Junkie XL (the one who made A little less conversation) was already an accomplished musician by the early noughties, with his own style and albums. His tracks were licensed for video games, and he himself helped with the sound of heavy rock bands. Tiësto (the one who made Traffic and Adagio for strings) was only promising in the early noughties. Yes, he had a solid DJ career in his native Netherlands, and there was a breakthrough remix of Delerium, but in terms of his own music, Tijs wasn’t doing great at all; his solo works sounded dull as ditchwater.

Tiësto’s brilliant talent as a composer was revealed by the young Dennis Reijers, who the future great Dutchman met in 1998 through mutual friends in a music shop. In collaboration with Dennis, Tiësto “wrote” all his best tracks, albums and remixes up to and including the Elements of Life period. After that, there was already a whole bunch of ghostwriters on behalf of the Planet’s Number One DJ.

But at the beginning of the noughties, Tiësto was looking for a way to gain a foothold and therefore actively collaborated with his venerable countrymen: Ferry Corsten, Armin van Buuren, and Tom ‘Junkie’ Holkenborg. In general, it’s clear who needed this more. Junkie said that they recorded Obsession in 2000 in shifts in his Amsterdam studio and in several sessions (each of the participants had their own concert schedule); and in the breaks they played draft versions for the audience to evaluate. The Obsession whisper was taken from an ad for Calvin Klein men’s perfume.

Now it may seem crazy: serious people wrote a 12-minute dance track, half of which is just an intro. But these were the laws of the progressive trance genre and the discos of the time. In our era of restlessness, when even the radio versions tend to be one-and-a-half-minute songs (why stretch it out for longer), turning on the full version of Obsession is the right way to empty a dancefloor.