How Darren Criss Got Steve Aoki For Dave Matthews Band Remix: ‘He Took It Very Seriously’

Darren Criss and Steve Aoki’s new dance track, “Crash Into Me,” started as a joke: what if someone made DMB EDM?

“I’ve always had this bit with friends that if I was ever an EDM DJ, I’d take Dave Matthews [Band]’s six-minute, seminal ‘Crash Into Me,’ and I would truncate it into a three-minute club banger,” Darren told Access exclusively at a recent listening party-slash-workout class for the single, thrown at Barry’s Bootcamp.

“It would just be really fun, unexpected – and it’s just fun to recontextualize songs,” said the “American Crime Story” actor, who considers himself a ’90s kid and has played in tons of ’90s cover bands. “It just started off as a joke, because there’s a drop in the song … And I was like, man, if I just had CO2 cannons and a four-on-the-floor, people like me at a club would be like, ‘Is this ‘Crash’? This is insane!'”

Despite largely writing it off as a “silly” idea, Darren decided to run it by Steve when they recently met.

“When I gave him this pitch, he took it very seriously. And he’s like, ‘That’s awesome. Let’s do it,'” the “Glee” alum said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvrp6puFsuk

The duo recorded the cover “immediately,” and the result is “uptempo” and “unapologetically fun” – a totally different vibe than the original.

Darren said it’s a “delight” to see fellow ’90s kids’ faces light up when they realize what song it is two seconds in – but not everyone gets the reference.

“What’s incredible is that there’s people below 27 that hear it, and have no idea,” he said. “They just think that it’s a cool song. And as a rabid consumer of music from all decades, this is a tradition that has been going on forever, where people contextualize songs they love growing up into new arrangements for new audiences to listen to. I can think of hundreds of songs that I heard as a kid that I didn’t know until later in life was a cover. So, I’m just kind of adding to that.”

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