Martin Solveig Q&A

French DJ and producer Martin Solveig has taken the dance music world by storm with hit singles like 'Hello' and 'Ready 2 Go'. His music has sold into the millions and he's had over 41 million views on YouTube with his webisodes that go by the same title as his fourth album Smash, which has just been released in Australia.

Solveig's playful tunes and tounge-in-cheek humour have earned him his popularity, not to mention collaboration requests from huge stars like Madonna. We spoke to Solveig about the album and what it was like working with the queen of pop.

You've produced tracks on Madonna's new album. What was the most surprising thing about working with her?The simplicity of the communication. The simplicity of the way we communicated on an organisation level. Recording those songs for that album was something that quickly became very natural and I think that really helped us to paint something interesting.

How involved is she in the recording process? Did you work very closely together?
She is as involved as you can be in the recording process. This was a very good and big surprise for me! I was assuming that she would spend only an hour or two in the studio per day and come and see where we were and say, "Ok I like this, I don't like that. I'll sing this. Bye!" And absolutely not... I mean we co-produced the tracks and it's not just written on the credits "co-produced by Martin Solveig and Madonna", we literally co-produced the tracks. I mean, at some point she wanted to choose the sound of a snare drum or a synth and that kind of stuff. She was really in the session!

‘Hello’ was shot with a tennis stadium, audience of 15,000 and ‘Ready 2 Go’ with a football stadium that fits 65,000 people. What’s next? Can we expect more episodes of Smash?
Well one of the next episodes of Smash is touring in Australia with probably, overall, 150,000 or 200,000 people, if you combine all the festivals! Hahaha. But that was last year during the Christmas tour and I think the numbers are exaggerated. The only thing that happened is that the story changed a little bit with the project of Madonna, which arrived in the middle of the album. So I had to put this [Smash videos] on hold for a little bit and of course then the story changes, which is fine. Then we re-group in a couple of weeks and we’ll see where we can carry on. But, that’s the beauty of this – it’s very open, it’s very crazy – so we can always adapt to any kind of change.

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