Calvin Harris: Defining a Decade

Calvin Harris is a name synonymous with the 2010s. He produced some of the biggest hit songs of the decade, collaborating with some of the most prominent artists in the world like Rihanna, Haim, Florence Welch, and many more. He began the decade making disco songs in his bedroom in Scotland and posting them on MySpace. He ended the decade as the highest-paid and most sought after producer/DJ in the world. Let’s go over just how Harris became a household name all across the globe.

Harris, real name Adam Wiles, was born in Scotland in 1984. Harris didn’t just wake up one day and started getting paid millions of dollars to just show up at festivals, but I don’t think he would have wanted it that way either. At only 17 years old, after already tinkering around with his sound, and creating some of his own instrumentals, Harris decided to move to London to further his music career. When speaking with Forbes back in 2013, he spoke on his lack of ambition to go to music school: “I was 17, and I thought I already knew everything”. That is something I’m sure resonates with many people, especially creatives. Harris spent a year in London attempting to find singers to perform on the instrumentals he made. During his year in London, he only found one singer, ran out of money, and decided to move back to Scotland to live with his parents. The time was 2003, and the popular social media platform MySpace was beginning to gain popularity. Harris used MySpace’s growing popularity to his advantage by connecting with songwriters and A&R’s on the platform, and (in his own words) “begging for them to listen to his beats.” After a week of using MySpace, Harris connected with Mark Gillespie, a booking agent at a record company, who liked his music — just a month after meeting, Gillespie signed Harris to a contract with EMI Publishing.

Harris released his debut album in the summer of 2007, I Created Disco. The album was what you would expect with the title, it was an hour-long disco tape, with sprinkles of electro-house mixed into a few tracks. Harris produced and performed the vocals on the entirety of the project. The two lead singles, “The Girls” and “Acceptable in the 80s” landed themselves in the top 10 of the U.K charts. Harris was on his way to becoming a star, as he had the talent and the ability to make a hit. His follow up project, Ready for the Weekend, featuring pornstar Lindsey Strutt on the cover in a pair of sunglasses entirely covered with beads, was released in 2009. The album debuted at number one on the U.K charts and became Harris’s first number one album. Ready for the Weekend was very similar to I Created Disco — that Harris produced and performed the vocals on 11 of the 14 tracks on the tape. The beats were slightly less poppy, and Harris seemed to be moving into a more traditional club sound.

With two albums under his belt, Harris knew he wanted to make a change stylistically, and it wasn’t about how he was constructing his instrumentals, it was about who was singing on them. Harris decided that he no longer wanted to sing on a majority of his songs. He felt like it took time away from the production aspect of his songs, which is the part he truly loved. While speaking with Billboard in 2010, Harris said, “[he] thought [he’d] exhausted every avenue [on the two albums] and it takes a long time to make [him] sound good, which is why [he] stopped singing live as well. [He’d] like to think of someone [..] better-looking, a better singer, better dancer to be the frontperson for the song.” Harris made this decision at a good time; he had a number one album under his belt, and more artists were looking to work with him. 2011 would prove to be one of Harris’s most critical years, as he was asked to be a supporting act for Rihanna’s upcoming Loud tour. Rihanna at the time (and still) was one of the biggest pop-stars in the world, and Harris’ opportunity to tour with her worked wonders for his career. After the tour, Harris was prepping his third studio album, which would be titled 18 Months, and he had already released the first single, “Bounce”, featuring Kelis. Harris also got to work with Rihanna and produced two songs with her, “We Found Love” and “Where Have You Been”, the former featured on Harris’s upcoming album. In late 2012, Harris released the album, and it skyrocketed him to superstardom. Eight of the album’s 15 songs landed on the top 10 of the Billboard charts, which broke a record previously held by the King of Pop, Michael Jackson. Ed Sheeran would inevitably break the record in 2017 upon the release of his album, Divide. “We Found Love” went number one in 27 different countries, and was number one on the Billboard charts for ten consecutive weeks, becoming Harris’s and Rihanna’s longest-running number-one song.

Calvin Harris had become one of the biggest artists in the world in just a matter of a few years. He became the most sought after DJ at every electronic music festival, and stories even circulated about him getting paid upwards of two million dollars to show up to a club and not even perform. Harris spent most of his 2013 touring music festivals such as Ultra Miami, Tomorrowland, EDC Las Vegas, and many more, all of which he headlined and was the top-billed artist at the festival. Harris had made a name for himself, and he had created his own brand. Calvin Harris was a guy who seemed to the general public that he could make a hit song by the snap of a finger. He rarely did interviews, so there was lore around him that made him much more exciting. In 2014, Harris was one of the headliners at the biggest music festival in North America, Coachella. Harris’s set on the first weekend attracted the second-largest crowd in the festival’s history, only surpassed by Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg’s 2012 performance featuring a hologram of Tupac (Harris was set up to fail, how does one possibly exceed a hologram of Tupac?). Later that year, Harris released another album filled with hits. The project was titled Motion and became his second consecutive album that debuted at number one on the Billboard charts. The album had almost as many hits as 18 Months, including the likes of “Summer”, “Blame”, “Outside”, “Open Wide”. Harris was continuing to make great dance music that people wanted to hear not only at a festival but also in the car, at the gym, riding the bus, he was doing it all.

In 2015 and 2016, Harris was reasonably quiet, aside from the release of two hit singles, “How Deep Is Your Love” with Disciples, and “This Is What You Came For” with his most frequent vocal collaborator, Rihanna. The songs were similar to the hits he had produced in the past, but “This Is What You Came For” had hints of tropical flares throughout the entire instrumental. Harris did not offer any glimpses into what he wanted to do musically at the time, but in hindsight, it would be his most significant stylistic change to date. Many critiqued Harris’s music as following the same formula for a hit-song, something I don’t think Harris cared much for, he just wants to make people dance. In 2017, Harris would move almost entirely away from the EDM genre and drop the album of the summer; Funk Wav Bounces Vol 1. Harris had been making EDM for his whole life, and he wanted a new challenge, to make a hip-hop, r&b, and funk-infused album. Harris enlisted the best features a producer could ask for, including Migos, Travis Scott, Snoop Dogg, Pharrell Williams, Ariana Grande, and Katy Perry, to name a few. The most prominent feature comes from the albums debut single, “Slide”, a bass-heavy track which opens with beautiful hints of piano and the pitched-up vocals of Frank Ocean. Frank Ocean and Calvin Harris is not a collaboration that many music fans would want, but it makes so much sense. Frank Ocean’s formula is to make music and keep his fans waiting for it while giving them (his fans) and the media as little information about him as possible, giving himself lore. Harris has done the same; he just likes to make music, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. That’s why hearing Frank sing the catchy hook is so groundbreaking;

“Do you slide on all your nights like this?

Do you try on all your nights like this?

I might put some spotlight on the side

Whatever comes, comes through clear”

The album features a song titled “Heatstroke”, which features Atlanta rapper, Young Thug, Pharrell Williams, and pop star Ariana Grande. The sheer audacity to put Young Thug’s grimy drug-fueled lyrics on a song with one of the world’s biggest pop stars (Ariana Grande) is what makes it so great. Harris had curated the perfect guest list for his album, but he didn’t just make cookie-cutter songs, he mixed rappers and singers with one another that nobody would have imagined could ever mesh on a song. The album is a masterclass on hit-making and Harris seemed to take a lot of inspiration from Caribbean music on this project. He incorporated a lot of bass throughout the project, most of which he provided himself. Harris proved to the world that he didn’t just know how to make dance music, he could produce multiple genres and do it well. The album is summer; the album is happiness, the album is precisely what you want to listen to on a summer night when you’re at the beach.

With five albums now under his belt, 21 top ten songs on the Billboard 100, eight number ones (a record for the decade), Calvin Harris solidified himself as the greatest producer of the 2010s. Songs that Harris has made have become ingrained in the brains of the people who lived through them. “We Found Love” is a dance-pop track released in 2012 that is still played at clubs to this day. He made songs like “Sweet Nothing” and “Summer”, club tracks that anybody in the world could dance to, and then just five years later was making songs like “Slide” and “Feels” which everybody could dance to, but you will never hear them in a club. Harris solidified himself in the music world in the 2010s, and he will go down as one of the greatest producers to ever live. To look back and think that he only sold one of his beats while living in London for a year, and now if you wanted a Calvin Harris instrumental, you’d have to sell your house. That is success, and that is Calvin Harris.