Junkie XL (aka Tom Holkenborg)

Talented electronic producer and musical genius Junkie XL is in such high demand that it seems as though everyone in the world — or perhaps something close to that — is longing for the opportunity to have their song, festival, film, or game touched by a bit of his magic. Luckily for them, he’s filled with as much dedication and tireless energy as he is with artistic inspiration. One of the more recent figures to request his services was none other than Madonna, who put Junkie XL at the top of her list of desired remixers for her hit song, “4 Minutes.” The resulting track has garnered him a Grammy nomination in the category of “Best Remixed Recording (Non-Classical).”

Junkie XL (aka Tom Holkenborg) took the time to talk with Buzzine about his musical background, his various projects, and even peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Ashley Schaeffer: As a classically trained musician, at what point did you realize you were more interested in making a career of producing and mixing music over performing with traditional instruments?

Junkie XL: Well, it went really gradually. I mean, yes, I was brought up as a traditional musician with classical training and stuff, but I was 17, or maybe even 16 when I started working in a music store where they sold the early generations of music computers. This was back in the ‘80s. I’m 41 right now, so I started working in the store around ’84 or ’85. That was around the same time as when the first synthesizers became available for everyone. It was still expensive, but it was available. I knew from that point on that my music always would have a combination between electronic and what I learned as a traditional musician. Later, I started also working at a radio studio when I was 17 or something like that. That’s when I really got into the technical side of things — got into mixing and eventually producing as well.

AS: A lot of people have the wrong impression of electronic music producers and believe that they work only in the digital form. After watching your appearance on a Dutch television program, I got to see how you used a bass guitar, electric guitar, and piano to add layers to the original version of “4 Minutes.” Do you provide all the instrumentation for your remixes yourself?

JXL: Yes, I do. I started as a drummer… Well, technically, I started playing piano when I was four, drums when I was seven, guitar when I was 11, and bass when I was 14. I even played violin for a while because my mom taught violin. So yeah, I play all those instruments and I have them all here. I have a bunch of different acoustic guitars here — semi-electric, electric, different models from different countries, huge amount of amps, the weirdest guitar pedals… I’ve got a drum kit, percussion tools… I’ve got everything here, so depending on what I work on, I use those instruments or not. It depends on the project and depends if it fits. But if I do use them, then I always do it by myself.

AS: I know the name “Junkie XL” comes from your habit of spending long hours in the studio. Do you still slave away at your work to the same extent as you always did?

JXL: Old habits die hard! It doesn’t necessarily feel like slaving away. It only happens now and then when you work on a movie or a video game where the workload gets really intense and where you start at 3:00 in the morning and you work ‘til, like, 11:00 at night. That sometimes really feels like work, but most of the time I work at my studio, which is more like a company setup — office manager and a couple of assistants. I work during the daytime on the more commercial projects between records (things like games and commercials and films). And then at home, I’ve got a home studio, and when I come home, I work really late at night on my own music. But that doesn’t feel like work. That’s just like playing around. It’s just relaxing.

AS: There has been a generous surge of new applications and hardware gear for DJs and producers in recent years. Do you feel like these things boost creativity when making music?

JXL: Yeah, absolutely. Creativity is like a weird animal. You get inspiration from many different things. I can get inspiration from cooking. It’s my current hobby. Cooking is very similar to making music in that you use, like, 10 or 15 different ingredients, but in the wrong balance, the meal is completely off. But if it’s right, it’s really good. You also constantly combine things together that obviously are not great. The most simple example is a sandwich: peanut butter and jelly. I’d never had a peanut butter [and jelly] sandwich in my life. It’s a typical American thing. When people are talking about it, I’m just like, “Come on…jelly and peanut butter?” And then you eat it and you’re like, “Damn, this is the shit.” It’s very similar to music. I’m working on a dance record with Dolly Parton vocals, and you’re like, “What? That can’t be any good.” But if you do it right, it’s just like, “Man, that’s amazing.” It’s just one of those. The beautiful thing about music is that it’s so global and accessible by people easily, and the threshold to get in contact with new music is so incredibly low because of the Internet that it’s a unique situation where you’re constantly coming into contact with new things, new vibes…it’s just beautiful. It’s a beautiful industry to be in. I mean, it sucks to be a record company, but from a music-maker point of view, it’s the most amazing time period to live in.

Junkie XL at Coachella 2008 (Getty Images)

AS: Do you think the vinyl DJ is experiencing its death rattle?

JXL: No, I think vinyl is actually making a comeback because CDs are a shitty medium in a way, when it comes to packaging. It’s the shittiest thing on the planet. It’s plastic boxes, the artwork doesn’t look as great… Some people try to do something really unique with it, but vinyl is just, when you have it in your hands, you have something in your hands. It’s not like, “Oh, this is just another CD.” No, it’s an album, and many people like that. I think the amount of people that are actually collecting vinyl is getting bigger over the years, but when you talk about just deejaying vinyl, I would almost say that’s a little old-fashioned because there are so many tools out there where you can be so creative with playing live.  I don’t deejay — I only do live performances with computers, but if you deejay with records, you can basically play one record and then you can play another record. That’s pretty much all you can do. And with all the new CD players and DVD players, all the software that’s out there, you’re not only able to play one record after another, but you can be really creative. You can loop certain parts, you can filter out the vocals from one track and mix it with the other, you can completely change around the arrangement of the song that you’re playing…and I think that’s the way forward where DJs will express themselves and put themselves apart from other DJs. It’s a whole new world, and a lot of DJs are getting into it and seeing what they can do with it. It requires completely different skills. Fifteen years ago, you would be a hero if you were able to mix two vinyl records together seamlessly into one another, but that, nowadays, is boring. Everybody can do it, especially with the software in the new CD players. You don’t even have to worry about what the bpm is of the new songs, so that’s not a skill anymore. The real skill is how do you create a DJ set of two hours that’s really exciting and musically triggering and compelling, and does something to the listener. DJs are forced almost to become musicians now.

AS: While performing, how much of your live sets are pre-planned versus spur of the moment?

JXL: It always depends. Basically, I prep things really thoroughly. That doesn’t mean the set that I’m playing, but the individual bits, so the tracks that I have are pretty much all the tracks with me that I’ve worked on over the past 10 years — all my original work and remixes that I’ve done, and even some things I did for movies and commercials. I have the individual parts with me of the songs — so the drums, bass, guitars, vocals, synthesizers, special effects — separately. I also carry around a stereo mix, and then it just depends. I usually have three or four tracks that I pick from that I start with, and then I basically build the set from there. If I play Coachella, for instance, last year in a tent, between M.I.A. and Hot Chip, you do the completely different live set than last week when I played in Vegas and I played in a dance club environment and was able to play for like two and a half hours. The set is completely different; it’s a different crowd, the transitions are way smoother, I jam on the instrumental parts and fuck around with effects, really subtle so it creates a trippy vibe… When you play Coachella, for instance, it’s the closest it gets to rock ‘n’ roll. It’s like: one song, one song, one song. Bam, bam, bam! Just like, fast transitions, guitars, more aggressive mix…so it’s a different vibe — and still the same songs!

AS: You played at quite a few festivals in 2008. Which would you say you enjoyed the most?

JXL: Well, I really love the festivals like Coachella, and there are four or five festivals in the world that I think are the most amazing festivals, and Coachella is one of them. Then there’s Summer Sonic and Fuji Rock in Japan. Then there’s Lowlands in the Netherlands, where I’m from, and then there’s Creamfields in South America and Roskilde in Denmark. There are a couple of those festivals where you can basically see every music style that you’re into and then, besides that, you can see performances — you can see certain acts. Those festivals are like dressed-up in really weird themes, they have artists that have put sculptures everywhere, there are movie theaters where you can watch the weirdest movies on the planet. People usually camp out there. It creates a really unique vibe where people go there Thursday night, they start setting up their tents, and they stay ‘til Monday morning, and then the festival starts Friday late afternoon and then goes ‘til Sunday night. Usually, those festivals have very unique headliners. It’s not necessarily the most popular bands. Last year, at Coachella, it was Roger Waters performing Dark Side of the Moon. And it’s so amazing to be there and then see super young kids that have never even heard of Dark Side of the Moon and be completely captured by some history. I think it’s amazing. It’s great to be at festivals where the line-up is every hot band on the planet. It’s like, “Okay, we have that band. Okay, we have that band… And the headliner is Coldplay.” Great, but those festivals usually do something really unique — unique reunion shows, or cross-work, or something like that where it’s really unique. 

Junkie XL (Getty Images)

AS: You can tell how much Sasha has been influenced by working with you. Has your style been heavily affected during your collaborations with him or any other musicians?

JXL: Well, it was really great to get to work with him. I went out to his house once in England, in 2001. We worked on a track for just like a couple hours in the afternoon, and it really clicked right from the start. We planned another session in my studio in Amsterdam, and basically he came over but never left. He stayed for nine months. We worked really intensely on that album, and I think we learned a lot from each other. I learned a lot from him, like certain vibes he was going for, what he wanted to achieve with this record, and on the other hand, I think he learned a lot from me on how to produce an electronic record. How do you keep it interesting listening to it at home or even when you play it out at a club? I think that’s the secret for electronic music, where you can make a club tune that works really well in a club, but it’s not really all that thriving or interesting to listen to at home. I don’t think that’s where the clash is. They’re two different mediums, but they can come together. It’s interesting to listen to music at home but at the same time to sit down and enjoy albums at clubs, and I’m really happy with how that record turned out. It wasn’t the biggest commercial success on the planet, but at least Sasha and I are still really happy with it, and the core fans are as well, so that was nice.

AS: Your versatility and skills seem to offer you a wide range of projects to choose from, including the music for video games. With such a busy schedule, do you ever get a chance to play the games you make music for?

JXL: I’m not a gamer anymore. I was a gamer until ’93, ’94, then I pretty much had to stop because there’s a reason my name is Junkie XL. I get highly addicted, and I was to video games. I would play them eight hours a day, six hours a day, and once music started taking off, that didn’t work anymore. But the games that I work on, I do play, and I also get them with special codes or a lighter version so I can get through all the levels without spending eight hours getting there, if you know what I mean, because I need to know what’s going on in a game to come up with and write music, but if I do a game for EA Games, they cannot expect to send a game and be trying to figure out for three months how to get to the highest level and then, “Okay guys, I’m there…I can make the music now.” That’s not how it works, and usually, when the game is in early development of the process, I usually get little QuickTime movies to play on my computer without actually playing the game.

AS: Your remix of “4 Minutes” was a wild success and garnered you your first Grammy nomination. Did you share the final version of the remix with Madonna, Timbaland, or Justin Timberlake before it was released?

JXL: Well, obviously, you have to. Those two have final say.

AS: How did they react?

JXL: They thought it was amazing. Madonna is one of those few artists that is on one hand super commercial in what she does, but she’s also super hands-on with everything that goes on in her company. Whether it’s her clothing, how she wants her live show, who the musicians are, and also who the remix should be made by… When she was done with this album, she had a short list of three remixers that she wanted to remix her single, and I was on the top of that list. So I got a call from her record company saying exactly that, and I said I’m more than happy to do a remix, and I made two remixes: the normal mix and the other is the “Dirty Dub.” They’re both considered remixes, so they both are nominated for one track, and when I was done with those remixes, I sent them out to the record company, and immediately both of them went to Madonna, and apparently she was really happy with them. I got a call back, like, half an hour or 45 minutes later that she approved both of them.

AS: What kinds of projects do you have lined up for this year?

JXL: My work is pretty much what we already talked about. The whole year is just remixes. I’m working on a new album, I’m gonna start on a video game and a movie in a couple of weeks, so all of these things go back and forth constantly, and it keeps my life artistically very interesting for myself. It’s switching back and forth between all those things.