This is the first entry in Culture Club, our series on songs that became far more famous as a remix than they ever were in their original form.
In 2012, the American country singer Easton Corbin released his second album, All Over the Road. The closing track was a gentle, radio-friendly country tune called "Are You with Me." It was never released as a single. It did not chart. For most listeners outside Corbin's country fanbase, it did not exist.
Two years later, a Belgian producer barely out of his teens named Felix De Laet, working under the name Lost Frequencies, built a tropical-house edit around Corbin's vocal. Released in October 2014, the Lost Frequencies version of "Are You with Me" became one of the defining records of the mid-2010s tropical-house wave.
The original
Corbin's "Are You with Me" is a gentle country song about a couple slipping away to dance under the stars. It has a warm vocal and a simple lyric. As an album closer in a crowded 2012 country market, it did its job and disappeared. There was nothing about its commercial life to suggest it would one day top charts in a dozen countries.
What it did have was a voice and a melody that translated. Strip the country production away, keep the vocal, and the song underneath turns out to be a perfect fit for the warm, mid-tempo, guitar-flecked house sound that was about to take over European radio.
The remix
Lost Frequencies kept the heart of the song, Corbin's vocal, and rebuilt everything around it. A muted, plucked guitar lead. A soft four-on-the-floor pulse. The airy, sun-warmed atmosphere that the tropical-house genre was built on. The result felt less like a remix and more like the song finding the arrangement it was always meant to have.
Released in October 2014, it became a number-one hit in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and beyond, and a top-ten record across much of Europe. It launched Lost Frequencies from an unknown bedroom producer into an international touring act and led to his debut album, Less Is More, in 2016. He later won two ECHO Awards on the back of the record.
Why it matters
"Are You with Me" is the clean version of a pattern that repeats across this series. A song's commercial fate is not fixed by its writing or its vocal. It is decided, to a surprising degree, by its arrangement and by the moment it lands in. Corbin's vocal was the same in 2012 and 2014. What changed was the production around it and a producer who heard a dance record hiding inside a country ballad.
For the original artist, the remix is found money and a second life. Corbin wrote and recorded a song that, in its first form, reached a modest country audience. In its second form it reached the world, and the songwriting credit and royalties followed it there.
That is the case we make for remix culture in general. A great vocal is an asset that can pay out more than once, in more than one genre, to more than one audience. The remix is not a threat to the original. It is a second roll of the dice, and sometimes the second roll is the one that wins.