Chris Lake’s grandfather understands his work more after he remixed Taylor Swift’s Opalite.
The 43-year-old producer has enjoyed major success in the dance world over the years but he admitted not everyone in his life was able to grasp the way his world and career work until he got the chance to work on the pop superstar’s single from her 2025 Life of a Showgirl album.
Chris told Billboard: “It’s given me the ability to have a conversation with people that very often don’t understand what I do or the world I live in.
“It’s something where I’m able to say, ‘I’ve done this’ and it’s understandable, because everyone knows about Taylor Swift. My 90-year old grandfather knows who she is.”
Chris admitted the attention he’s received as a result of the remix has been “mind blowing”.
He said: “It’s quite mind blowing, to be honest. The thing that’s been really funny are some of the messages I’ve gotten from people who I haven’t spoken to for a very long time who thought this was genuinely the coolest thing on the planet.
“There are daughters of people who’ve worked for my father who found out I’d done it and just thought it was the craziest thing.
“Like, they knew someone that was kind of doing something close to Taylor Swift. Her gravity is powerful.”
The Opalite remix has had 3.4 million global on demand streams, but Chris stressed he never worked on the track for the money.
He said: “I do think that sometimes the downside of remixing some of the most popular artists is that there’s a belief you’re doing things for money.
“I can’t press enough that I couldn’t give a f–k about that. If I hadn’t made something that I felt worked well, I wouldn’t have done it.”
And Chris is “really proud” of his take on the track, which required him working out how to pair the major chords in Opalite with the minor chords that typify his own output.
He said: “Pretty much 99.9% of all the music I’ve ever played or made in my life is with minor chords.
“To work with a vocal that wasn’t written to be used that way was really challenging.
“That’s the bit I’m actually the most happy with… If you listen to the original and to the feel of how her chorus comes in, it’s very happy and uplifting, whereas in the remix, I don’t know what emotion you’d call it, but maybe it’s sort of hauntingly emotive. It makes you feel a completely different way. Then the way it launches into the drop, I haven’t done that on a remix before. I’m really proud of it.”
However, he had to remix his own remix after calling a friend for feedback after two days in the studio.
Chris recalled: “He was like, ‘It’s overcomplicated. You kind of overcooked this.’ I was like, ‘S***. This is really inconvenient, but he’s absolutely right.”