Close your eyes and picture a music festival. It’s outdoors, hot at hell, somewhere vast and imprecise: a beach on the Algarve, a neon-lit park in downtown Hong Kong, an ungodly temporary oasis in the Nevada desert. There are hundreds of thousands of people — there may as well be millions — and they’re all dancing together, staring through their disposable sunglasses at one man in the middle of the sprawling stage, towering over the decks and looming over the crowd on titanic projectors. Chances are, whether you mean to or not, the person you’re imagining right now looks a lot like Tiësto. He is ubiquitous, uber-famous, a globe-traversing DJ and producer who basically headlined the opening ceremony of the Athens OIympics two decades ago and has somehow only grown bigger since.

It didn’t start out like that, of course. Tijs Verwest was once a kid from Breda, a small city in the Netherlands, playing trance sets at a small local club called The Spock. His early releases made him a big name in the underground, as the melodic and overwhelming trance sound he helped to pioneer took root in Europe. But it was his U.S. debut, the mix album Sumerbreeze, that showcased Tiësto at his peak, the relentless remix of Delerium’s “Silence” playing in clubs and climbing up charts worldwide. That set his debut solo LP, In My Memory, up to be a smash, combining the harder-edged trance he’d played coming up with more recognizable pop.

He was already a mega-DJ, and from there things just snowballed: Grammy Awards, Olympic ceremonies, an appointment by Queen Beatrix to be an Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau. On 2009’s Kaleidoscope, he collaborated with everyone from Tegan & Sara to Calvin Harris to Sigur Ros’ Jonsi. And by the time he released his fifth album, A Town Called Paradise, in 2014, he was almost unrecognizable from the kid playing The Spock. He was making pop music, melodic EDM focused directly on the brain’s pleasure centers. It may not always have earned him the love of every raver or music critic, but it definitely put him up in the middle of that vast and imprecise stage as an unquestioned headliner.

His seventh album, Drive, is out this Friday. It's very loosely based on a true story about missing diamonds at the 2004 Monaco Grand Prix, but, by his own admission, Tiësto is more drawn to the glamour and spectacle of Formula 1 than he is to the narrative or history. The album is quintessential latter-era Tiësto: unabashed, slick pop music that leans on some intelligently selected collaborators to keep the party moving. On “10:45” with Tate McCrae, he collaborates with a young singer who was born long after Tiesto had outgrown European trance. He’s got a song with FADER cover star Charli XCX, after the two had admired each others’ work from afar for years. Tracks with Karol G, Ava Max, and A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie are already massive hits, having been released as singles in advance. There’s even a remake of Black Eyed Peas’ “Pump It” called “Pump It Louder,” which maybe sums up Tiesto’s unimpeachable hitmaking instincts better than any podcast introduction could.

When I called Tiesto late last week, he was in a hotel suite in Bangkok, preparing to play another massive show, before coming back to Vegas for the weekend. He was polite, even almost bashful, when discussing his career and reflecting on the changes in his audience over the past three decades — and he was particularly thoughtful when he remembered his late friend and mentee, Avicii.

The FADER: I was going to ask if you want me to call you Tijs or Tiësto. I wonder if those two people are the same. Has having kids maybe separated those two people a little bit?

Tiësto: They've always been a little separated, but they're also the same because Tiësto is my whole life. And my daughter just told me, when I left she said, "I want to hear Tiësto music." She doesn't know what Tiësto is, but she knows the name already and she wants to be a DJ later on.

What drew you to this story about the Monaco Grand Prix?

It's about the journey between the tracks and the drive that people have. I’m always attracted to the racing theme — not necessarily the race itself, but more like the glamour around it, like the Grand Prix of Monaco, the celebrations, the champagne, the yachts and the cars going through the town. And I thought it was very Tiësto. The music I make right now, it fits the champagne vibe.

You collaborate with Tate McRae on Drive. She was born two years after you released your first album, and this is nothing new for you. You've collaborated with singers and DJs who probably grew up listening to your music. What do you take from the younger generation?

A lot of the energy. When you get older, sometimes you get really stuck in your routines and in your way of doing things in the studio and what you like. Young people have a completely different vision of everything, and they can really throw you off in a good way, to go a completely different direction. They bring me to different directions.

Trance is back in the mainstream and back in clubs in a more serious way again. Have you noticed that?

Not necessarily in the clubs. I feel like in the clubs… I play mostly clubs in America so it's very house. Fred again.. is massive. But the real trance, I haven't heard it yet — like the old school 135 BPM, you don't hear that much. At the festivals, you hear it definitely more, like at the big festivals like an EDC festival or Greenfields. That's definitely where you can hear more trance. The clubs, not yet. What I love about Fred again.. is that he takes old elements, but it still sounds like 2023. It's not like you're like, "Oh yeah, that sounds like a track for the '90s." It's fresh. He takes the best of everything and that's why he's so brilliant.

As a DJ and as a producer, do you think about your audience first or are you thinking about making music for yourself?

It's actually a bit of both. Sometimes I feel like this track will go off when I play this at a festival or you really have the festival in mind and sometimes you have the radio listener in mind. I have to like it myself as well. It's a combination.

Are there specific feelings that you want to get out of an audience?

It’s very much changed over the years. When I started DJing, I felt like I played very melancholic. It was very emotional music. Long tracks, 10-minute tracks, and that would really take you on a long journey. I would play for four or five hours. And nowadays, I feel the attention span of people became so short that I play every track for only one and a half, two minutes. The goal now is more to give everybody a good time and give them a bit of everything.

So yeah, my sets are very all over the place and anything can go in there, which I really love because, after so many years of DJing, that keeps it exciting for me. And before I was only playing trance music, so you are only focused on one genre and one certain kind of people like that music. Now I can play anything. I can even play drum and bass in my sets and people love it. They love the house, the drum and bass, the trance, the EDM, the techno — and I love mixing it all together. It's like going to an amazing restaurant and you get a little bite from everything the chef can make you.

What’s the difference between playing a show in a club, regardless of the kind of music you're playing, and playing a show where you can't even see the audience's faces, it goes so far back. Is the feeling different? Is there anything similar about those two things?

It’s a little bit of a different feeling. In a club it's more intimate. It's like playing in a living room, it's definitely more personal. But playing in a stadium can give you a very euphoric kind of feeling that you've never experienced before. To be in control of what 60,000 people can hear is an incredible feeling. It's hard to describe, but it's goosebumps from bottom to top. It's really special. You feel almost god-like.

How do you come down from that? When you walk off-stage afterwards, how do you get your heart rate down? What do you do?

For me, I think it feels the same as a football team that just won a big match. You get off stage, you high-five your friends, your team around you, and you just celebrate just an amazing performance, that you did well. "I scored two goals, let's go!" That's the feeling I have when I have a great set. I feel like, yeah, I won something. It's really the best feeling in the world.

The trance scene that you came out of in your early days, there was a community around that, one that you helped to foster as well. You had your own label, you were working with other artists. As you get bigger and bigger, is it harder to maintain a community around your music, or does the community around your music just get bigger?

Well, the community is you talk to other artists and stuff, but you don't have much feedback from them because they're always being polite. They'll never say something is bad. Maybe behind your back. You only get feedback from the messaging boards, basically, that's really honest. And nowadays on social media when you release something and you can read on your comments or something if things are good or bad. Sometimes it's fair and sometimes it's not.

When it's a fair comment, I think about it. And if it's somebody just being a hater, I'm just like, "Hey, whatever." It's like that. Back in the day, we didn't have that. We didn't have that feedback. It was just like you release a track and then people would like it or not. You always see the reaction on the dance floor, and that's the real feedback I'm always going for.

I remember when I released Kaleidoscope and that album was very different than my trance albums before and I did a lot of indie collabs with a lot of amazing bands. On the internet, I got a lot of hate for it. All the comments were like, "Man, what have you done? You left trance music." And it made me a little bit depressed, actually, because I thought I do something completely different and it's fresh and so exciting — and it was really the opposite, what I got from the people.
And then I went on tour. I had a college tour in the US, 30 shows in one month. Every night, every track from the Kaleidoscope album, people went crazy. So I was like, "Wait a minute, what's wrong here? Online people are all hating it, but I see the crowd going off on the track," and that's what kept me going. That gave me back my stamina and my energy.

I have developed a big elephant skin. The comments don't hit me anymore.

Working with these younger artists, you are obviously seeing kids who grew up making music in a completely different way to you. If you have the talent, you can make a song on your phone while you're waiting for the subway. Do you think that that sort of accessibility to DJing and producing is a good thing?

It makes it harder for people to break through nowadays. I think all the older guys got really lucky back in the day. There was just less out there. I wouldn't say it was easier to break through, but once you had your track out, it was definitely easier to put it in front of an audience. Now everything is so accessible and there's so much going on on your phone — it must be hard for new guys to break through. I think there must be like a million tracks a day getting released between YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify and all the other outlets. It's crazy out there.

April 20 will have been five years since Avicii passed. I know that you were close and admired each other. How do you remember him today?

I've had a long history with Tim, with Avicii. We met in 2008. He was doing mashups, and I played a lot of them in my radio shows. And then we met up in Sweden and became friends. He wasn’t even DJing yet; he didn’t know how to. I invited him to spend the whole summer with me in Ibiza, and that’s where he learned how to DJ. He was playing every night before me, and then we went back to the house and he was making music always on his laptop. He was always in a good mood.

After he became famous in like 2010, we kind of lost track of each other. As DJs, if you’re both that big, he plays one night there, I play one night there… We never saw each other again, and I always felt a little bit sad about that.

Then, [in early 2018], we decided to meet up again, like, “Man, what happened to us? We were always so close. Let’s get more contact going.” We went for a very nice dinner in L.A., and he came out to a show I played. He was very happy. He had a new girlfriend, and everything was going so well. Two months later, he passed away.

That was very strange to me, and I never understood what happened. I wish I had more time to talk to him about what was bothering him. I feel like maybe I could’ve helped him get out of that, because I get the pressure a lot of artists are under. You get so insecure because a lot of people are bashing you on your music or your sets. That can really hurt you, and I don’t think people realize that. They think artists are untouchable and they have no feelings, no heart, but it hurts.

When Avicii played that whole set at Ultra where everybody was like, “Oh, he’s playing country, it’s not dance music,” he felt a lot of pain. Two months later, he had the biggest hit in the world with Wake Me Up. I think he didn’t really put those two together. You make something great, and then online, you get so much hate. To come back from that is very hard. But… his music will always live on. We all still play “Levels” and “Wake Me Up” and all the others… Man, I wish I made “Levels.” It's one of those tracks — a timeless masterpiece.