I actually have been really influenced by dance music.
I love music, and I loved dance music immediately. So I bought some equipment and started making my own. When I started this, I didn't say, 'okay I'm going to do this step and then this step' to become popular. I just created music that I loved.
Holland was one of the first countries to adopt dance music into their culture, and we were the first ones to have really big raves. I grew up in that atmosphere in the early 1990s, and I was very interested in how dance music was made.
In '92 - '93, I was at that age when I was looking for my identity and that's when I found dance music and I really fell in love with it.
Dance music is like a virus: it has affected so many different genres.
I have been a huge fan of Major Lazer for a long time and they have done a phenomenal job in redefining dance music across the globe.
I think every Dutch person has a connection with dance music.
Jazz in the 1920s and '30s was dance music, teenage music for parties, for being wild and young. There's this punk feeling I really love. It was something so radical and different and new and not codified. People didn't have a definition of what they were doing.
'90s fashion is awesome. Best of both worlds - you had power pop, like the Spice Girls and Shampoo. But then you had Nirvana and Hole. And you also had '90s dance music like N-Trance, who kind of blended both.
I love that way dance music can put you in a trance.
