In this day and age where dance music scarcely gets on the radio, one production/remix outfit has deftly defied all odds. Not only do they make records that club DJs eat up like happy soup, but with the same mix in edited form, they get pop radio airplay and subsequent sales to go with it. Who are these masters of walking the thin line between club cool and massive radio airplay? Why none other then Ernie Lake and Bobby Guy, AKA Soul Solution.
Between their awe inspiring remix of Toni Braxton's "Un-Break My Heart" to the more recent and unlikely dancification of Shania Twain's "You're Still The One," this New York based duo has turned many pop projects that may never have had club play into dancefloor monsters. Then, with the magic of radio edits, the same mix the DJ is spinning is also playing in heavy rotation on the local FM top 40 station. Besides refashioning pop tunes, Ernie and Bobby can also write songs, play instruments and produce entire records from scratch. With the recent success of the Twain remix and the imminent release of Taylor Dayne's new album featuring cuts produced by them, their future lies ahead. DMA caught up with them one day on conference call when Guy was out in LA mixing down the Dayne project and Lake was getting some R+R in Martha's Vineyard. Here's what went down:
DMA: You guys were plugging away long before you ever had any sort of success? How did you two come together as a duo?
Bobby Guy: We started off in late 80's as producers doing freestyle. Riana Paige and Sa-Fire and stuff like that, in that era. We were not called anything, just Bobby Guy and Ernie Lake. Then we started to branch into the house thing when house really started to get back into the clubs.
Ernie Lake: Actually we got into the techno thing for a minute. We were called Tech-Mode which quickly turned into Soul Solution from there.
DMA: What inspired you to change your name? Was the name Soul Solution in response to techno's total lack of soul?
Guy: Well, we had this record signed to FFRR called "Love, Peace and Happiness" and it was a house record. The person who signed it, Anthony Sanfillippo came up with that name. We were gonna go under a different name, but right before we were ready to release the record, someone else came up with another name so we sat on the phone with him one night for like 20 minutes brainstorming a new name.
Lake: Actually, Victor Simonelli came up with our name.
Guy: So "Love, Peace and Happiness" was our first record that made some noise and its was 1992 or something like that. Junior was all over it and that's when he was REALLY hot and he did a remix of it. We had write ups in Vanity Fair that he thought be be the next hot thing and all this stuff. But instead of following that success, instead we did programming for other remixers. We would essentially do the entire mix by ourselves with somebody half asleep on the couch in the lounge. We're not gonna name any names.
DMA: Well, without naming any names what were some of the remixes you worked on?
Lake: Patti Labelle "Right Kind of Lover," Ten City, George Lamond. We were hired by other remixers to do programming so we don't recall all the songs. There was a whole bunch of shit during that time -- Whigfield -- eventually we just got tired of doing that and figured 'You know what? Let's just do this on our own.' Then we started soliciting ourselves everywhere we could. Jurgen over at Radikal Records was very instrumental in helping us get our feet wet. Soon, Jellybean approached us about doing some work for his label which yielded our second big record, "Lover That You Are," as well as "Find A Way" and "Can't Stop Love," both of which did respectable on the charts. When "The Lover That You Are" came out that put us over the top. That's still our favorite record to this day.
