From gospel singer to boy band crooner, Chris Willis found himself in the studio with David Guetta and Joachim Garraud where they produced the track "Just a Little More Love." Massive international success led to many more anthemic collaborations -"Love Don't Let Me Go," "Stay," and current single "Love is Gone," which is beginning to cross over to pop radio stations here in the United States. Check out Chris Willis' tour schedule on his Myspace page as he is touring extensively this summer – and is an incredible live performer!
DJ Ron Slomowicz: Hey Chris, congratulations on the success of your track with
David Guetta "Love Has Gone."
Chris Willis: Thank you, DJ Ron.
RS: It's getting all kinds of adds at radio stations here in the
US. Did you have any idea the song would become so big here in the
States?
Chris Willis: I had hoped to be on, I had hoped that's exactly what
would happen, and I'm so excited that that dream has come true.
RS: When you wrote the song – actually, when you work with David
Guetta – how do you work with him, how do you write to his tracks?
Chris Willis: Basically I get the track which he and his co-partner,
Joachim Garraud, put together. I literally just sit with the track
and play it over and over and over, until I get maybe two or three
melodies. We may have already spoken about a story, and come up with
a couple of buzzwords – in this particular song, "Love Has Gone" were
the keywords. I build the melody into that phrase, and just craft the
chorus. With most of the songs, the structure isn't a typical, verse /
chorus / verse / chorus. It starts off at the chorus, and we may have
some ad-libs. We've just kind of kept that formula going, and that's
how we did it.
RS: Your background is gospel. How did you get from gospel to house?
Chris Willis: Oh, a major leap. In a way I had always been
envisioning myself as a gospel singer and seeing that as the end all
to end all's. But I went through some personal issues that I wanted to
sort out, so I just put myself on hiatus for a while and house music
found me. I just happened to end up in France working with this group,
and one of the guys in the group knew David and introduced me. David
invited me to come to the studio and see if we connected, and the
first track that we wrote together was called "Just A Little More
Love." The next day David called me into the studio and said, "You'll
never believe this – the record company wants to release this as a
single." That's literally how it happened, just almost like magic.
RS: You mentioned you were working with a group in France – what
group was it?
Chris Willis: It was just a little boy band back in the day with
Backstreet Boys and all of them. They were called 2BFree.
