Morgan Page is a busy man. He's an in-demand club DJ who tours regularly. As a producer, his remixes for Madonna, Nelly Furtado, Jody Watley, and others have hit #1 on Billboard's Dance charts. And he has produced two albums under his own name for Nettwerk Records. The Deadmau5 remix of "The Longest Road" from his album Elevate (2008) was nominated for a 2009 Grammy. "Fight For You," the single from his forthcoming album Believe, is available now.

DSI's Andrew McGowan caught up with Morgan at his home studio, where he's already hard at work on new material.

Andrew McGowan: You've been DJing and making music for roughly 10 years?

Morgan Page: Yeah, just about. I got a really early start and have been constantly working at it every day and sort of juggling that with DJing and touring at the same time.

AM: Did the DJing come first?

MP: I kind of did it all backwards. I started producing a little bit and then got into radio before I got into the club stuff, and then got back into producing after getting a firmer grasp of the kind of music I wanted to make. As I started digging deeper into club culture, I began to play out more, instead of over the airwaves.

AM: At what point did you become interested in making your own music?

MP: I started making my own stuff way before the bootlegs and the remix compilation, Cease and Desist (2006), with a bunch of illegal remixes. Before I was doing remixes, I was doing originals. I've sort of been flip-flopping back and forth between these different directions. I started out with very primitive original stuff. I had some hardware—an MPC 2000 and an E-mu sampler, but before that it was actally just a computer, using a tracking program, the kind they used to use for video games, with a very limited capacity for samples and audio. So I just kept upgrading the setup. It's a funny path, because now it's back to computers again, because computers are so much more powerful.

AM: What got you interested in electronic music initially?

MP: It was definitely college radio. I grew up right on the edge of the suburbs and the country in Vermont, so the college airwaves were able to extend out that far. Burlington, the main city in Vermont, has a pretty big college, the University of Vermont, with a great radio station and you didn't have to be a student to be a DJ there. There was a really interesting variety of DJs and people running the station. So that's where I first became exposed to it. I'd never heard it before and it wasn't played on the commercial stations. So I started to reach out and got to know DJs playing at that station and also DJs doing after-hours mix shows on the commercial stations.

AM: How did you make the leap to doing your own stuff? Did you just think, "I can do that"?

MP: Yeah, being a little naive and thinking "I can do this better," or "I want to imitate this and see how well I can do it." I built a little studio in my parents' basement and eventually it clicked and I got a working process going. I was a radio DJ and doing the graveyard shift, which is basically what they stick you with because they don't want you on during primetime until you get good and can form complete sentences [laughs]. So I would play like 4 am to 6 am and play favorite records, like Crystal Method—the Vegas album was huge around that time—and Rabbit in the Moon and Goldie...sort of the seminal electronic records. And that changed everything. I think once you get bitten by the bug, it just never goes away.

AM: You're involved in different disciplines: DJing, producing, creating your own music. How do those influence each other?

MP: They're definitely complementery. I think with DJing, it's very important to be producing to get your name out there. And with producing, you really need to be DJing to road test the material, making sure it translates well to club systems. A track can sound radically different on a big system, so it's been really helpful to be touring regularly and be able to hear it really loud. It really affects how you mix your records. So many producers are making records for the radio or whatever, but clubs are just such a different environment. There's only so much sonic bandwidth that a club can accommodate, so playing clubs helps you pare down the elements and keeps you to the essentials.

AM: You've got a new album, Believe, coming out early next year with a single, "Fight for You," out now, correct?

MP: Yes, and the single has the telltale Dave Smith Prophet sound right in the beginning. You can hear it prominently in the intro.

AM: When you sent us Believe, one of the first things I said to Dave was that it is one of the more "Smithy-sounding" albums I've heard, at least in the DSI era.

MP: I had this revelation with analog keyboards and not being completely satisfied with soft synths. Soft synths have come a long way, but in the last couple of years I've had a lot of fun getting the instant gratification with hardware and not having to worry about compatibility and OS updates and buffer settings, just playing and getting good sounds immediately and having tangible control.

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