Silence and Tears

You’ll have to forgive me, my galaxy brain is showing in this post a little bit. But bear with me! I promise it’ll be worth it.

Classic trance is among my favorite types of dance music. My first time taking ecstasy was at the Lovefest Afterparty on September 23, 2006, one month into my first semester of college, with Paul Oakenfold, Christopher Lawrence, Junkie XL, Above and Beyond, and Andy Moor. I saw Armin van Buuren on my 21st birthday. Trance runs deep in my soul.

The godfather of trance, who I’ve unfortunately never seen live, is Dutch DJ Tiësto. Tiësto is such a master of his craft that his remixes of songs have often become the most well-known versions of the song, while being squarely within the trance genre, which has never been in the mainstream. This post is about two such songs.

The first, and most famous, is Canadian electronica band Delerium’s 1997 song “Silence” with the brilliant also-Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan on vocals. I love Sarah McLachlan to pieces and will accept no criticism of her. This was the same year she released her album Surfacing, one of the most successful and beloved adult-contemporary albums of all time and the album that kicked off the cultural phenomenon known as Lilith Fair. “Silence” in its original form is slow, new-agey, and decidedly downbeat. It borders on being ambient. Sarah McLachlan’s voice is ethereal but it sounds much closer to one of Sarah McLachlan’s own songs than one of the greatest trance masterpieces in all of history. You’ve probably never heard the original version. 

Two years after the album on which “Silence” appeared, Delerium’s Karma, a Belgian trance duo called Airspace remixed the song and rereleased it to radio. The Airspace Remix is the first version of this song I heard, and it is brilliant in its own right, which is why I’m including it here, as well. This version became so successful that it crossed back into adult contemporary radio; a trance song on adult contemporary radio stations was previously unthinkable. It took 11-year-old Alexis by storm.

But then, Tiësto took this refigured Airscape version and completely transformed it, yet again. Sarah McLachlan, best known today by “them darn kids” as the singer of that sad puppy song that makes everyone cry when it plays on TV, rose to the top of the elite club world. It wasn’t the first of her songs to be remixed; Rabbit in the Moon remixed “Possession” in 1995 and BT remixed “I Love You.” These tracks, along with Tiësto’s remix of “Silence” and several others, were released on an entire album of Sarah McLachlan remixes in 2001; she later released a second remix album in 2005. The Tiësto remix of “Silence” was voted by readers of Mixmag Magazine as the 12th greatest dance record of all time. It really is that good. Don’t be intimidated by it being eleven minutes and thirty-five seconds long; it takes that long to go through the entire journey. If you’ve never heard it before, welcome; if you have heard it before, have fun again.

I realized that there was a second song, a few years later in 2002, that Tiësto transformed at least to the same amount, and that remix, too, became the best-known version. Further, it was released by Conjure One, the alias of Rhys Fulber, who is half of Delerium. The original version of “Tears From the Moon” is similarly downtempo to the original album version of “Silence.” This song instead features another brilliant singer-songwriter who no one ever expected to release a dance song: Sinéad O’Connor. The original, yet again, is a wonderful listen all on its own.

But Tiësto again transformed this slow electronic Sinéad O’Connor-fronted song into a club classic. In both cases, Tiësto enhanced the singer’s voice and mixed the vocals into his brilliant electronic instrumentation, both as an accompaniment and within the structure of the song itself. Sinéad O’Connor’s voice echoes and reverbs into the background music while maintaining the main focus. Join me for this journey, too.

I’m not even going to talk about the musical journeys that Tiësto takes you on in these remixes. I could, but it would take me several hours to break it down. Instead, I invite you to listen with me and take the same journey I started in 1999, at 11 years old. 27 years later, the journey is still developing for me and I love it just the same as I did hearing “Silence” on Alice 97.3 in the car with my mom for the first time.