Zedd on why even he was surprised that Jeff Buckley’s estate gave him permission to remix Dream Brother

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Zedd’s new album, Telos, comes with an eye-catching list of collaborators - the likes of John Mayer, Muse and Remi Wolf - but none more surprising than the late Jeff Buckley.

The singer-songwriter’s vocals appear on Dream Brother, a new arrangement of Buckley’s song of the same name, and the penultimate track on his classic 1994 album, Grace. Buckley died in 1997, aged just 30.

In an interview with Apple Music 1’s Zane Lowe to mark Telos’s release, Zedd has been explaining why he wanted to pay tribute to Buckley in this way, and how the seemingly unlikely partnership came about.

“Dream Brother has always been inspirational to me,” says Zedd. “I’ve always thought that there’s a side of it that could live in a different context. I just thought I could make this into an incredible respectful dance-ish song.”

Would Buckley’s estate grant permission for him to do it, though? Zedd says that he actually began working on his version of Dream Brother back in 2017, but only after he’d been given their blessing.

“I never thought it would ever happen but I had my management reach out,” Zedd recalls. “And I knew it was going to be amazing but I also didn’t think that it would ever happen, because there are no Jeff Buckley remixes [or] collaborations.

“So the chances weren’t great - at least that’s what I thought - [but] we reached out and I think they were really relieved that I asked for this song specifically. Because, apparently, a lot of the people all wanted to do Hallelujah, and they just categorically said no.”

Somewhat surprisingly, Zedd says that Buckley’s estate - which includes his mother - gave the green light without ever hearing a demo of what the EDM producer had planned. “They happened to like what I do, which is really a blessing for me,” he adds.

Zedd says that he then had to go back to the studio where Dream Brother was originally recorded to get hold of the tapes, before getting to work.

“I tried to find this - and I think I successfully did - this balance between keeping every bit of the DNA that makes Dream Brother so special and uneasy in the best way possible. It’s got this, like ‘tension’ throughout the whole record that I wanted to keep alive, but let it live in a different universe while respecting every bit.”

For Zedd, part of this respect involved including more than just Buckley’s parts in his remix; even elements such as the hi-hat from the original drummer were repurposed. “I could have used any sample but I really wanted as much of the original stems as I could make sense of,” he says.

You can decide for yourself if you think that Zedd’s take on Dream Brother is a fitting tribute to the genius of Jeff Buckley by listening to it now, but for the producer himself, it holds special importance. Indeed, he says that it’s the only song to survive from the ones he made during lockdown, when he felt he was simply filling time rather than working with any great sense of purpose.

“It was like, ‘Well, there’s a pandemic. When am I going to get another chance to sit down and make music?’ But I didn’t have real genuine inspiration, and I was aimlessly trying to make music without any context or real reason.”

It seems that Dream Brother, though, helped Zedd to rediscover his mojo, and the result is his first album in almost a decade.

“Telos has multiple meanings, one of them being ‘accomplishment’ or ‘completion of human art,’” he says of his new record’s Greek title. “I've always dreamed of creating an album that, 30 years on, I can look back and be incredibly proud of. That will be just as amazing then as it is right now, because it's not based on trends or sound design that might fall off - it's based on music, just like the albums that shaped me growing up that I still adore to this day. With Telos, I created something I didn’t think I was capable of - it just took a bit of time to get there.”

Telos is available now on Interscope Records.