The 2010s File Feature
This Is What It Feels Like
Chart History and Recording Background of "This Is What It Feels Like" by Armin van Buuren Featuring Trevor Guthrie Armin van Buuren, the Dutch DJ and record…
01 The Story
Chart History and Recording Background of "This Is What It Feels Like" by Armin van Buuren Featuring Trevor Guthrie
Armin van Buuren, the Dutch DJ and record producer born in Leiden, Netherlands in 1976, had by 2013 established himself as one of the most prominent figures in global trance and progressive electronic dance music. Having been voted the world's number one DJ by DJ Magazine five times and having accumulated a devoted international following through his long-running radio show A State of Trance, van Buuren occupied a position at the top of the commercial electronic music hierarchy. "This Is What It Feels Like" was released from his fifth studio album, Intense, which was conceived as his most accessible and emotionally resonant project to that point in his career.
The song featured Trevor Guthrie, a Canadian vocalist who had previously released his own solo material and had experience as a session and touring performer. Guthrie's voice was selected for its combination of emotional expressiveness and tonal range, qualities well-suited to the anthem-scale track van Buuren envisioned. The writing process involved collaboration between van Buuren, Guthrie, and additional songwriters, with the goal of creating a track that would function both as a dance floor anthem with significant melodic impact and as an emotionally complete song capable of crossover appeal to non-electronic music audiences.
The production represents a refined example of the uplifting trance template that van Buuren had helped define over the preceding decade. The track's architecture moves through a careful progression from a relatively restrained verse arrangement into the full euphoric release of its central melodic hook, following the structural logic that makes trance music particularly effective as a live performance and festival setting. The layering of synthesized pads, arpeggiated melodic lines, and building rhythmic elements reflects van Buuren's mastery of tension and release as compositional tools.
Intense was released internationally in May 2013 and received strong reception in European markets, particularly in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and across Scandinavia and Central Europe where electronic dance music maintained its largest concentrated commercial bases. The album entered multiple national album charts at high positions, and "This Is What It Feels Like" was its flagship single, the track that received the heaviest promotional investment and most concentrated radio campaign.
In the United States, the song's chart presence on the Billboard Hot 100 was modest: it debuted and peaked at number 96 on October 5, 2013, spending one week on the all-genre chart. This limited Hot 100 showing was consistent with the position of trance music in the American market, where electronic dance music's commercial breakthrough had primarily benefited artists working in house, electro, and big room genres rather than the more melodically complex trance style that van Buuren represented. However, on specialized charts, the song performed at considerably elevated levels. It charted prominently on the Billboard Dance/Electronic Songs chart and received substantial support from American electronic music radio formats and festival communities.
The track's international performance substantially outpaced its American Hot 100 showing. In the United Kingdom, "This Is What It Feels Like" reached number four on the UK Singles Chart, giving it one of the strongest chart performances of van Buuren's career in that market. It also charted in the top ten in Germany, Australia, Ireland, and several other European territories, establishing it as a genuinely global commercial success in the electronic music sector even if its American pop chart presence was limited.
The song received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Dance Recording at the 56th Grammy Awards in 2014, the first Grammy nomination of van Buuren's career. This recognition from the Recording Academy validated the song's standing as one of the most significant electronic music productions of 2013 and brought it to the attention of industry and critical audiences who might otherwise have engaged primarily with its chart statistics rather than its artistic merit. The nomination contributed to the song's visibility in the United States at a time when the American EDM market was experiencing its most commercially significant period.
On YouTube, the official music video and associated content for "This Is What It Feels Like" accumulated over 159 million views, a figure that reflects the consistent global appetite for the track across streaming platforms in the years following its release. Van Buuren continued to perform the song in festival and arena settings throughout the 2010s, and it became one of the most reliable anthems in his live repertoire. The combination of radio success, Grammy recognition, and sustained digital performance made the track one of the defining recordings of van Buuren's discography and a touchstone for the genre at a pivotal moment in electronic music's mainstream penetration.
02 Song Meaning
Meaning and Themes of "This Is What It Feels Like" by Armin van Buuren Featuring Trevor Guthrie
"This Is What It Feels Like" is organized around a declaration of emotional arrival: the moment when an internal state of overwhelming feeling reaches such intensity that it demands to be named and shared. The song's narrator addresses a romantic partner directly, attempting to convey the quality of an experience that exceeds ordinary description. The repeated invocation of the title phrase functions as both an explanation and a demonstration, the act of saying becoming a way of enacting the feeling itself.
The thematic content is rooted in the vocabulary of romantic transcendence that characterizes the most emotionally ambitious strand of electronic dance music. Unlike purely hedonistic club anthems that center the pleasure of the dance floor itself, "This Is What It Feels Like" uses the sonic architecture of trance music in service of an interpersonal emotional narrative. The love being described is not simply physical attraction but something more encompassing: a connection that transforms the narrator's experience of being alive, making ordinary moments feel luminous and extraordinary.
This thematic framing aligns perfectly with the structural conventions of uplifting trance as a genre. Trance music, as both artistic form and cultural experience, is built around the pursuit of elevated emotional states: the architecture of building, release, and sustained elevation that defines its characteristic sound is a sonic analog to the emotional arc the lyrics describe. When Trevor Guthrie's vocals carry the lyrical content over van Buuren's production, the words and the music reinforce each other: the feeling described is performed simultaneously in the sonic experience of the track itself.
The song also operates within the broader cultural function that festival and arena electronic music serves for its audience. Large-scale communal listening environments, the festival field, the nightclub floor, the arena concert, create conditions in which music can produce genuinely transcendent emotional experiences that listeners might not encounter in more private listening contexts. "This Is What It Feels Like" speaks directly to those experiences, functioning simultaneously as a description of personal emotion and an invocation of the collective emotional intensity that electronic music at its best can generate in communal settings.
The address structure of the song is significant: the narrator speaks to a specific "you," making it an interpersonal communication rather than an internal monologue. This directness gives the song its intimacy and separates it from more abstract expressions of euphoria. By directing the emotional statement toward another person, the song implies that the feeling is only complete when it is communicated and shared. This relational dimension prevents the track from being simply a celebration of individual emotional experience and roots it in the intersubjective dimension of love and connection.
Cultural reception of the track in the electronic music community positioned it as one of the definitive examples of the emotional ambition that distinguished serious trance production from more purely functional dance floor fare. Critics noted that van Buuren and Guthrie achieved a balance that was difficult to execute well: music of genuine dance floor utility that also carried lyrical and emotional weight capable of sustaining repeated listening in non-club contexts. The Grammy nomination for Best Dance Recording reflected industry recognition of this achievement, acknowledging the track's contribution to the larger project of demonstrating that electronic dance music could aspire to the full emotional complexity of other popular song forms.
Over the years following its release, "This Is What It Feels Like" became one of the most frequently cited examples of the uplifting trance aesthetic for listeners discovering the genre, serving as an entry point precisely because its emotional directness made the genre's values immediately legible to new audiences unfamiliar with trance's more instrumental or abstract modes.
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