Zedd Remixes Shania Twain's "You're Still the One" Without Knowing It

A Blank Slate Advantage

Zedd approached his remix of Shania Twain's "You're Still the One" with a rare advantage: he had never heard the original. The German producer tells EDM.com that while Twain had huge hits in Germany, this particular 1998 ballad somehow escaped him. That ignorance became creative freedom.

"That let me produce a song with a blank slate," he said. "That's what excites me the most. I love writing around vocals and I love finding a new home for them. You can mold it into anything."

Four-on-the-Floor Breakthrough

The original track clocks in at 134 BPM, a tempo that belies its lilting cadence. Sticking with that higher tempo was the skeleton key that "unlocked" his creativity, Zedd said, allowing him to produce a propulsive four-on-the-floor beat that adrenalizes the song's acoustic ache through the vintage Zedd lens.

"My takeaway was that this has to be super fun," he recalled. "This has to be energetic. This has to be driving. So that was kind of the puzzle for me. It actually was really not as easy to crack as I thought it would be. And it wasn't until the very last day, when I had to show the first version of the song, that I had this breakthrough: 'I'll just stick to four-on-the-floor.'"

Technical Details and Twain's Blessing

One of his more fascinating technical choices involves the synths in the drop, each layer of which he dressed with a sliver of reverb before sculpting the tail so it blooms in fast and drifts out slow. That small detail, he explains, makes the mix sound "very pillowy" and opens up space so the percussive elements cut through cleaner. He also painstakingly isolated his kick drums from the synths so they have virtually no transients, which makes the beat sound more open and breathable.

Zedd crafted slide-heavy electric guitar tones into a new bridge section, an instinct he later realized echoed the original's acoustic bones despite never having heard them. But he left Twain's vocal melody untouched. "How do I cross these bridges where I don't alienate fans of the original," Zedd recalls of his thought process, "but I do give all the things that I want or imagine the song needs to fit this vocal? So I decided to just write around the melody."

Stressed about the track's timeline, Zedd said he called Twain in a "really anxious" headspace, braced for a list of untouchables. She offered none. "She was just like, 'Oh, you'll be fine. You'll figure it out,'" Zedd says with a laugh. "But I was much more nervous. And she says, 'No, you'll do great.'"

The remix is now out on streaming platforms along with an interactive Candy Crush video directed by Grammy-winning filmmaker Jonas Åkerlund, who has helmed music videos for Metallica, The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Blink-182. The collaboration marks another intersection of Zedd's dual passions for music and gaming, a decade after teaming up with M&Ms.