- DJ, singer, songwriter born Adam Wiles in 1984, from Dumfries Scotland.
- Harris became interested in electronic music as a teenager, and he recorded demos in his bedroom when he was 15 years old. At 18, he released 2 dance club singles, using the stage name Stouffer. In 2002, he moved to London, hoping to break into the music business, but he did not find success in London, so he returned home to Scotland. He began posting his music on his MySpace page, using the name Calvin Harris – he stated that his early music had a soul sound to it, and he felt that Calvin Harris was a more racially ambiguous name than Adam Wiles. He started gaining fans on his social media page, and he stuck with the stage name.
- By 2006, his MySpace page was so successful, he was signed to a recording contract. He debut album, I Created Disco, was released the following year. Harris wrote and performed all of the tracks on a personal computer. Songs from the album, as well as the follow-up Ready For The Weekend, were popular in the UK – the song I’m Not Alone reached #1 there – but he remained popular only in the UK until 2011.
- That year, he was an opening act on Rihanna’s concert tour in Europe and Australia. Later that year, he had a huge hit as the featured artist on Rihanna’s We Found Love. Written and produced by Harris, the song was the longest running #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 for the year, remaining at #1 for 10 weeks. Ultimately, the song was certified 9x platinum in the U.S. Also that year, he started releasing singles from his third studio album, 18 Months. This was his first album where he featured other vocalists instead of handling vocals himself. It was the first album ever to have 9 singles reach the top 10 of the UK singles chart. Four of the songs were top 20 in the Hot 100 chart – Feel So Close, Let’s Go (featuring Ne-Yo), Sweet Nothing (featuring Florence Welch) and I Need Your Love (featuring Ellie Goulding). The last 2 were #1 songs on the Billboard Dance Club Songs chart, and were certified 2x platinum.
- In 2014, he had another major EDM hit with the song Summer, reaching #7 on the Hot 100 and #1 on the Electronic Songs chart. The song was the most streamed song of the year on Spotify, with over 200 million streams that year. In 2016, another collaboration with Rihanna was This Is What You Came For, written by Taylor Swift – it reached #3 on the Hot 100.
- He released albums in 2014 and 2017, and in 2018 he began to release singles that are expected to be on his next studio album. His song One Kiss, with vocals by Dua Lipa, was the best selling song in the UK for 2018, and it reached #1 in the US on the Dance Club Songs chart – it’s an infectious deep house EDM track that became my favorite new song from 2018. Another collaboration, Promises (with Sam Smith on vocals), topped the Dance chart and it became Harris’ tenth song to reach #1 in the UK.
- His success has made Harris the highest paid DJ in the world – reportedly, he made $48 million from June 2017 to June 2018, and he has led the list for 6 consecutive years. His video of We Found Love (with Rihanna) earned him his only Grammy award, for Best Music Video. In the world of Electronic Dance Music, Harris is the king of the hill. Here’s the video for One Kiss – half a billion views on YouTube and counting.