“Travis! How’s it going? Just heard you and Taylor were listening to my tracks. Great to hear,” Chris Lake wrote to Travis Kelce in a mid-January Instagram DM. “I’m going to take a crack at remixing this track for her. No idea how I’ll get on, but I’ll do my best!”
The NFL superstar and famous fiancé responded a few hours later: “Chris! You’re a legend, bro love everything you’ve come out with, and Chemistry is one of my favorite albums I listen to right now,” Kelce wrote, referring to Lake’s 2025 debut LP. “Can’t wait to see how you put it together man.” A true fan, Kelce added that he’d loved Lake and Fisher’s set at Coachella 2023.
Lake replied that he was “On it” then two days later sent an up “F–k I’ve got something really cool with this. I’ll send soon.”
“Dawg I’m f–king pumped!!!! LFG!!!! Can’t wait to hear what you cooked up,” Kelce replied.
This conversation revolved around Taylor Swift‘s “Opalite,” the ebullient second single from her 2025 album The Life of a Showgirl. Released on January 12, “Opalite” is currently in its 23rd week on the Hot 100, where it spent a week in the top spot. Lake’s mission was to reimagine it for his natural habitat, the dancefloor.
Working from a London studio for two days in January, Lake reworked the bright pop confection into the club-ready version released on Feb. 19. This remix came out as part of a drop that also included “Opalite” edits by Skream, Bunt. and Ely Oaks. Lake’s remix now has 3.4 million global on demand streams, according to Luminate.
“I do think that sometimes the downside of remixing some of the most popular artists is that there’s a belief you’re doing things for money,” says Lake. “I can’t press enough that I couldn’t give a f–k about that. If I hadn’t made something that I felt worked well, I wouldn’t have done it.”
To make something he, and then subsequently the world, would love, Lake first had to figure out how to pair, he says, the “vibe and the sentiment of the song with the beats from my world, and make [the remix] make sense as something that would fit amongst other songs from my world without it standing out like a sore thumb.” To do so, he started with a bouncy, thumping beat, over which he laid the vocals, then creating a feel of anticipatory joy with Swift’s pre-chorus and loads of building percussion, before the drop breaks the song open into a slick amalgamation of guitar, chimes and vocal samples all played at a galloping pace.
A major element of this process was making “Opalite”s major chords work with the minor chords that characterize Lake’s oeuvre. “Pretty much 99.9% of all the music I’ve ever played or made in my life is with minor chords,” he says.
To meld these styles, Lake first found a chord progression that could play for the duration of the song that melded with the vocals. “To work with a vocal that wasn’t written to be used that way was really challenging,” Lake says. “That’s the bit I’m actually the most happy with… If you listen to the original and to the feel of how her chorus comes in, it’s very happy and uplifting, whereas in the remix, I don’t know what emotion you’d call it, but maybe it’s sort of hauntingly emotive. It makes you feel a completely different way. Then the way it launches into the drop, I haven’t done that on a remix before. I’m really proud of it.”
This final result was a product of fine tuning. After two days in the studio, Lake FaceTimed a friend to get his take on it. “He was like, ‘It’s overcomplicated. You kind of overcooked this,'” recalls Lake. “I was like, ‘S–t. This is really inconvenient, but he’s absolutely right.”
As such, he spent another hour remixing his own remix, at which point he had the finished product. Passing it over to Kelce’s side, Lake was soon informed that they were “over the moon” about what he’d made. So too have been the fans who’ve heard Lake play it in recent sets, with the producer sharing that the edit has been sounding “really great and really warm” in his live shows.
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Lake is of course a longtime star of the dance world who’s still riding the wave of his celebrated Chemistry release and who has major headlining and festival shows booked through this fall. But in remixing “Opalite,” he now knows the kind of attention that comes with a Swift-level collaboration.
“It’s quite mind blowing, to be honest,” he says. “The thing that’s been really funny are some of the messages I’ve gotten from people who I haven’t spoken to for a very long time who thought this was genuinely the coolest thing on the planet. There are daughters of people who’ve worked for my father who found out I’d done it and just thought it was the craziest thing. Like, they knew someone that was kind of doing something close to Taylor Swift. Her gravity is powerful.”
The project has also opened up a conversation between Lake and Kelce: “I have only spoken to him on Instagram and text, but that guy’s energy is infectious,” says Lake. “Speaking to him has been really uplifting and energizing, so shout out to him for helping make it all happen.”
In a turn of events as sweet as “Opalite” itself, making the remix has also helped people in Lake’s life who are less familiar with the dance scene better understand his world and his work.
“It’s given me the ability to have a conversation with people that very often don’t understand what I do or the world I live in,” he says. “It’s something where I’m able to say, ‘I’ve done this’ and it’s understandable, because everyone knows about Taylor Swift. My 90-year old grandfather knows who she is.”
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