Xfinite Radio Artist Spotlight

Ask any DJ who's worked a wedding, a club, or a backyard party in the last fifteen years, and they'll tell you the same thing: when the floor starts to thin out, you put on Bruno Mars. It works every single time. Bruno came up the old-school way — playing lounges, learning to work a room, and studying the greats until he could do a little bit of all of them. Then "Just the Way You Are" and "Grenade" made him a star, and he never looked back. "Locked Out of Heaven," "Treasure," "24K Magic," "That's What I Like" — that's not just a run of hits, that's a whole night's playlist from one guy. And then there's "Uptown Funk" with Mark Ronson, a song so big it basically became its own decade. Here's the booth angle: I learned early on that Bruno is my emergency button. I remember one reception where the energy was dipping — dinner ran long, the older crowd was tired, the younger crowd was rest...

If you DJ'd a single dance in the 90s, you know the feeling: you drop "Waterfalls" and the whole room sings the first line before you even get your hand off the fader. T-Boz, Left Eye, and Chilli didn't just have hits — they had anthems that everybody knew, from the kids in the front row to the parents pretending they weren't dancing in the back. TLC came out of Atlanta in the early 90s with a sound and a style nobody else was touching. "Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg" and "Baby-Baby-Baby" put them on the map, but CrazySexyCool made them legends — smooth, confident, and cool in a way that still sounds fresh today. Then FanMail took it even further, with "No Scrubs" becoming one of those rare songs that defines a whole era. Four Grammys, tens of millions of albums sold, and a run of hits that never really left radio. Here's the booth angle: I learned fast that TLC was my secret weapon for a mixed crowd. At a party years back, I had the ...

Every DJ has a record that can restart a room all by itself. For me, that record is "Billie Jean." I've watched that bassline do the same thing for thirty-one years: the second it drops, heads turn, feet start moving, and somebody on the floor tries the Moonwalk. They never quite nail it. They always have the time of their life trying. That's the thing about Michael Jackson — he didn't just have hits, he had moments that rewrote what pop music could be. He came up as a kid with the Jackson 5, then grew into the biggest solo star the world has ever seen. Thriller alone sold over 70 million copies and is still the best-selling album of all time, and it wasn't just sales. "Beat It," "Billie Jean," "Thriller" — every one of those songs changed the sound of radio and the look of music videos forever. He made the video an event, the dance move a language, and the album a world you lived inside. Here's the booth angle: I learned ea...

There comes a point where "pop star" stops being a big enough word. Taylor Swift crossed that line somewhere around 2023, and honestly, she never looked back. I've been a DJ for three decades — I've watched artists dominate a summer, dominate a year, even dominate a decade. I've never seen anyone dominate the entire conversation the way Taylor has. She started as a teenage country singer-songwriter with a guitar and a diary full of honest songs. Then she reinvented herself — fearless pop on 1989, synth-soaked intimacy on Folklore, full stadium maximalism on the Eras Tour. And here's the part that matters: she didn't chase trends, she made them. She re-recorded her entire catalog to take her masters back and fans followed her through it. Who does that? Who gets a stadium of 70,000 people to sing every word of a ten-minute song like "All Too Well" like it's a national anthem? Taylor does. Here's my booth story: wedding receptions are my rea...

Every DJ has a panic button — that one song you drop when the dance floor is dying and you need to save the night. For me, in thirty-one years behind the decks, that button has a name: "September." I can't count how many times that opening horn line has pulled people out of their chairs. You don't ease into it. The second that groove kicks in, the floor fills — grandmas, groomsmen, the cousin who "doesn't dance." Nobody sits through Earth, Wind & Fire. Nobody. That's because Maurice White built something almost nobody else pulled off: a band that was funk and soul and jazz and disco and pop all at once, with a horn section that hit like a brass freight train and Philip Bailey's falsetto floating over the top. "Shining Star," "Boogie Wonderland," "Fantasy," "Let's Groove," "After the Love Has Gone" — that's not a catalog, that's a war chest. They sold over 90 million records and go...

Every generation gets one voice that makes other singers quietly rethink their whole career. For the 90s, that voice was Mariah Carey. I'm a DJ, I've played thousands of slow songs at thousands of weddings and proms, and I can tell you: nothing clears a dance floor faster than a bad ballad, and nothing fills one faster than "Hero" starting up. Mariah's whistle notes did that. Still do. She arrived in 1990 and just... took over. Five-octave range, writing her own hits from day one — "Vision of Love" wasn't just a debut, it was a warning shot. Then the run: "Fantasy," "One Sweet Day" sitting at number one for sixteen weeks with Boyz II Men, "Always Be My Baby." Album after album, she owned the decade in a way nobody else did. And she did it while changing the game — pop and R&B in one body, hip-hop remixes with ODB before crossovers were the playbook. Every diva who came after is walking a road she paved. Here's ...

There are artists you play, and there are artists you reach for when the night needs a jolt of pure lightning. Prince is the jolt. I've watched "1999" hit a dance floor and turn a tired crowd into a choir in about ten seconds flat. Nobody does that like Prince did. The man wasn't a pop star — he was a weather system. The Minneapolis kid who wrote, produced, and played nearly every instrument on Purple Rain, then turned around and gave you funk, rock, pop, and soul all in the same verse. In the 80s he wasn't chasing trends; he WAS the trend, and everybody else was playing catch-up. He could out-dance James Brown, out-guitar most of the "guitar heroes," and make a room full of strangers scream the lyrics to "Kiss" like it was a personal anthem. Here's my booth story: I once played a corporate holiday party where the playlist had been handed to me on a napkin — strict, approved, safe. Two hours in, the energy was flat as a parking lot. I went ...

There's a moment every DJ knows. The floor is warm, the night's got a heartbeat, and you need that one record — the one that makes everybody from the bride's grandmother to the groom's college buddies hit the dance floor at the same time. For me, that record has always been "Superstition." That dirty clavinet riff kicks in, and I swear the room gets two inches taller. Stevie Wonder isn't just a singer to me — he's a cheat code. Motown signed him when he was 11 years old, and by the early 70s he was running his own sessions, writing, producing, and playing nearly every instrument on a run of albums that I don't think has ever been topped: Talking Book, Innervisions, Songs in the Key of Life. Back to back to back. That's not a hot streak, that's a mountaintop. Here's my booth story: I'll never forget a wedding in West Palm where the whole night was slipping — wrong crowd, wrong energy. I dropped "Isn't She Lovely" for ...

I still remember the first time I heard The Weeknd in the booth. It was late — those after-hours hours where the club lights go low and the crowd stops talking and starts feeling. "The Hills" came through the monitors and the whole room just... shifted. Dark, hypnotic, dangerous in the best way. I leaned into the mic and said, "That's The Weeknd — remember where you heard it first." And I wasn't wrong. Abel Tesfaye came up the hard way: dropping anonymous tracks on YouTube in 2010, no face, no interviews, just those hazy mixtapes that sounded like 3 a.m. feels. Then he went and did what only the greats do — he went full pop without losing the soul. "Blinding Lights" didn't just top the charts, it rewrote them: the longest-running hit in Billboard history at one point. That's not luck, that's craftsmanship. Here's what I love as a DJ: he's a guaranteed floor-packer. Drop "Can't Feel My Face," "Starboy," or...