With a career that spans two decades, it’s hard to find a box that Danish recording artist Trentemøller has left unchecked. He’s performed at Coachella and Glastonbury, remixed songs for Blonde Redhead, performed on KEXP and tapped Slowdive singer Rachel Goswell to perform on his 2019 track “Cold Comfort.”
Trentemøller’s latest checkmark comes in the form of his new album Dreamweaver, which was released in September 2024. Right now Trentemøller is touring the record across North America. The tour has already featured a packed show at Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York, plus stops in Toronto, Chicago and Vancouver. His limited run of shows wraps up on the West Coast with shows at Nuemos in Seattle, Great American Music Hall in San Francisco and Echoplex in Los Angeles. Ticket information is available here.
Trentemøller’s seen and accomplished a lot, but he’s still finding ways to prove he hasn’t done it all. Here’s a conversation before his recent Chicago show where he discusses composing Dreamweaver. Trentemøller also reflects on times spent in North America and how he chooses what gear to pack before leaving his Copenhagen home and touring other continents.
Beyond The Stage: Right now you’re touring North America with a full band. That’s a lot of gear to bring over the ocean. Do you have to sacrifice and leave some instruments back in Denmark?
Trentemøller: When I pack my suitcase for tour, I always bring too much clothes, but also I want to bring my laptop, a MIDI keyboard and then I thought about having some speakers to maybe do some music in the hotel rooms. So flying in and out from every show, there is no time to really be creative. It’s just doing soundcheck, going straight to the hotel. Maybe if we are lucky, we have two, three or four hours to see the city we’re playing in.
Beyond The Stage: You’ve been to North America before. Do you have fond–or simply ‘memorable’ memories about your time here.
Trentemøller: I have a lot of good memories, but I have a crazy story about the last time we came here that is a nightmare. We had to play in Mexico City. Before we headed there, we played five or six shows in the States. And then we had to fly to Mexico and our tour bus driver was supposed to pick us up again at the Miami airport. The driver was a bit weird. He’d only driven trucks before. Things were falling apart on the bus. When we got back to Miami and he was to pick us up, he still had our gear, clothes and everything. We used rented gear in Mexico. Well, he never showed up. So he had actually taken the bus with all our clothes and all our equipment and just drove to Nashville. And then he wanted money in order for us to get it back. We were like, ‘what the fuck?’
So we were standing in the airport. We had the show the same night. We had no gear, no clothes, nothing but our passports and that was it. Luckily, our tour manager had put Airtags on our suitcases and he could track the bus. Some of our crew followed the bus and confronted the guy. The rest of us had a show to play. Thankfully the venue we were scheduled to perform at was very sweet and gave us some rented gear. The rest of our crew was able to track down the driver and we got most of our gear back. The lesson is: no more bus drivers.
But we have some really great memories being here too. We played Coachella and that was fantastic. We enjoy the desolate areas in small quiet towns where you can park your vehicles for rest–not just big cities. There is a charm to those kinds of towns. For us coming from Denmark, we’ve never seen towns like that. It’s not the usual New York or Los Angeles. We like that sometimes too. Or to be in a little city and go out and find a diner and eat there. It’s a cool place to visit.
Beyond The Stage: This is your first time here performing your new record Dreamweaver. What are you excited for fans to hear this time around that they haven’t heard from you before?
Trentemøller: We’ve already gotten practice because we have also played a big European tour. We played 38 shows in two months. Really, really massive. We also began to play those new songs in different ways. We change the arrangements quite a lot.
I really like that people can still hear parts of the new album but we are playing them in a quite different way sometimes because it has to fit the touring band’s style. For the studio version of the albums, it’s me playing all the instruments. But I like it when we’re playing live. It shouldn’t be trying to move over the backing band. Everyone is able to play their own thing in their own way. I’m just part of the band and we really have a band feeling. People will hear my music in a new way. I see it like dressing up a doll. You have a song and you can dress it up in different clothes, and that’s also how I do remixes. I also really like to take the core of a song and see which direction I can take the song. That’s also what we try to do live. Sometimes we also play to what is working with the crowd.
We can have a setlist made before the tour, then we go out and play three shows and decide ‘no, that was the wrong first song to start with,’ or ‘the energy is a bit slow in the middle. We have to change the order of some of the songs.’ I like that we can change the show up.
Playing in Europe, compared to playing in the States, or Australia and China, people will always react differently. Of course, most of the time they react the same way to the music, but it’s fun to see some songs are working better over here. It’s fun to see that there are some cultural differences.
Beyond The Stage: You’ve often had multiple vocalists perform on your records, usually they play on a song or a few each. On Dreamweaver, Icelandic singer DíSA is the only vocalist. Is there a reason that you thought her voice fit thematically with the album?
Trentemøller: She began to sing with me on my last tour. She was not singing on the last album, but I was so happy about her voice. We tried that out live with the band and we played a lot of shows together. I felt inspired and thought that for the next album, it could really be great, not to have all those features. I felt that it kind of was easier to get a natural flow if it’s not too many different voices that you have to identify yourself with when you’re listening to the music. So I think having four or five different vocalists sometimes can be a little bit impersonal.
And then with DíSA, I was just like, we have to do an album together because I love the way she sings, both live and also in the studio. So that was quite easy. Normally I would wait four or five months before I slowly start to write new music. But after the last tour with her, I was really inspired. I think it was three days after we came back to Copenhagen, I went back into the studio and I was so inspired and started writing new music with her voice in mind.
Beyond The Stage: What’s a message you want your fans to know right now?
Trentemøller: Come to our shows and experience them live. It is always very difficult to describe the vibe and the atmosphere you can experience with a live performance because you can rewatch them on your phone or social media.
You can watch a hundred movies and you can hear all the music in the world on Spotify. But being in the same room with people, watching a band or an artist play, it’s still something that’s quite intimate. Sometimes people are seeing much of the show through their phones and filming. One time in Paris, our bass player encouraged everyone to put down their phones for two songs. It created a belief that we could just be here together. That really changed the whole vibe because if you tell people in a loving way, they will listen.
When people are there for the music and the socialization of seeing a concert, it is beautiful. Watching and experiencing music together with people you don’t know, but you are in the same room with. It’s now, it’s live. It’s not tomorrow or later. It’s now and now we have this.
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