MY PASSION WAS MUSIC AND I FELT THAT I HAD TO DO
SOMETHING BIGGER WHEN IT COMES TO MUSIC TO
FEEL GOOD [ABOUT] MYSELF
In the international arrivals terminal at Vancouver’s
YVR Airport, Danny Avila is about to get bad news.
After a brief introduction, I wonder how long to wait
to tell him that the show he is set to open tonight is
hanging by a thread.
“Tiësto’s ?ight got delayed?” Avila reiterates after I
tell him his opener might not be able to make it. He’s
confused because his mentor isn’t taking his usual
mode of transportation, the jet.
The driver gets the luggage into the car as Avila,
his manager Kai and I scramble on twitter to ?nd
out the latest news. Coming up on 7pm with a 1am
shut-down time for the Sunday event, it’s simply a
numbers game. Tiësto is in Houston, still sitting on a
United Airlines commercial ?ight that can’t take off.
It’s a 4-hour minimum ?ight duration, and even if he
could get a private jet and speed through traf?c to
the venue, he won’t make it.
Avila pulls out his laptop in the back of the car,
unsure about what the evening will hold, and settles
into listening to music. Solid Events, the hosts for
Doom Night, an annual Halloween bash celebrating
its 10th anniversary, is petitioning to keep the venue
open until 3am in order to give Tiësto more travel
time. Everything is up in the air.
As the sun sets, the short drive to the hotel is serene,
even in the midst of pre-show chaos. At the hotel
while checking in, Avila asks what any newcomer
to Vancouver wants to know: where to get good
sushi. The clock continues to run and Tiësto is still
somewhere in Texas.
In his hotel room, Avila ?lls out a questionnaire
(pictured) that I came up with to get a glimpse at
his life beyond his music. I try and get Avila to go
Halloween costume shopping, teasing him that
“Tiësto dresses up for Halloween!”
“Halloween is not that big in Europe,” Avila says,
dismissing my pleas. He can’t even recall the last
time he donned a costume.
Truthfully, it’s dif?cult to think of Avila, now 18, as a
little kid trick-or-treating because a few years ago he
went off the path of a typical teenager and decided
to forge his own. He moved to Madrid, the capital of
Spain, for high school in order to pursue his music
career, dividing his time between music and class.
“I was doing it in a different way cause I was travelling
so much in the last year, year and a half,” he says.
“It was a bit tough to be honest but I managed to
?nish school and now I got it done, so [I’m fully]
concentrated on music.”
It couldn’t have been easy to convince his parents
to let him move from his hometown in the south
of Spain, almost 600 km away from Madrid, just to
concentrate on his career.
“It was a bit tough but at some point you know, I just
could not do anything else,” he says. “My passion was
music and I felt that I had to do something bigger
when it comes to music to feel good [about] myself.”
Avila sets up his laptop at a desk in the corner of the
hotel suite, clearly accustomed to the routines of
unpacking. A life of globetrotting is hardly normal,
but it is now for Avila.
“Airports and hotel is like 95-90 percent of the day
and that 5-10 percent is the best thing ever. You just
play the show and have the best time ever. But the
rest it sucks to be honest, to be [travelling the whole
time] but you get used to it and in the end it’s just
like normal things.”
It’s undisputed that the DJ world is a boys club and
perhaps a reason Avila ?ts in so well is that he’s had
practice being one of three in a band of brothers.
He skypes with his family pretty much every day,
and forces himself to take mini vacations in order to
decompress from being on the road.
“If you are travelling 24/7 and do that for for a year
straight, you are tired,” he says.
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