One month after Armin van Buuren debuted his remix of Van Halen’s “Jump” at Ultra Music Fest with a little onstage help from David Lee Roth, the track is now available to stream. The Dutch trance DJ’s new take starts sparse with a slow-building rhythm and Roth’s lyrics before exploding into Eddie Van Halen’s iconic synth riff. He made it over further with strong, danceable beats, a “Jump … jump … jump” breakdown and a little fade-in, in place of the original’s guitar solo. Van Buuren will be performing the track again Friday night in Las Vegas on the first day of Electric Daisy Carnival.
Van Buuren recently told Rolling Stone he began tinkering with the remix when a friend of his offered him the stems to the original song. “I knew the song already as a kid,” he said. “I think I was six years old when the track was a Number One hit everywhere. I was just eager to have the stems, because I always thought, ‘What if you could have the energy of that song from 1982 and transfer it to 2019?’” He made a mix and sent it to Van Halen and was surprised to hear words of praise back from Roth. “It’s the first step toward world peace if we can do it,” the singer said in the interview.
Roth also opened up in the chat about how he’s been obsessed with dance music for as long as he could remember. “It’s the reason Eddie Van Halen and I have had so much friction over these decades,” he said. “It’s the only music I listen to.”
At the time, before it had come out, Rolling Stone asked the singer to describe the song and got a purposely oblique answer: “Sure, it’s like the first time you drove past the pyramids,” he said. “Remember that feeling?” Now people can gauge that feeling for themselves.