"How can we know who we are and where we are going if we don't know anything about where we have come from..." ~David McCollough

EDM has risen to popularity very quickly over the past few years, particularly in the U.S, but the dance music scene as a whole has been growing and evolving over mutliple decades.  There is such a vast amount of new music being constantly produced and released that newcomers often don't have time to go back and look into the important tracks of the past that brought their favorite genres to where they are today. 

Throwback Thursday is meant the show popular and key songs to EDM's past and sometimes showing the history of artists or albums that have had a huge influence.  I am lucky enough to write the first edition of TBT, but different writers will jump in and share some of the throwback tracks they are feeling that week.

If you live in California, like I do, it has been raining for the last few days, which gave me the inspiration for my first song: Kaskade and Adam K's "Raining."  This track, released in 2010, makes me feel much better relaxing inside all day and drinking some hot chocolate.

Keeping with the melodic theme, I have one of the most important songs in the history of Trance, Paul van Dyk's "For An Angel."  This song was released in 1994 (1998 in the U.S) and it launched the career of former DJ Mag Top 100 winner Paul van Dyk.  If you are a huge fan of Trance music, you need to know this song because it became a representitive song of the trance community in the 1990s.

Next, I had to add an old school remix and found the perfect one in Laidback Luke's remix of MSTRKRFT's "Heartbreaker Ft. John Legend."  The best part of this track is that the original and the remix are both huge in their own right.  Laidback Luke created a strong house vibe in this track that can still be felt today.

My last track is a personal favorite of mine, and it was one of the EDM tracks I owned, Cosmic Gate's "Exploration of Space."  This is an older track, released in 2000, that still claims a regular spot on my song rotation today.  This song was made when fast synths were popular in trance and Cosmic Gate found a great synth line to run with that makes this track a classic.