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The Football World Cup is the largest sporting event in the world. In 2022, almost 1.5 billion people watched the final in Qatar. When the score was 3:3, the penalty shootout followed – there is no more pressure. And who played the music in this moment of total tension? Grayson Repp. From a sporting perspective, there is hardly a greater moment. While most people are already overwhelmed by taking over the aux cable from their best friend at a basement party, Grayson has had to make completely different musical decisions in his career. We met Grayson Repp for an interview and talked to him about his bizarre path to becoming FIFA music curator and his official World Cup song for Vancouver – and about how he deals with the political debates and which song the Germans really go crazy to.
How the wind blows like that
How do you manage to find your way in life? There is probably no universal answer to this – but Grayson’s story offers an interesting approach:
Anyone who thinks that in order to DJ in the World Cup final or to make Snoop Dogg dance at the Olympic Games you need early musical training with piano lessons from the age of five is wrong. For Grayson, the path to becoming one of the biggest sporting event DJs in the world began in the swimming pool. Tall and lanky – perfect qualifications for a professional swimming career in Canada. The fact that this path would one day lead to music only became apparent in the dressing room, where he was already active as a DJ.
“I always made the mixtapes for all the sports locker rooms. I was putting together mixtapes when I was eight years old – Blink 182, Sum 41, ACDC – just stuff that got the guys in the locker room hyped up.”
His swimming career brought him to the USA on a scholarship to Arizona State University. Some of his teammates from Scandinavia were there – and what was big in Scandinavia back then? The birth of electronic music.
“”Those were the early days of Avicii, Swedish House Mafia, Eric Prydz – music that hadn’t yet arrived in North America. I fell in love immediately. I watched the Swedish House Mafia documentary and thought: That’s exactly what I want to do. A few months later I dropped out of college, put the rest of my student loan into DJ equipment and mixed up and down in my parents’ basement.”
From the locker room to the World Cup final
How Grayson found his way from swimming to music is now clear. But how does one get from Canada to Qatar? The leap from his parents’ basement to the largest sports stadiums in the world came less through meticulous career planning than through the right news at the right time. In 2021, a screenshot ended up with a good friend of Grayson.
“It was a screenshot from his father – he works in sports presentation. He wrote: Hey, we are looking for people to be floor managers at the FIFA Arab Cup 2021. That was the test event for the 2022 World Cup. I had just moved to Germany. I had no money. I was so broke. Newly married, no German, in the middle of winter, no idea what was happening around me. And that in the middle of the end of Corona – a really hard time for everyone. I have a short time with my friend’s father and said: I’m there. No matter what job, I’ll do it. Turns out, that year they wanted to integrate DJs into the stadium program. They handed me a hard drive – full of music that was downloaded from YouTube.
It’s that easy: Zack, you’re head DJ and music director at a world championship. But the real question remains: How do you satisfy an entire stadium with a wide variety of musical tastes when most of them can’t even manage a house party? Grayson says:
“My goal is always to make as many people happy as possible – but realistically you can’t make 80,000 people all happy. Music is very subjective. So I treat it like an objective task.”
He also reveals an interesting detail about our national team. If you were wondering what to play at the World Cup barbecue party, you might find an answer here:
“There is an affinity for universally loved music – the sing-along moments. Sweet Caroline works in almost every stadium, maybe not with two Spanish-speaking teams, it depends on the location. But what the German national team absolutely loves is Can’t Hold Us by Macklemore – they sent me the song themselves in 2022. The team delegates said: Yes, that’s one of our big tracks. I was completely surprised. I’m from the Greater Vancouver area, Macklemore is from Seattle – an hour away. I heard this song at university when he was just growing up. Ten years later I’m in Germany and it’s just as popular as it was back then at its peak.
How does Vancouver sound?
So Macklemore is the German song. But Grayson Repp is not only at the top as a DJ, he also produces his own music. Among other things, he released the official remix for Vancouver. Anyone who watches a Vancouver game during the World Cup and hears a snippet of the official Vancouver Sonic ID song now knows who to thank for it. The Sonic IDs are a new concept from FIFA: For each of the sixteen host cities, a local artist produces a remix of the official World Cup song – a sound that is intended to represent the respective city. For Grayson it was clear from the start: This wouldn’t work without the First Nations.
“If we don’t do this song with the indigenous groups, then it just wouldn’t be right.”
So he flew to Vancouver, worked in Bryan Adams’ studio and recorded the song.
When asked who will win the World Cup, he answers:
“I’ve been a big Germany fan since I was ten years old. Lukas Podolski, Miroslav Klose, Michael Ballack – that was my era when I really started watching football. And I was always rooting for them, for whatever reason. I’m not entirely sure. I know that I have some roots in the Black Forest. And I always had this strange feeling that I somehow belonged in Germany. Very strange. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I ended up marrying a Berliner. Anyway I’ve been rooting for Germany for a long time. I hope they go far and I hope that Canada makes it through the group stage.”
Then let’s hope Grayson is right. The Canadian now lives in Berlin with his wife Sophia Repp. So anyone hoping to see him live in Germany can probably do so more often after the World Cup. If you want to see why the Mexican fans are the best for him and what he says about the calls for a boycott in Germany, you can now find it on our YouTube channel.