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“I don’t know what day it is, truth be told!” says Kaskade, surging with adrenaline.
It’s 4:30 on the morning of July 5, and the acclaimed DJ has just rampaged through a three-plus-hour set at the Encore Resort’s XS Nightclub—a 40,000-square-foot Dionysian dancehall in Las Vegas that’s half-nightclub and half-nighttime pool party, lit up by a plethora of pyrotechnics.
“There are 10 different parties going on at once,” he says, flashing a boyish grin. “The scale of this is freaking bananas. There are 5,000 people here tonight. It’s really more like a festival. There’s fire off the roof. When you call this a nightclub, it’s insulting to nightclubs.”
When you watch Kaskade manning the decks, he looks like a kid in a candy store, smiling from ear to ear; a single raise of the arm sends a shockwave rippling through the crowd, inciting blasts of air and confetti, accompanied by wild paroxysms of dance.
So you’d be shocked to learn that this fresh-faced, vibrant man, who Forbes ranked as the No. 8 highest-paid DJ in the world, raking in $17 million in ’14—and who doesn’t look a day over 30—is a 44-year-old married father of three daughters.
“I’ve been up for over 24 hours at this point because I woke up with my kids in a different time zone, and they were up at the crack of dawn,” he says with a chuckle.
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If that weren’t enough, while most of his DJ contemporaries subsist on a diet of tequila shots, groupies, and amphetamines, Kaskade is a straight edge Mormon who doesn’t partake in any of the so-called extracurriculars offered to the nightlife gods.
