Chris Willis

Twelve years in Nashville, then a Paris introduction

Willis was born on 26 February 1969 in Dayton, Ohio, and his first professional footing was gospel, not dance. He sang with groups including the Heritage Singers, appeared on the 1993 pop-classical record Handel's Messiah – A Soulful Celebration, and spent the middle of the 1990s on the road as a backing vocalist for the Christian artist Twila Paris.

Told in his own words, that period amounted to roughly twelve years in Nashville doing gospel work, backing sessions and demos — the unglamorous middle of the music business, where a voice gets technically good and commercially invisible at the same time. The break came sideways. In 2000 he was in Paris working with a French boy band when he was introduced to a local house producer, David Guetta. They wrote Just a Little More Love the following day. It went to number one in France.

Willis has described the song as a deliberate nod to Martin Luther King and the idea of walking hand in hand, which is a less obvious reading of a club record than most people give it, and consistent with where his singing came from. He has said the love songs trace directly back to his Christian upbringing.

The records that did the work

The Guetta partnership turned into something closer to a house band arrangement than a guest feature. Willis co-wrote and sang across Guetta's debut album Just a Little More Love, including its title track, and then stayed on through the run of singles that made the producer a chart act in Britain: Love Don't Let Me Go, and in 2007 Love Is Gone, the second single lifted from the album Pop Life.

Love Is Gone is the one that travelled furthest. It is also the clearest statement of what Willis does on a dance record — a sung, gospel-weighted top line with an actual melodic argument in it, sitting on a filtered house track that would be thin without him. The commercial peak came in 2010 with Gettin' Over You, credited to Guetta and Chris Willis with Fergie and LMFAO, which reached number one on the UK singles chart.

Beyond Guetta, his credits take in work with Cedric Gervais, Steve Angello, Sebastian Ingrosso and Akon, which places him in the Swedish House Mafia orbit as well as the French one. For a stretch of the 2000s, a large share of the vocal house that crossed from European clubs to British radio had him somewhere on it.

A solo catalogue, run on his own terms

Willis has never pretended the solo work matched the reach of the collaborations, but he has kept it going and kept control of it. He set up his own label and in 2010 released Louder (Put Your Hands Up), which went to number one on Billboard's Hot Dance Club Songs chart in early 2011. The EP Premium – Songs from the Love Ship, Vol. 1 followed in 2011.

His method is hook-first and unsentimental about it: build the chorus, then write verses that earn their way into it, and test the result on collaborators in the room and on trusted listeners before release. That is session-musician discipline applied to his own name, and it explains the shape of his catalogue — singles and remixes rather than albums, written to function on a dancefloor and in a radio edit.

Willis married Jacqueline Leiske on 2 June 2014. He is based in the United States and takes bookings internationally.

Where he is now: a steady output of singles

The current phase is a release every few weeks rather than a campaign. Through 2025 his listings carried remixes of Lonely One, including versions by DJ Boutique and a HI Energy mix. In 2026 the pace picked up: The Demos Have Magic (The 90s), Lights Go Down, Enough Is Enough (No More Fears), and Without Your Love, a collaboration with DJ Groove and Alexander Popov. A Van Snyder remix of Without Your Love was issued on 9 October 2026, which makes it the most recent thing with his name on it.

None of this is chasing the streaming mainstream. The remixers and labels involved sit in the Euro-trance and hard-dance end of the market, where a strong vocal and a known name still carry a release and where a singer of his vintage is an asset rather than a nostalgia line. It is a working model: supply the top line, license it out, let the remix economy extend the life of each track.

He has also kept at least one foot in his older register — the 2026 singles include material that reads as a deliberate look back at the 1990s songbook he came through.

The touring shape: packages, not headline tours

Willis does not mount his own tours. Listings show ten shows in 2025 and four across 2026, and the 2026 dates are all slots on someone else's bill. On 26 June 2026 he appeared on the opening night of the first Festival Summer Dreams at Open Air Furdenheim, fifteen minutes from Strasbourg, on a Forever Electro bill alongside Joachim Garraud — Guetta's producer from 2001 to 2009 — and Nils Van Zandt, with the local Elsass-Brothers and DJ Kab taking the opening and after-party sets. The French preview coverage billed Willis simply as the signature voice on the records, which is accurate and is how he is sold.

The rest of the year ran through American rooms of a similar kind: Pier 13 in Hoboken, New Jersey on 25 July 2026 on a bill with Louie DeVito, and Stereo in Chicago on 22 August 2026. Chicago is his most-played city on record, with Philadelphia next, then Miami and Las Vegas.

Agency material counts more than four hundred completed events and offers him for festivals, award ceremonies, corporate galas and private functions as well as club and arena bills — a candid description of where a vocalist with a catalogue of certified hits and no current album actually earns.

The date on sale

The one date currently on sale is Dance Now Atlantic City at Hard Rock Live at the Mark G. Etess Arena, 1000 Boardwalk, on Saturday 17 October 2026 at 8pm. Willis is one name on a long 1990s and 2000s dance bill that also lists Jenny Berggren of Ace of Base, Haddaway, Robin S., Real McCoy, La Bouche, Alice DJ, Snap, No Mercy, and C+C Music Factory with Freedom Williams. Tickets have been listed from around $82.50.

One caveat worth stating plainly: the promoter and Live Nation list the show as on sale, while the aggregator listings on Songkick and JamBase flag the Etess Arena date as cancelled. Anyone holding a ticket should check with the venue rather than trust the secondary listings either way.