A proud "re-plant" to Chicago, DJ Dealer recently moved back to his former childhood home after spending much of his musical career in Denver. It was there that he built an incomparable reputation as a solo artist in addition to being part of Pound Boys, the powerhouse production duo with his former partner, Craig C. Dealer has over 100 releases spanning 12 years on his Look At You record label alone, and has worked with many of the top House vocalists, including Inaya Day, Lisa Millet, Byron Stingily and Dajae.

Now that he's settled in town and on the eve of the release of his new album Joyride on Look At You, 5 Magazine interviewed Dealer on the move to Chicago, the end of Pound Boys and future prospects for both Dealer and Look At You.

How come the recent location back to Chicago?

I have family here, and it was also kind of time for change. There are a lot of things that have changed with the scene in Denver. And I know people here already. My brother has two identical twins that are a year old. It's nice to be here for them in their lives. And as far as the music goes, you can pretty much do that from anywhere.

You have highly successful label called Look At You Records. Where did the name derive from?

When it came to selecting the name, I didn't want anything too serious. It was an inside joke amongst friends. It was kind of like when you put someone down and say, 'Hey, look at you with your orange high-tops and your blue wig!" I think you can't really take things too seriously and that's how it came about.

You released material prior to starting up Look At You.

I spent a couple years trying to find my footing with production. A couple of my first releases were on Mindfood Records, which was a small label based out of Chicago. Also one of my earlier releases was on Subliminal.

I was going to mention that! You actually had the 9th release on Subliminal which is at nearly 200 releases now and still one of the biggest House music labels around. Did you know the label was going to be that big and blow up like it did?

I didn't! I knew who Erick Morillo was of course because of Strictly Rhythm and the Reel 2 Real stuff. I also had just met the label manager from going to Miami, but it was still all new to me. It was the beginning of a new chapter.

A lot more of your releases recently have been on your own label. Is there a reason for that?

Yes. I spent about two years doing my solo thing and then about ten years of doing production under Pound Boys. That was good and eventually it lead to time for another change and we stopped doing stuff together. I really didn't want to do stuff for the major labels anymore. That became a game I didn't like.

For many years people only knew the Pound Boys name. When we split I got to start fresh again as DJ Dealer, and I'm doing stuff for the label where I can start over from scratch.

Do you want to talk about why you and Craig C. aren't doing stuff together anymore as Pound Boys?

It was a long time coming. There are a lot of reasons, but mainly because after working with someone for so long, it led to differences in what we each wanted out of things as well as the musical direction that we each wanted to go in. For awhile it felt like it was one step forward and three steps back. Things finally reached the point where we had done as much as we were going to do together and it was time to move into different directions musically.