Beyond a shared Kanye West connection, the underground Los Angeles dance duo DJDS (formerly DJ Dodger Stadium) and “Uncle” Charlie Wilson, the R&B great and former Gap Band frontman, don’t seem to have too much in common. (DJDS helped produce some tracks on West’s The Life Of Pablo, and Wilson has worked with him a number of times.) So it’s cool that West apparently had nothing to do with Wilson’s voice showing up on a new version of DJDS’s single “You Don’t Have to Be Alone.” Instead, to hear DJDS tell it, they sampled Wilson’s voice on their new album Stand Up And Speak. While they were clearing the sample, Wilson heard their work and liked it. And now we get to hear his million-dollar pipes all over a swooping, euphoric house track that was just calling out for that churchy power. The new version of the song is just awesome. You can hear it and read DJDS’s account of how it happened below.

DJDS write:

When making our song “You Don’t Have To Be Alone” we sampled the voice of Charlie Wilson from a record he did in 2005. What by every law of music industry bureaucracy should have ended up as a sample clearing nightmare, somehow then turned into a dream collaboration for us. We owe that to the man himself who heard the song and thought we could expand on it together. We got together in the studio in Los Angeles, wrote and recorded new vocals, and created a new version of the song. You can hear it now. Thank you Charlie.

Stand Up And Speak is out now on Body High/Loma Vista.