The first thing you hear on When a Fire Starts to Burn is not a synth or a kick drum. It is a man preaching. “When a fire starts to burn, right, and it starts to spread,” he says, and Disclosure loop the line until a whole festival field is shouting it back. That voice belongs to Eric Thomas, a motivational speaker from Detroit who once lived on the streets of the city before he ever stood in front of a crowd.
From the Streets of Detroit to the Pulpit
Eric Thomas was born in Chicago on September 3, 1970, and grew up in Detroit, raised by a single teenage mother. As a teenager, after a series of arguments at home, he dropped out of high school and left. For roughly two years he was homeless in Detroit, and he has often told audiences that he survived by eating out of trash cans.
The turn came through a church. A friend brought him to a service, and a pastor and evangelist team there pushed him to get his GED and go to college. He enrolled at Oakwood in Huntsville, Alabama, where he began preaching and set up a program for struggling young people. It took him twelve years to finish his undergraduate degree, which he completed in 2001. He went on to earn a master’s degree at Michigan State University in 2005 and, ten years later, a PhD in Education Administration from the same school.
Along the way he built a following as the “Hip Hop Preacher,” delivering sermons and talks with the rhythm and punch of a rapper. His 2011 book, The Secret to Success, carried the message he is best known for: you have to want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe.
How a Sermon Became a Disclosure Track
Guy and Howard Lawrence came across Thomas years before their debut album. The brothers later described him as “a goldmine of inspirational quotes and motivational speeches.” One of those speeches was a talk called “Rope a Dope,” and inside it was the line about a fire that starts to burn and spreads.
Disclosure did what dance producers have always done with a great vocal: they cut it up, repeated it and built a groove around it. The result was When a Fire Starts to Burn, a stripped back house track where the preacher’s cadence works like a hook. The same speech also opens the album, sampled on “Intro,” so Thomas is literally the first voice you hear on the record.
Settle Goes to No. 1
When a Fire Starts to Burn was released as a single on May 24, 2013, ten days before the album. Settle arrived on June 3, 2013 through PMR and Island Records, and it debuted at No. 1 on the UK Albums Chart with 44,633 copies sold in its first week. It edged out Queens of the Stone Age, whose album came out the same day, by roughly 7,000 copies.
Settle was nominated for the 2013 Mercury Prize and has since been certified double platinum in the UK. When a Fire Starts to Burn never became a big chart single on its own, peaking outside the UK Top 100, but that barely matters. It went Silver in the UK, Platinum in Australia and Gold in New Zealand, and it became one of the defining live moments of the Disclosure era, the point in the set where the room starts chanting along with a preacher.
Eric Thomas Returns on Energy
The partnership did not end in 2013. In May 2020 Disclosure announced their third album, Energy, and shared its title track. Built on Afro and Brazilian rhythms, the song is driven once again by Eric Thomas, this time with several of his speeches stitched together. “We cut up various speeches to make something that makes sense,” the brothers explained. His message was so central to the record that the song gave the whole album its name.
Energy was released on August 28, 2020 through Island Records and reached No. 4 in the UK. Thomas’s voice has turned up in hip hop too: his sermons open Meek Mill’s 2017 album Wins and Losses.
Why the Voice Behind When a Fire Starts to Burn Matters
House music has always borrowed from the church, from gospel divas to preachers’ cadences sampled on Chicago twelve inches. Disclosure simply found a modern preacher whose words could carry a dancefloor. The story fits a long line of hidden voices behind dance hits, like how Sam Smith sang Latch on a lunch break or the subway singer behind Storm Queen’s Look Right Through.
The next time When a Fire Starts to Burn drops and the crowd starts shouting the words, remember who wrote them: a kid from Detroit who left school, slept rough and found his way back through a church, a classroom and a microphone.
