The Berlin Wall hindered Paul van Dyk's ability to fully listen to Western European and American music as a child. But now he has been charged with writing the official song celebrating the anniversary of the wall's demise.

"We [he and partner Johnny McDaid] were just approached to write the main theme for the celebration for 20 years of the wall coming down," van Dyk said during an interview at the W Hotel in Scottsdale, AZ. "That's a major challenge. We'll see how we pull that off."

The song is part of a slew of new music that van Dyk and McDaid are writing, primarily for van Dyk's sixth studio album. Van Dyk was in Scottsdale earlier this month to kick off his 17-day tour in support of "Volume: The Best of Paul van Dyk." (See remaining dates below.)

"I'm writing a lot of music right now," van Dyk said in between sips of tea. "Basically, the new track ['Home'] that's on the "Best Of" as well is one of the first tracks that were ready. I'm working quite closely with Johnny McDaid. He's the guy that I did 'Time of Our Lives' with. When I come back from this tour in July, we travel the whole month of July together and we do things, write songs and stuff."

"Volume" is a two-CD anthology of songs from van Dyk's studio albums ("45 RPM," "Seven Ways," "Out There and Back," the Grammy-nominated "Reflections" and "In Between") and various remix productions. One disc is a mixed collection of his original works including "White Lies," featuring the Pussycat Dolls' Jessica Sutta, "Nothing But You" and "Time Of Our Lives" with Vega 4, whose lead singer McDaid also lends his vocals to "Home." Also highlighted are the hits "Forbidden Fruit" and "We Are Alive" plus a new mix of the van Dyk classic "For An Angel." The other disc consists of his most popular remixes of artists such as Britney Spears, U2, Justin Timberlake and Depeche Mode. Van Dyk said now was the perfect time for a greatest-hits collection.

"It's 15 years after my first album," he said matter of factly. "It was kind of time. People always ask to re-release 'For An Angel,' make new releases of the track. We kind of gave in.

"We could easily have had 10, 20 CDs [for the] best-of package. So we had to scale everything down. I went for the obvious. I remember when I bought the best of New Order. I wanted to have the big singles on there, the big tracks--not the freaky B-sides. We find all the singles on there, but tracks that also had a great response by my audience, like 'Together We Will Conquer.' That never came out as a single before but it was like great feedback about that song. There's the best of the remixes I've done. So you find the Timberlake stuff I've done. The Britney Spears things, U2, Depeche Mode, right next to those classic techno tracks from the '90s."

Van Dyk said if he had to choose someone with whom to collaborate, he'd pick Phoenix resident Chester Bennington, lead singer of Linkin Park.

"I'm a big fan of Linkin Park and bands that have power and substance and a certain drive," he said. "I like music that's intense. I don't like that 'la la' stuff in the background. I like something that really lasts with me. A sad song should make me sad and something positive should make me feel positive. I like bands like Kings of Leon, too, because they're very intense. They don't have anything to do with what I do."

Besides promoting "Volume," van Dyk is pushing his iPhone application, PvD DJ-App, which costs $1.99. The PvD DJ-App delivers useful products for a DJ, including a BPM counter, frequency analyzer, noise-level readouts, seismic reader, virtual glow stick, torch, itinerary manager and much more.

"Our techie guy said, 'This is like the thing to do,'" van Dyk said with a laugh. "Then they came up with all these ideas. I don't want a cheesy iPhone app that is a player of my music that you use once or twice. I wanted something that's fun as well as useful. He created the DJ iPhone app, which includes things that are very helpful. For example, there's a seismic reader on there. When you put the iPhone on the turntable, it sees the vibration and therefore you can calibrate your computer system. That's something very useful for the professional DJ. On the other hand, you have funny [things] like the glow stick and stuff like that--just for the people to enjoy."

Recently, van Dyk also penned the music for EA Sports' Grand Slam Tennis game, a challenging task for the electronic dance-music artist.

"I spoke to EA Games and I told those guys I never played those sports games," van Dyk said. "I don't know what these games sound like. [They said] 'Just do what you think you want to do.' I had to write the main theme for, like, Wimbledon, the US Open, the French Open and all that. Knowing that these games are even more popular than the real tournament, knowing that the theme that I write will be known as, say, the Wimbledon theme, there's quite some pressure. It was sort of like producing out in the open. Altogether, I did 22 songs for them. Only one came back: the US Open in New York was too bangy. I had to scale it down a little bit."

In the meantime, however, van Dyk is continuing his 17-date tour.

"It's the very first time that we're doing a bus tour," van Dyk said. "Usually, we wouldn't be able to go to places in rural America like Albuquerque, and stuff like that. We decided for this time, for this album, to actually take a bus and actually drive and do a gig each day, rather than flying around. It's something special for us.

"There are many places, many cities that I usually don't have the time to play. When I fly somewhere, it's usually Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and that's it. We don't really have the chance to get to smaller markets. So we're taking a bus, therefore, we can crisscross a lot of America."