To confuse matters, darkness had been an element in Avicii’s music from the opening song on his debut album, “True.” “Wake Me Up,” a No. None of the people who heard those lyrics at the time found special meaning in them. “He was looking super good,” noted Pontare. In his adopted home of Los Angeles, he hired a personal trainer, started to meditate and began a writing renaissance. Friends and associates say he quickly began to heal. He quit his highly lucrative touring career to concentrate solely on his greatest love: making music in the studio. Worse, Von Bahder said, “the more famous he got, the more amplified his social anxiety got.”īy the end of 2016, Avicii made a bold choice. “It’s very easy to become too attached to partying,” he told Rolling Stone of that period. Though the fast-rising star was at the peak of his career then, playing before hundreds of thousands of fans at gigs commanding $250,000 a night, the pressure, and milieu, of the hard-partying world of electronic dance music encouraged his most destructive habits. “I said to myself, ‘What happened with him?’” “He worked way too much and looked too thin,” Pontare said about that period. With an unflinching honesty that his friends considered one of his finest traits, Avicii spoke in the film about his social anxiety, lifelong shyness and profound discomfort with fame. Afterward, doctors gave him pills for his pain, which he later said were grossly overprescribed.
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The movie also chronicled Avicii’s struggles with alcohol, which led to an 11-day hospital stay in New York in 2012 for pancreatitis in 2014, his gall bladder and appendix were removed. “We talked about doing the album after this.” “There were things he wanted to do, places he was going to go.”Īlbin Nedler, a collaborator who was staying in Avicii’s Los Angeles home when he left on his trip, recalled his saying he was “ in a really good place.” Another creative partner, Vincent Pontare, communicated with Avicii when he was on the plane to Oman. “He had so many plans,” said Lucas Von Bahder, a close friend since middle school. All 12 who spoke were in agreement about one thing above all: Not only did they not see Avicii’s death coming, they insisted that in the months before it happened, he was in the best spirits they had seen him in for well over a year. Avicii’s oldest friends spoke, too, as did his most trusted songwriting and production partners in the studios where they have just completed work on the project. To illuminate the origins of Avicii’s final songs, and to speak more candidly about his suicide, his father sat for his first formal interview since his son’s death.
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A full album, titled simply “Tim,” is due out in June, and its first track, “SOS,” arrives on April 10. The family, still very much grieving, is also breaking its nearly yearlong silence with two announcements: the arrival of newly completed Avicii music and the formation of a charitable organization called the Tim Bergling Foundation that will support groups involved with mental health and suicide prevention. A statement from his family at the time stated, “He could not go on,” and while they still decline to go into the details of his death, they are publicly acknowledging the death was a suicide. Avicii, the genre-redefining dance-pop songwriter and producer of global hits like “Levels” and “Wake Me Up” - died last April 20 at the age of 28 during a vacation in Muscat, Oman. The “he” Falk referred to - Tim Bergling, a.k.a. Would he like this? What would he have done?” “It was really hard not to criticize yourself the whole time. “I was trying to produce through someone else’s eyes and ears - someone who’s not here,” he said with vexed intensity, while sitting at his control board. STOCKHOLM - For the last six months, the music producer Carl Falk has been venturing into his dark and cloistered recording studio in central Stockholm to collaborate with a ghost.