logobossstupid

• Avicii Songs

Find album reviews, stream songs, credits and award information for True - Avicii on AllMusic - 2013 - With the hypnotic and bright Grammy-nominated. For my thirty-fourth review, I talk about the new Avicii album 'TRUE' with some hesitation due to the sparse lyrical content - and then discovers a whole new angle in which to discuss the album.

April 20, 2019 marks the one year anniversary since Swedish musician Tim Bergling, better known by his stage name Avicii, took his own life. Despite creating music whose incessant rhythms and soaring melodies connoted a joyous optimism, he was haunted by depression, anxiety and addiction, and at the age of 28 succumbed to his angst. Six months before he died, the film Avicii: True Stories was released, which chronicled his journey up to that point and erroneously posited his troubles as a thing of the past. Currently available for streaming on Netflix, it now stands as an unintended epitaph to an artist whose musical influence has become common place and whose popularity was worldwide.

The film begins with an ecstatic concert scene, a massive crowd and fireworks, as a young man strike a grandiose pose behind a bay of electronics. It’s a fairly typical view of any EDM gathering, but Avicii’s music was hardly typical, blurring the lines between multiple genres, from dance music to pop and even country. “The first four or five years, everything was awesome,” he tells us in an interview, before going on to say that by 2016 he no longer enjoyed touring or even making music.

Avicii Songs

Born in 1989, Avicii grew up in Stockholm, Sweden. “My whole life was in between 5 blocks,” he says. Like others of his generation, making music wasn’t something learned in grubby practice spaces, but a natural extension of gaming, fan forums and digital recording apps. He and his tight-knit group of childhood friends fantasized about one of them making it big so they could live out their Entourage fantasies. They appear throughout the film, either to give an aside or ride shotgun as their friend becomes one of the most important artists of his era.

Avicii soon began turning heads, uploading his songs to online music forums, and eventually re-mixing tracks by A-list EDM artists. His first manager Ash Pournouri encouraged him to think of himself not merely as a DJ or a producer but as “an artist.” Avicii searched for new sounds to build tracks, eventually incorporating acoustic guitars and using rock and bluegrass musicians. In fact, hits like “Wake Me Up” and “Hey Brother” sound more like contemporary country than EDM, besides the incessant kick-drum and digital recording touches.

As Avicii graduated from playing clubs to playing stadiums, he began living the life of an international pop star, despite still being a scrawny though fresh faced kid with acne, dressed in casual wear that looked like his mother bought it for him. “Every show was a big party,” he says. By 2012, he was headlining Miami’s massive Ultra Music Festival, with Madonna flying in to introduce him. He says he began drinking before gigs to loosen up and calm his nerves. However, his health problems, which began that same year, were the result of heavy alcohol abuse, not a few beers here or there.

In early 2012, Avicii was hospitalized with acute pancreatitis, allegedly the result of heavy drinking. Two years later, both his appendix and gall bladder ruptured. He started taking the opiate Percocet, which he said still did little to alleviate his persistent stomach pain. Rather than take time off, he continued touring, but his shows were now marred by a growing sense of anxiety every time he got near the stage.

In 2015, Avicii released his second album, Stories. His first album had taken three months to make, this one took two years. In 2016, he moved to the U.S., seemingly healed from months of therapy and rest. He was working out, almost unrecognizable from the gaunt young man a couple years before, and traveled by tour bus across the country with his friends. However, the trip’s ultimate destination at the Ultra Festival in Miami was marred by technical difficulties and return of his performance anxiety. Soon after, he announced his retirement from touring.

The film’s final segment comes with a title card, “Chapter III.” We see Avicii playing on the beach in Madagascar, while famous musicians from prior generations praise his work ethic and approach to making music. Filmed a month after his retirement from touring, Avicii says, “I feel like I did when I was 18 maybe. I feel I’m in the same spirit.” There is a sense of renewal, a rebirth, of what yet, we don’t know. Tragically, it’s a false sense of peace. Not even three years later, Avicii would commit suicide.

Directed by Levan Tsikurishvili, Avicii: True Stories is beautifully filmed, as bright colors radiate and drone cameras pan out to reveal beautiful locales where the millionaire musician works on his music or revels in his free time. Unfortunately, we can’t un-know the story’s grim conclusion. While I feel Tsikurishvili undersells Avicii’s struggles with addiction and depression, there was no way he could have foreseen the artist’s tragic end. Still, it’s hard to watch when you know the film’s cautiously happy ending would become a tragedy when the cameras stopped rolling.

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC.