Wake Me Up

Wake Me Up arrived in 2013 as something genuinely new: a dance record built on an acoustic guitar and a soulful vocal from Aloe Blacc, fusing house music with folk and country. Tim Bergling, the young Stockholm producer behind Avicii, premiered an early version at the Ultra festival to a crowd who had come for big-room EDM and reacted with confusion. Within months it was one of the biggest songs in the world. Bergling was barely into his twenties and already one of the most in-demand DJs alive, touring almost without pause. The line about carrying the weight of the world with only two hands reads very differently in hindsight. In 2016 he stepped away from live performing, citing exhaustion and health problems that the relentless schedule had made worse. In April 2018 Tim Bergling died at the age of 28. His death recast Wake Me Up, and its lyric about not knowing where the journey will end, as something the song never set out to be, and it prompted a wide reckoning with the pressures placed on young artists. His family later founded a mental health foundation in his name. The track remains euphoric, which is part of what makes returning to it so complicated.