The entire music world was shocked in 2018 when the news broke that musician Avicii (his real name was Tim Bergling) had killed himself. Avicii had already retired for performing two years before because he felt that the amount of pressure was taking a way too high toll on his body and mind, so he only was producing music at that moment.
The biografie about the build up to this moment in Tims life was written by Mans Mosesson and is a gigantic collection of memories, stories and moments collected from his friends, family and colleagues.
Ask someone who loves electronic music (even though if this isn't your style) or someone who loves to read about the person behind the artist, I digested this book in less than three days.
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Maybe the name of the artist Avicii doesn't ring that many bells to you, but I am sure that when you hear one of his multiple hits that you also have heard it before somewhere.
Tim Bergling was an exceptional autodidactic artist, who didn't have that much knowledge about music theoretics but he learned everything himself. This was in the time of Youtube and Spotify just starting and it was also in the first period of time that working around the world and talking about music with other artists got a lot easier compared to the years before.
This is actually the song of Avicii that I like the most and this is also one of his first released songs. I like the build up in the break not having a silence, but the tones continuing making the song even more powerfull which was a typical thing for Avicii to do.
According to the book ever since Tim was a kid he was very aware fo his surroundings and also always scared about the opinion other had of him, especially on his skin as he was a kid with pimples. This combined with that he was a 'thinker' kind of type from heart didn't make his life as an artist easy. He was always really aware of the reviews, or what people thought of him and his music and next to that.....
His touring schedule was crazy
This is probably the most famous song from Avicii and at a certain moment it was just played everywhere. You can argue if this was even house music anymore or EDM or that maybe Tim deep in his heart even wanted to 'just' play pop music. Also with the collaborations that he worked on, he worked with so many just 'popmusic' artists.
Interesting to see in retrospect that a lot of these videos (although they are always about music, dancing and dancefloors in there as well) have some dark elements in there with weirdness and death. You could see this was always a recurring topic with Tim.
Dark title and video again right? One of problems that was haunting Avicii was that he was suffering from a chronic pancreatitis, which is actually one of the most painfull illnesses there is. Because of that and working around his ridiculous touring schedule he received painkillers to manage that and got addicted to those. I think this is also one of the first times that painkiller addiction got out as a bigger problem than that everyone realised.
But how does all of this work when you are a musical genius and a money making machine. Hardly anyone will encourage you to stop doing it right?
At a certain point Tim realised the touring did him more harm than good (he didn't like performing, it just gave him too much stress) and he started travelling the world with his buddies as a 'normal' person.
In that phase he also got a lot more into spirituality and mindfullness strying to give his thoughts a better place. In combination with still medication and also smoking pot this lead up to him taking the exit route out, which throughout the book sounded more than inevitable seeing how destructive the man was living.
'Tim' is a sad book to read, because you know how the story ends, but reading about the rise and fall and how the music industry in that time worked was actually super nice.
I think the author who spent 2 years on collecting stories and data about Tim did a good job on putting up an honest story about how this young musician lived his life. As said...I devoured the book in just a couple of days because it was so intruiging.
But this was a story about a troubled young man addicted to painkillers and also a bit afraid of the world....and that is just super sad.
