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 chorus, asking to be woken when it is all over, reads very differently in hindsight. In 2016 he retired from touring, citing health concerns. In April 2018 Tim Bergling died at the age of 28. His death recast Wake Me Up as something the song never set out to be. All proceeds from his posthumous album Tim went to the Tim Bergling Foundation, named after him. The track remains euphoric, which is part of what makes returning to it so complicated.