Avicii

Good afternoon,

For some reason, I have never been affected by celebrity deaths. I have never understood it either. I've never known a celebrity well enough for it to matter, it never seems more sad than a stranger dying in a car accident. There's never been a famous person to die, who I've been the least bit attached to for it to have an impact on me.

Then, about a year ago, before driving down small-town Oklahoma roads to a KC-135 systems class, it became news that Tim Bergling had killed himself in Oman. Unlike every other celebrity death I've experienced in my life, I felt... really sad. It caught me off-guard, it wasn't a dear friend or familiar member who'd passed, but it felt like someone I'd grown up with was no longer with me.

To explain it I must go back to the first moment I'd heard his music. I was in a nightclub in Los Angeles at 18 years old (an appropriate time and place to be introduced to house music). Levels came on and the club shattered into pieces; it was the most simple and repetitive yet complex string of notes to have been played in a Hollywood nightclub yet (I mean, I think it was, that was the first time I'd been in a nightclub).

Avicii followed me through the early years of college, helping me study to songs like Silhouettes, Superlove, and I Could Be The One. Fast forward to sophomore year, in the middle of rough ROTC times and rougher engineering classes Karen and I were to take Spring Break in the one and only MIAMI. The day before we left, while struggling through midterms and packing our bags, Avicii dropped a brand new single. X You, just in time for Ultra, and with a music video highlighting Miami nightlife, we couldn't help but feel, despite how irrational, that Avicii made the song for us because he somehow knew that we needed it. We needed a break, we needed Miami (more than usual), and we needed a new Avicii song to listen to on the flight. And Avicii delivered.

College life continued and Avicii followed us with Wake Me Up among others as he gained popularity. Boyfriend life turned into engaged life and eventually married life and we started traveling more and more. Songs like Hey Brother I never understood until hearing it in a nightclub in Rio de Janeiro and seeing all the cariocas singing along in redneck accents. It seemed like the traveling made the music better, as if we only felt the full effect of the melody if we heard it the same way he wrote it: on the road, finding new places.

One of the most memorable of all times was on our honeymoon in Dubai, when a few days into our trip Avicii came out with Waiting For Love. Again, because the song was released within days of our wedding, and crept itself onto a YouTube playlist just as we arrived in Dubai, we couldn't help but feel that in some way or another the song was written for us. Of course we know that's not true, but the feeling presides none the less. There are times when a song matches a memory so indescribably well, it's ingrained in your mind for life; and hearing this song while driving through the the buildings on Sheikh Zayed is the prime example.

Then came darker times. Cambodia, my mom's first illness, moving away, things bubbled over quickly in those months and I had an Avicii album to emote with. The lyrics and melodies of Ten More Days or Sunset Jesus, once again, felt like they were written for me personally in order to be discovered at the exact moment I needed it. For A Better Day, a song about the escape from child trafficking of all things, landing in my lap just in time for me to listen to on my lunch break between teaching Cambodian children stuck in poverty, feels like it's fulfilling a purpose.

So to let it sink in on an Oklahoma highway that Avicii was no longer here, creating music and living life, meant there would be no more chance encounters with his music when it seemed I needed it most. It would mean I'd hit the limit on relating to his music. And perhaps the saddest aspect, it meant the lyrics weren't for show. It meant he really was a tortured soul, and when it felt like through his music he had the same problems we all do with life, it's because he really did. And now there will be no more of it because of the fact.

But hopefully, I can reminisce in the fact that for the rest of my life whenever I hear Levels there will be a projection in my mind of Hollywood nightclubs. Whenever I hear X You I picture the approached over the Everglades into 8L at KMIA. Hey Brother takes me right back Rio, and Karen and I both still see skyscrapers on both sides of an 18 lane freeway when we hear Waiting For Love. I  will always remember sitting in a hammock on Koh Rong coping with his latest album.

And just like that, a complete 180 of my previous assertions on celebrity deaths. They do leave an impact, an empty feeling, because despite being a one-way road a person can share quite a bit of their life with an artist. And the most stinging part of their death is the fact that the bond no longer exists, despite never existing in the first place.