“Remember when we saw Avicii?”



I was 19, the hottest I’ll probably ever be in my life, and stuck in Reno after being convinced to go on a college ski trip. I don’t ski — an attempt in eighth grade left me sore and wondering why anyone would pay to willingly hurl themselves down a hill — but my best friend and some sorority sisters wanted to escape LA for a weekend.

If you weren’t down for winter sports, there wasn’t much to do in Reno; there were budget hotel rooms filled with plastic bottles of vodka and bad energy drink mixers and slot machines I accessed with the help of an excellent fake ID. And then there was a performance: This random guy named Avicii was playing in town.

He was the one who did “Levels,” the song that played ad nauseam in the frat houses where I partied. I had no idea who Avicii (real name: Tim Bergling) was — I had no idea what “electronic dance music” was — but the show was something like $20, which seemed pretty low-risk, high-reward.

There were no seats, and as I would later learn, EDM events were more of a stand-and-sweat-on-each-other situation. It was dark, and the only thing you could see clearly was keyed-up frat dudes saying “bro” over and over again, forcing me to come to terms with the fact I was in my own personal brand of hell.

This tall, gangly Swede wearing a baseball cap and hoodie came onstage and I clapped and hollered just to feel like part of the crowd. I wasn’t sure if he was a DJ or a college kid who got lost. Then it started: one track, two tracks, three tracks. When “Levels” finally came on, the room erupted. I remember thinking, Is this how religious people feel at church? I stood there, surrounded by strangers, but somehow I’d never felt so understood. I was seen.