Tim reached out wanting to see if we were interested in working with him.
I was very familiar with Avicii’s work and thought he was a really incredible artist
and was totally game for it. We went into his studio with my guitarist
Wayne Sermon and started from scratch on a track with Tim.
I remember actually, I put the session together and I didn’t put in a guitar player or
keyboard player, and I felt really bad so I was coming in to apologize and say
“Guys, I’m so sorry”. But by the time I got in there, Dan and Tim had already started
“Heart Upon My Sleeve” and they were amped, and they played it for me,
and I closed my eyes and I was like, “Oh my god, this is so big.”
There is a sound to a Avicii vocal, even though they’re all different vocalists,
and that was Tim’s great talent. It was unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
He knew what he wanted to hear, and I would just remember singing melody after melody
and it was like, “what about like…” and he would just be like “nahhh” he just kind of sat there
and then when I was like “….” his eyes lit up and he was like “Yes, that’s it!”
He knows what he wants to do, and he had a vision, and the track
has this almost cold dark strings that are very brooding.
But it also has a real beauty, like a glimmer of beauty within this kind of coldness.
This searching, kind of desperate road wariness that really is magical and wouldn’t be
captured if we were in some happy, chipper place, I think. But there is a real beauty to that.
I think we worked on that session and we kept in touch via email, sending the track
back and forth. Like I said, we were really excited about the track and so was Tim,
but I don’t know, I think it was just one of these things where
the universe has its own timing for things.
“I wear my heart upon my sleeve”, I mean, you cannot articulate
something that describes Tim better than that.
The process of finalizing the song without Tim was difficult. The only thing I really added was
what we thought it needed back in the day which was, it needed another verse, it needed to
go somewhere else, and I didn’t know where it needed to go until this last year when I felt
like, okay what this needs is to go back to the memory of Tim. I think that the way that it’s
come together and come full circle now is just how it was meant to happen.