The Ultra Set Where Avicii Got Booed During ‘Wake Me Up’ Debut Was 10 Years Ago Today: See New Footage From the Show
Wednesday (March 22) marks the 10-year anniversary of one of EDM’s milestone moments: the Ultra Music Festival performance where Avicii was booed while debuting his then-new single “Wake Me Up.”
2013 was a heady time for dance music in the U.S., marking the height of the EDM explosion, the influx of money and fans to the scene and Avicii as its biggest star — a position he’d earned after releasing a litany of genre-defining hits, including his 2011 breakout track “Levels.”
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But on March 22, 2013, things went sideways for Avicii, if only momentarily.
It was on this day that the artist born Tim Bergling used his mainstage set at Miami’s Ultra Music Festival to debut a new track. A group of musicians assembled onstage and proceeded to play a bluegrass song that had little resemblance to the maximalist EDM the assembled crowd was expecting.
Instead, they got banjo, two guitars and vocalist Aloe Blacc singing about carrying the weight of the world. According to those in the crowd that night, the performance “did not pop.”
“When we performed at Ultra, it was just awkward,” Blacc told Spin in 2019. “I don’t think even the sound people knew what they were doing. Everybody else at the festival had air cannons and pyro and half-naked girls dancing onstage. Then here comes Tim with drums, banjo, fiddle, guitar and three singers.”
But despite the audience really not getting it, the world soon would. That new track, “Wake Me Up,” soon exploded, ultimately becoming the most successful song in the Avicii catalog. It was the Swedish producer’s only top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, reaching No. 4 in October 2013. It spent 26 weeks at No. 1 on Hot Dance/Electronic Songs in 2013-14 and spent 10 weeks at No. 1 Dance/Mix Show Airplay. In the last decade it’s been streamed more than 2.97 billion times globally, according to Luminate.
But this Ultra 2013 performance — which also included a similarly frosty reception for the other new country-leaning Avicii track “Hey Brother” — contained much more than its most famous moment. Nearly 10 minutes of new footage released by the Avicii estate on Wednesday captures this show’s renditions of “Addicted to You” and “Dear Boy,” which (like “Wake Me Up” and “Hey Brother”) are also from Avicii’s 2013 album True. That LP was released six months after the 2013 Ultra show.
This footage of “Addicted to You” features guest vocalist Audra Mae, who is the great-great niece of Judy Garland, taking the stage. The song is followed by “Dear Boy,” which finds the late producer — who would die five years after this show — manning the decks while wearing his signature backward baseball hat as the lights flash in front of him and the crowd goes as wild as they eventually would for “Wake Me Up.” Watch the performance below.
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