Tim Bergling picked up a guitar he barely knew how to play, ran his fingers across the strings, and said it felt like water. That single unguarded moment captures something essential about how ‘Stories’ came to life: not through polish, but through genuine curiosity. For anyone who has ever wondered what actually happens when a globally recognized electronic artist strips away the festival stages and sits in a room with a few collaborators and a blank session file, this footage offers a rare, unfiltered answer.
Two composers, two nerds, just getting it in
The sessions that produced ‘Stories’ were built on a working philosophy Avicii kept returning to throughout the recordings: no BPM ceiling, no genre obligation, no predetermined sound. He described it as the biggest project he had ever taken on, and the one where he finally went, in his own words, ‘all in on songwriting.’ His collaborator from these sessions put it plainly about what made Tim exceptional in the room: ‘He understood every part of the creation, just naturally.’
That natural instinct showed in small, telling ways. When a chord progression landed and the two of them sat back to listen, one of them noted the track had a quality that made it hard to locate the downbeat. ‘You don’t know where the one is,’ came the observation, offered as a compliment. For producers trained inside the rigid grid of electronic music, losing the one is usually a problem. Here it was the point.
The guitar moment stands out in particular. Avicii had no formal training on the instrument, admitted he did not know much about guitars, then immediately said he was starting to want to learn. Within the same conversation he was strumming, reacting with a single word: ‘Juicy.’ It is not the vocabulary of a calculated recording strategy. It is someone genuinely discovering something for the first time, inside a session that cost real money and real time.
Blues, bluegrass, and a house producer who refused the category
The sonic scope Avicii was reaching for on ‘Stories’ was deliberately destabilizing. He framed it himself as a fusion pulling from house, blues, jazz, funk, disco, bluegrass, and folk, the kind of list that reads more like a provocation than a tracklist brief. What held it together, he argued, was the fact that he was involved with every note on every song, each one written from scratch in the studio during a year of sessions with collaborators he described as among the most talented people he had ever worked with.
Lyrics mattered deeply to him in a way that surprised some observers of his earlier work. He traced that instinct back to growing up inside hip-hop culture, citing the Fugees as a foundational influence. The emphasis on what words actually mean, and how they land inside a track, carried directly into the ‘Stories’ sessions.
All of it was filmed. The plan at the time was to turn the footage into something audiences could watch, possibly a YouTube series, the details still being worked out. The recordings existed. The evidence was there.
The guitar sitting on the studio couch
At some point during a session, an acoustic guitar rested in the room while the two of them worked through something that had not yet found its final shape. The strings had just been played by someone who was not sure he could play them. The sound had already been called timeless by the person sitting next to him.
By the end of that year of sessions, Avicii had made something he could not have made inside the boundaries he had started with. ‘In just a year I’ve had so many sessions with so many talented people,’ he reflected, ‘and I’ve learned something each time.’ The guitar was still in the room.
