Friends and associates say he quickly began to heal. He quit his highly lucrative touring career to concentrate solely on his greatest love: making music in the studio. Worse, Von Bahder said, “the more famous he got, the more amplified his social anxiety got.”īy the end of 2016, Avicii made a bold choice. “It’s very easy to become too attached to partying,” he told Rolling Stone of that period. Though the fast-rising star was at the peak of his career then, playing before hundreds of thousands of fans at gigs commanding $250,000 a night, the pressure, and milieu, of the hard-partying world of electronic dance music encouraged his most destructive habits. “I said to myself, ‘What happened with him?’” “He worked way too much and looked too thin,” Pontare said about that period.

With an unflinching honesty that his friends considered one of his finest traits, Avicii spoke in the film about his social anxiety, lifelong shyness and profound discomfort with fame. Afterward, doctors gave him pills for his pain, which he later said were grossly overprescribed. His work in that capacity for Liberty Records eventually landed him in Los Angeles and in the orbit of Nancy Sinatra, who then hired him to write songs for her and her company.The movie also chronicled Avicii’s struggles with alcohol, which led to an 11-day hospital stay in New York in 2012 for pancreatitis in 2014, his gall bladder and appendix were removed. It was there, around the age of 20, that Davis began performing in bands and writing songs while working as a 'promotions man' for record labels, trying to secure radio play for their releases. At 16, upon graduating from high school, Davis left Lubbock to join his mother, Edith, in Atlanta. In all, he released 19 albums over 25 years, beginning with 1970's Song Painter and ending with 1994's Will Write Songs For Food.ĭavis was born in Texas on Jan.

He was an inductee to the Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame, the Georgia Music Hall of Fame and was a recipient of the BMI Icon Award. He was 78.ĭavis' songwriting work was recorded by dozens of artists, including Nancy Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, Reba McEntire, Tom Jones, Kenny Rogers, Merle Haggard and more. His death was confirmed by his manager, Jim Morey. Mac Davis, a songwriter and performer who began a decades-long ascent in music and entertainment in the early 1960s, died Tuesday in Nashville following heart surgery.

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