Singer-songwriter Mike Posner scored several hit singles from 2010 through 2015, and also produced or co-wrote songs for Justin Bieber, Maroon 5, Nick Jonas and others. His biggest hit, and the song most commonly associated with him, is a SeeB remix of his autobiographical song “I Took a Pill in Ibiza,” which charted in multiple countries and reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 — he recently released a new reinterpretation of the song that details how he’s evolved since the original version. Here, he talks about his unusual path to success, the depression that followed his pop star career, and how he dug himself out of it.
I arrived at NightBird Studios in a sleek white Porsche. I shut the door and traded my keys to a valet for a pinkish slip of paper. I wasn’t kill-yourself sad. I was just my-life-should-be-better-in-some-undefined-type-of-way sad. There was a subtle resentment towards reality running in the background, like an air conditioner whose hum you’re no longer conscious of, but is there nonetheless.
In 2014, NightBird Studios was a hornet’s nest for B-level recording artists of all genres, backgrounds, and sexual orientations. I was there to write with a country artist named Jake Owen. I was hoping this would result in another hit, which would result in more fame, which would result in… I didn’t really know. That’s as far as I had planned.
As I entered Studio B, Jake Owen was strumming a shiny Taylor that somehow reminded me of my Porsche.
He handed it to me and I wrapped my barely calloused fingers around the neck. When I strummed A minor, six separate strands of sadness emanated off the strings and crystallized, making purple in the room. I climbed through the chorus of a new song and emotion steamed off of me like a football player who just took his helmet off. When I finished, the room was silent. Could anyone else feel this?
JAKE: That’s cool man. What’s it about?
I shook off my altered state and replied,
ME: It’s about a girl I had a thing with in New York. But I mixed her story up with another girl I had a thing with in Cleveland. And the rest I just kind of made up.
His annoyingly handsome face made a constipated look. He was trying to decide whether to tell me something.
JAKE: —why don’t you just tell the truth?
Telling the truth in songs had never really occurred to “Mike Posner.” “Mike Posner” thought songs were for convincing everybody how cool “Mike Posner” was.
JAKE: You know there are songwriters who just tell it like it is.
JAKE: Yeah, man. Let me show you.
I passed the guitar back to Jake and he played me an old country song that you don’t hear growing up North of the Ohio.
“I got cuffed on dirt roads, I got sued over no-shows.”
The Hank Williams Jr. lyric danced with the guitar chords and did some kind of magic on my neurochemistry. Without warning, I felt a tear show up in my left eye. I knew I needed to cry. But like a baby kangaroo, that tear decided it was comfortable right there, and refused to fall.
That night, I boarded a flight to Russia with Jake’s question, “Why don’t you just tell the truth?” bouncing off the walls of my mind. I took out my Green Notebook and turned the pages past all pages of songs about how I wanted people to think my life was and wrote one about how my life actually was. That song was, “I Took a Pill in Ibiza.”
This was quite the departure from the first chapter of my career, which was mostly focused on emulating Justin Timberlake. But I did my best to adjust. I was figuring out who I was post-pop-fame.
The subsequent months included a breakup with a girlfriend, a confusing move into a 1993 Dodge Conversion Van, and the growing of an unkempt beard.
But while I was “figuring it all out,” forces beyond my control were at work. A few executives at Island Records, Matt D’Arudini and Zeke Silvera, cleverly recognized that there was a limit to how popular the acoustic rendition of “Ibiza” could get.
So they sent the vocal files to a Norwegian duo named SeeB to create a remix of “I Took a Pill in Ibiza.” A few weeks later, my manager emailed me SeeB’s overhauled version of the song, asking for my approval.
Though my grungy van speakers had grown accustomed to playing solely Bob Dylan since I left LA, I opened the email.
The song cascaded out of the van, sounding like a love letter from outer space. Its high-energy production was almost hostile to my ears, which had grown accustomed to silence.
Nonetheless, I approved the song, shut my laptop, and picked up my guitar with my now very calloused fingers.
For the rest of the summer, I drove around the Rockies, buying day passes to local gyms and sleeping in Walmart parking lots. I forgot about the song from my email.
But the song hadn’t forgotten about me. In fact, it was about to change my entire life.
“The remix is taking off in Norway. It’s number one.” These were the words my then-manager, Ryan Chisholm, said to me over the phone while I was somewhere in Utah.
I went on Spotify and looked for myself. In some weird turn of events, my little song about how I was no longer famous was making me famous again.
After the song shot up the Norwegian charts, it did the same thing in Sweden, and then the Netherlands.
By Christmas, I knew that the U.S. was not far behind.
Now six years older, but only incrementally more mature, I found myself back in the limelight, doing my best to act like I didn’t care.
But I did. So off went the beard. In came the income, the bleached hair, and the world tour. I was back.
My iPhone rang and like a Pavlov dog, I went and retrieved it out of my fancy LA kitchen.
I’d been expecting a call from my manager to discuss an offer that just came in to do a private show for some rich dude’s daughter. 100k.
I wasn’t expecting Mom to say what she said: “Dad was acting strange yesterday so I took him to the doctor. They did a scan and he has a tumor in his left frontal lobe the size of a tangerine. They’re gonna take it out tomorrow. You need to come home.”
That night, I unpacked my fancy Helmut Lang shirts into my childhood dresser, which was still covered with the crooked Ninja Turtle stickers I put there when I was six.
Dad was diagnosed with Glioblastoma, a terminal form of cancer. And I was now living a double life. One as a born-again pop star. And another as a caretaker.
Along with my family and nurses, I helped shave him, turned him so he didn’t get bed sores, and changed his diapers. None of it felt weird. His body refused direction from doctors, family, and Dad himself, and did exactly what it wanted to. Which was march towards death.
I sat on the edge of his bed.
ME: Where do you think we go when we die Dad?
