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: Well—
Internal debate settled, he said,
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.
MIKE: There are?
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.
The Diagnosis
_______________________
June 2016
Los Angeles, CA
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.
But instead, the screen read:
Home.
Disappointed, I answered.
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?
DAD: I think I’m going to take my last breath and then that’s it.
His answer caught me off guard. I always thought my Dad believed in heaven. Why else was he so darn joyful all the time?
I tried to persuade him to be more like I thought he was.
ME: Well I think you’re going to be with Grandma and Uncle Harold.
Unconvinced, he retreated inward, leaving me to over-analyze my last sentence. Did I just make a colossal mistake?
His leg was still shaking. I reached out and put a hand on the decaying quadricep. Tears were raging up to my throat, but I managed to halt them there.
ME: I love you, Dad.
DAD: I love you so much.
I nodded toward my guitar, which I’d left lying next to his bed.
ME: Do you want me to play you a song?
DAD: Yes please.
I turned down the lights and sang an especially sad version of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” The dark blue coming out of my guitar harmonized with our black fear and created a rich love. It expanded across the room like a storm cloud.
Nobody heard that strange duet but us.
***
Grieving is hard for narcissists. Mostly because we believe we don’t have to do it. After all, we’re special. The annoying and burdensome steps of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, are a roadmap laid out for less spiritually evolved people. People who are not geniuses, like us.
So after my Dad died, I washed back up on the shores of West Hollywood. But the old tricks I used to convince myself I was happy stopped working. My meditation mantra turned to sand in my mouth. And my fame was exposed for the lame-substitute-for-love that it was.
I was no longer just my-life-should-be-better-in-some-undefined-type-of-way sad. I was slipping into kill-yourself sad.
But on some level, I realized I was already dead. Not in the way Dad and Avicii were. But in an even sadder way. The kind of dead where you’re still walking around, saying words, and shoveling food in your mouth, pretending like you’re okay. But deep down you’re just a shadow of the person you’re actually supposed to be. And the worst part is you know it.
To add insult to injury, “I Took a Pill in Ibiza” slowly retreated off the pop charts and into a “remember-that-one-song” territory.
For the second time, I became a guy who used to be famous. And yes, I grew my beard out again. But the defining physical characteristic of this part of my life was the sunken holes where my eyes used to be.
TSA agents holding my ID sometimes recognized my name. They did double-takes and always asked me the same question:
“What happened to you?”
I was doing my best to answer that question. But I needed help.
The Transformation
_______________________
December 2022
West Palm Beach, FL
Tony Robbins events are what would come out if a church service made love to a Guns ‘N Roses concert.
Under harsh fluorescent lights, out-of-date David Guetta hits play at absurd volumes, while markedly uncool attendees wear lanyard name tags and jump up and down with outstretched hands.
Something about it feels left over from the ’90s.
I arrived skeptical and sick. Was this really going to work? I hoped so. I’d tried everything else.
Tony took the stage and his gravitas as a speaker was undeniable, even to someone as cynical as me.
The next two days of Tony’s “Date With Destiny” included tear-jerking suicide interventions, powerful distinctions about human psychology, and soul-riveting “closed eye exercises.”
By day three, the conference had taken on a momentum of its own.
Avicii’s song “Levels” blasted out of the speakers, echoing like a ghost from my past, reminding me where my life was headed if I didn’t change. Before long, I found myself jumping around with all those lanyard-wearing people I’d judged upon arrival.
The song faded, the lights dimmed, and Tony’s gravelly voice instructed me and the other thousand live attendees to close our eyes.
Already, I felt something of great significance was starting to happen.
Tony proceeded to guide us through a visualization where we visited younger versions of ourselves. I was vaguely familiar with so-called “inner-child” work, but this felt different.
ROBBINS: Visualize yourself walking over a hill and there’s a person there. And as you get closer, you realize you recognize that person. It’s you when you were 16. What do you want to say to this version of you? What do they want to say to you?
As I write this, I realize how absurd this scene may appear to readers. But I don’t care. Because as I “hugged” that 16-year-old “me” in my mind, two truth bombs exploded into my awareness and presented themselves as unequivocally true:
- My depression was tied directly to my fear of intimacy. The longer I avoided intimacy, the more pain Life was going to give me.
- All the pain I’d undergone in my life thus far was the perfect training for me to serve others in the way I was actually supposed to. Life was giving me challenges so I could learn to overcome them. That way I could teach others to do the same. As Byron Katie so eloquently puts it, Life was not happening to me, it was happening for me.
I looked like the same person but as I stood in that overly air-conditioned conference room, but something about me had changed forever.
I realized I’d been telling myself a lie. The lie was that I was a depressed genius whose sadness was rooted in the fact that no one understood him. That wasn’t true.
Depression was not something I had. Depression was something I was doing.
Nothing more than a set of negative thoughts I repeated in my mind, a slouchy way I held my body, and a false identity I had created for myself.
It was a bad habit. And any habit can be changed.
Mistaking habits for identity leads to suffering.
Distinguishing habits from identity leads to freedom.
So I decided to tell myself a new story.
***
I wouldn’t say Tony Robbins cured me of depression. But I would say Tony Robbins gave me the tools to cure myself of depression.
When I left the conference, I was determined not to slip back into my ways. So every day, immediately upon waking, I put on my headphones and play the same songs Tony used at “Date With Destiny.” I kept telling myself my new story. As the music blared, I would go for a run or lift weights or move my body in some way while repeating:
I am joy.
I am faith.
I am love.
But I didn’t just say it. I screamed it and repeated it until I believed myself. Every. Single. Day.
In this manner, I kept my transformation alive and literally changed my identity.
I found vast amounts of energy reserves unlock.
My Mom, someone who easily irritated me in the past, became one of my best friends. My baseline level of happiness increased tenfold. And drum roll please: I faced my fear and entered a real, live relationship with a real, live woman. That relationship ended amicably but eventually led me to my now fianceé who I’m more-than-happily engaged to. Even I am sort of surprised at how permanent the effects of “Date With Destiny have been.
The last few years have still had their fair share of pain and challenges. There have been health issues, deaths in the family, and breakups. But I’ve learned to ask better questions when the challenges come.
What is Life trying to teach me right now?
By asking this question, my pain becomes the conduit for further expansion, growth, and wisdom. It still hurts. But I use it to take me somewhere I want to go.
Unfortunately, we live in an age of cynicism. Our social media feeds are rife with charlatans and “life coaches” who haven’t even figured out how to live their own lives. The words “mental health” have been misappropriated to actually mean mental weakness.
But I guess I’m a rare example of personal growth work actually working. And I don’t want to mince words: we can change. And our lives can become that good.
When I reflect on my firsr 38 years alive, although I am still very much building the ship as I sail, I realize my greatest achievement isn’t getting famous, writing hit songs, hiking thousands of miles, or even climbing Mt. Everest. My greatest achievement is that I went from a person whose emotional home base was life-suckingly depressed to someone whose emotional home base is now joy, faith, and even deeper than those, love.
But even after I changed my internal story, the larger public still remembered me as the guy who sang “I Took A Pill in Ibiza.” So I decided to change that story too.
For over a decade, “I Took a Pill in Ibiza” dragged me around wherever it wanted. But now it was my turn to lead my life.
No longer was I going to let my music dictate my life. Now I was going to let my Life dictate my music. I wrote, “I Went Back to Ibiza.”
Let’s call a spade a spade, part of my motivation for writing this piece is to get the word out about it. But that’s not the whole story.
In an age where AI can write darn good pop songs and most people “connect” via little blue text bubbles on small screens, art is simply one human saying, “This is what it’s like for me to be human. Anybody else?”
And if we’re lucky, somebody else says, “Yes. That’s exactly what it’s like for me to be human, too. I couldn’t put my finger on it but that song/book/painting/essay said it just right. Thank you. I feel less alone now.”
Twelve years ago when I wrote Ibiza 1.0, I had no idea my life was going to get this good. And interestingly, I’m doing a lot of the same things I was doing 15 years ago: playing concerts, meetings with record labels, and social media posts. But it feels completely different. Instead of obsessively using my job to get more money and fame. I’m trying to do it to serve others and make a difference in their lives. That is to say, after all the spiritual seeking, I haven’t so much changed what I’m doing; I’ve only changed how I’m doing it. And sometimes that makes all the difference.
So if you’re reading this and you’re in a challenging chapter, remember, it’s never too late to change your story. You have no idea how good it could get in the next few years. Keep going. In deep gratitude,
Mike.
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