Songfacts®:

• Tim Bergling was a Swedish house producer and DJ, who recorded under the name of Avicii, which is Sanskrit/Pali for "without waves." This song contains a vocal sample from the 1962 gospel-inspired "Something's Got a Hold on Me" by Etta James, and was released on October 28, 2011.
• Bergling also recorded under the name of Tim Berg; he had an international hit under that name in 2010 with "Seek Bromance."
• American rap artist Flo Rida used this song as the background sample for his 2011 single "Good Feeling."
• Bergling said regarding his Avicii moniker: "Avici [sic] is kind of like Dante's Inferno ... it's the lowest level of hell in Buddhism. A friend of mine told me about it, and it stuck in my head. I was going to make up a name for my MySpace page for the first time, and I just kind of went for it. I tried a couple of other [names] before, but they were all taken (laughing). I kind of ended up with Avicii, and then I got really attached to it."
• Avicii told the story of the song to Artist Direct's Rick Florino: "Well I had this vocal sample from Etta James, which I really wanted to use. After I came up with the 'Levels' hook, I tried using the vocal over it, and it worked really well. Then my manager landed an incredible deal with our label and did an amazing job getting publicity for the track. To me, it's one of the career changing tracks that I fell brought the whole AVICII brand to another level—pun intended (Laughs)."
• The song was a Top 10 hit throughout Europe and was especially successful in Avicii's native Sweden and Norway topping the charts in both countries for multiple weeks.
• Avicii's manager, Ash Pournouri, got a songwriting credit on this track along with the composers of the Etta James song it sampled.
• This was featured in the pilot episode of the CW drama Arrow in 2012.