The clue arrived as a text message to Jenny Lindfors.
A friend vacationing in Malta was sitting beside a hotel pool when music came drifting out of the bar. Something about the voice made her stop. She texted Lindfors: had she ever recorded a session with a repeating line about “enough is enough”?
Lindfors, a singer-songwriter who now makes indie-folk music under the moniker Sailing Stonesconfirmed that she had. The barman told her friend it was Avicii, who was by then one of the biggest DJ acts in the world.
“I was quite flabbergasted,” Lindfors tells EDM.com in an exclusive interview.
That moment began a years-long crusade for Lindfors, who says she is the uncredited vocalist on what has become one of the legendary DJ’s most enduring unreleased tracks, known variously to fans as ‘Enough Is Enough’ and ‘Let Me Show You Love.’ Since Avicii’s tragic death by suicide in 2018, the track has taken on an almost mythological quality in EDM circles, accumulating tens of millions of streams from unofficial uploads while the question of its authorship remained unresolved.
Bootleg recordings, Reddit threads and fan forums have spent years speculating over whose voice was used by Avicii, whose real name was Tim Bergling. The names Yolanda Selini and Amy Pearson have circulated widely. The Australian DJ duo NERVO were also associated with the record, having co-written its original melody. All of this bypassed Lindfors for years, she tells us.
She did not know the recording would end up in DJ sets at festivals all over the world. She did not know, when she walked into the studio in the spring of 2011, that the client was Avicii.
Jenny Lindfors.Credit: Julian Ward
The session, Lindfors recalls, came together through Hal Ritson, a Grammy-nominated British music producer who founded Replay Heaven. The London-based company specializes in what the industry calls interpolations or sample replays, precise recreations of existing vocals or instrumental tracks that allow producers to sidestep the legal and financial complications of clearing original recordings. Lindfors says Ritson had already hired her for several such projects, including recreations of Sia’s ‘Drink to Get Drunk’ and Madonna’s ‘Ray of Light’ for tracks released on the influential Dutch EDM label Spinnin’ Records.
Lindfors, who was known within that world as a skilled vocal mimic, says Ritson called her in to sing in the style of Florence Welch, the distinctive voice behind Florence + The Machine. She was paid her standard session rate and signed the accompanying contract, requesting that if the recording were ever released, she be credited under an alias. She now realizes the name on the contract was Avicii’s.
EDM.com has reviewed and verified the recording contract, which explicitly names Lindfors and Ritson as the “vocalists” on a song “provisionally entititled (sic) ‘Let Me Show You Love’ by the artist Avicii.” A separate invoice issued by Lindfors for her session fee, dated May 15, 2011, lists “(Avicii/ Let me show you love).”
Ritson is credited as a vocal producer on ‘Fade into Darkness,’ a generational dance anthem released by Avicii in 2011, which suggests the depth of his working relationship with the artist’s camp during that period. Lindfors believes the ‘Enough Is Enough’ session was part of the same creative orbit. She also said the session was brokered by Arash Pournouri, who managed the DJ throughout his rise to global fame and was referred to in the studio simply as “Ash.”
The contract also sheds light on why Lindfors had so little control over what became of her voice. A clause in the agreement explicitly waives her moral rights, granting the client the freedom to edit, alter, amend or remix the master recording at will, without any obligation to consult her. It is that provision, standard boilerplate in session recording contracts of this kind, that allowed her original vocal to be lifted from the original arrangement and placed over a different instrumental, the one that would go on to fill EDM festivals and, apparently, hotel pool bars across the world without her knowledge.
After her friend’s text message that day, Lindfors did some internet sleuthing and discovered that the instrumental she sang over in the studio had been replaced entirely by Bergling’s signature euphoric sound. Her voice, however, was still unmistakably there.
“I took to the internet and saw countless videos of Avicii playing a track that contained my original vocal at festivals and clubs,” she says. “The music was totally different to what I’d sang along to in the recording session. Rips of the song were on SoundCloud and YouTube, and had racked up something like 30 million streams altogether. I later discovered it was one of Aviciis personal favorites, and he liked to open shows with it.”
Since ‘Let Me Show You Love’ was never officially released, Lindfors could not pursue legal action without an authoritative credits page to consult, leaving her with no recourse to correct the record. She also refrained at the time because she was an acoustic artist trying to build her own artistic voice and the breakneck, technicolor ecosystem of EDM felt like a stark departure.
“It was a paid gig for me when I was living in London and struggling to get my music out there,” she explains. “I didn’t really feel that the EDM world was a good fit for me, but also I also didn’t know how to capitalize on it when the song was officially unreleased.”
The NERVO sisters have spoken publicly about attempting to release a version of the song. In 2021, Liv Nervo said they had to strip the record of Berglin’s contributions after his estate declined to clear them, describing the resulting project as a remake rather than a release of the version that initially captured the collective heart of his fanbase. An unearthed video showing Avicii and the duo dropping the track live at the 2011 Tomorrowland festival reignited fan interest last year, with the latter commenting that it was “hopefully coming out soon.”
15 years later, as the prospect of an official release looms, Lindfors has decided the moment to speak up is now.
“These people may all be involved in different capacities as writers, demo vocalists and so on,” Lindfors says of the various musicians tangled in the song’s tortuous recording history. “But the vocal that’s out there is definitely me.”
Now, Lindfors is preparing to release a self-produced record called Slow Magica collection of songs that explores the experience of motherhood, on July 3rd. The first single, ‘A Promise to Love,’ was written during a workshop led by Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes. She also still works as an occasional backing vocalist and session vocalist now that her own artistic path has calcified.
At the time of this writing, Avicii’s estate has not formally announced a release date for ‘Let Me Show You Love,’ nor indicated that the song will ever come out.
The post 15 Years After Recording One of Avicii’s Biggest Unreleased Songs, the Anonymous Singer on “Enough Is Enough” Is Stepping Forward appeared first on EDM.
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