“And when I’m back in Chicago I feel it.”
For the last few weeks, TikTok users, especially those in Chicago, have been inundated with videos featuring those lyrics on their feeds via a clip of the song “End of Beginning” by Djo.
A typical video might feature a self-shot supercut of the city’s greatest hits. The Chicago River shimmers underneath the Franklin Street bridge. The L bustles through the Loop. Fireworks burst over the lake. People walk along Montrose Beach.
Other videos might feature sentimental text extolling Chicago’s virtues and how other artists miss the city or how happy they are to have moved here. Some string together clips from Chicago-based shows “The Bear” and “Shameless.”
It’s a trend comprising more than 19,000 posts, most centering on Chicago while guitars jangle along with glossy synths, an indie-psych-rock beat rides and a voice belts, “You take the man out of the city, not the city out the man.”
The TikTok virality has been a boon to the song’s popularity, as it entered the Billboard Hot 100 on Tuesday, debuting at No. 51. On Spotify, “End of Beginning” has racked up nearly 72 million streams.
@zunaira.tu Summer can’t come fast enough☀️ also ily chicago #endofbeginning #filmtok #fyp #film #chicago #djo #joekeery #chicagoviews #exploringchicago ♬ End of Beginning - Djo
The man behind the wheel of this lush nostalgia vehicle is 31-year-old actor Joe Keery — known for roles in “Stranger Things” and “Fargo” — who makes music under the moniker Djo.
For Keery, “End of Beginning” captures the many emotions swirling during an “alternate time in my life” spurred by major change, he says in an interview.
“It’s about longing for something in the past and then also trying to appreciate the future and the present moment that you’re in,” Keery says.
‘Another version of me’
The Massachusetts native graduated from DePaul University in 2014 and stayed in Chicago, cutting his teeth in the DIY music scene with the band Post Animal while pursuing acting.
By 2016, his role as Steve Harrington in Netflix’s wildly popular “Stranger Things” kick-started his acting career. Then, in 2019, Keery made the decision to leave the band and close friends and take his Chicago memories to Los Angeles and, as he sings, “wave goodbye to the end of beginning.”
As his acting career took off, Keery, who now lives in New York, never stopped making music. He has released two solo albums as Djo, including 2022’s “Decide,” which features “End of Beginning.”
He says that song is a “reflection on how inclusive and collaborative” the Chicago music scene is. It’s a song that illustrates “having dreams to reach some sort of bigger success but not necessarily realizing what an amazing and fertile environment that you’re in” — and what it feels like to return years later.
“It’s about going back to a place and then, in Chicago, breathing in the air there — the lake smell and downtown, the chocolate smell that happens every once in a while, and it’s a very visceral thing,” Keery says. “When you’re back there, you’re like, ‘Wow, oh, my gosh, I feel like I am that age.’ … You kind of appreciate how far you’ve come.”
Almost two years after its release, “End of Beginning” is being heard by many people for the first time thanks to a TikTok trend that, to his astonishment, is “100% organic on this side,” Keery says. “It’s kind of cool to see that the song that’s been out for a bit has kind of seemed to have found a new audience and struck a chord with so many people.”
Song’s wide appeal
One of the earliest adopters of the TikTok trend was 23-year-old Katie Kelly of Northern Ireland, whose “End of Beginning” video has had nearly 2 million views and gotten more than 368,000 likes.
Kelly says the experience of standing on the precipice of change while in Chicago resonates with her even thousands of miles away, attending college in Dublin.
@katiekelly777 Getting the summer blues for Chicago with this song :( Inspo: @DOS 🌐 . #filmtok#edit#fyp#film ♬ End of Beginning - Djo
Kelly says she has visited Chicago twice, and there’s something about the city that makes her want to romanticize it, just as others have.
“The first time I went there, it was an ‘End of Beginning’-type thing,” Kelly says. “I broke up with someone that I was with during that time, then I met all these new people there.”
With the title card reading “Summer in Chicago,” Kelly’s ode to the city strings together clips from her time visiting the lake, the Bean and the Riverwalk.
“I’m not even from Chicago, and I have really good memories associated with it,” she says.
Seeing people like Kelly identify with the song has been powerful, Keery says.
“You write a song, and you hope that people understand it,” he says. “It’s personal to me, and I have a really deep connection to the lyrics. But then to see people take it and make it applicable for their own life and situation — that’s kind of what it’s all about.”
Singing the song at Lollapalooza
One of Keery’s first times playing “End of Beginning” live was at a packed Djo set at Lollapalooza in July 2022, months before the song’s release.
Clad in white jumpsuits, he and his band eased into the song. Keery faced the skyline and sang, donning a shoulder-length wig and sunglasses — a common ensemble he wears to separate the actor from the musician.
Keery says the moment was “a real blur.”
Here was a performer — once embedded in the city’s music scene, honing his craft in clubs like the Empty Bottle and Sleeping Village, for whom a successful night meant a tight set at Schubas and a free fish-and-chips dinner — playing on the city’s biggest stage.
“Singing that song, specifically in Chicago, was a real out-of-body experience that I feel like I went somewhere else for,” Keery says.
In the crowd watching Keery perform was 28-year-old Chicagoan Lyssa Sheng, who in a recent viral TikTok described hearing the song for the first time.
“We hear that lyric, ‘When I’m back in Chicago I feel it,’ and the crowd was just like, ‘Whoa!’” Sheng says.
She discovered Keery’s music in 2019 and saw him play at Sleeping Village. A fellow DePaul alum, she says Keery’s song captures what it’s like to be in your 20s in the city.
“It’s kind of a running joke in my friend group that Joe Keery went to our college,” Sheng says. “So we kind of knew what he was talking about when we heard the song. Joe knew what he was writing about with this song. There’s something very special about this city.”
