He started this one in a barn on the Mornington Peninsula, with no words at all. Most songs begin with a line, a chord, a feeling someone is chasing. This one began with a sound he liked and could not stop circling: a few seconds of warm, plucked strings, gentle and a little uncanny, the kind of melody that sounds settled and lived-in before you have heard it once. He looped it, built a bed underneath it, and let the track exist before the song did. The phrase on top was familiar in a way he could not quite place, and that was the point. It felt borrowed from somewhere older than he was.

For a long stretch it went nowhere. He had the mood, the loop, the ache of a relationship that had cooled into nothing, and he had no way out of it. One voice, turning the same hurt over and over, kept hitting the same wall. The breakthrough, when it came, did not arrive as a sharper lyric or a bigger chorus. It arrived as a decision about who else was allowed in the room, an instinct that the song needed something it did not yet have. The collaborator he reached for was a late and unlikely call, a name few would have predicted, and almost nobody now can imagine the song without.

What happened next was not normal. The track went to number one across most of the planet, swept the night at the Grammys, and became, for a while, simply the song everyone everywhere was hearing. It is the kind of success an artist is supposed to want without complication. He did not wear it that way. The bigger it became, the more uneasy he seemed about what it was turning him into, and about the machinery that wanted to wring every last cent from it. He drew lines other people found baffling, said no in places where yes was the obvious answer, and treated the song less like a trophy than like something he had to keep at arm’s length.

In time he stepped back from it almost entirely, and eventually from the name the world knew him by. The barn, the loop, the borrowed melody: all of it had carried him further than any musician could plan for, and somewhere in that flight he decided he would rather be the person who made the thing than the person the thing had made. It is a strange fate for a song this joyful: beloved by millions, and quietly held at a distance by the one who built it.