Actor Joe Keery attends the premiere of “Fargo” in Los Angeles last year. His song “End of Beginning” has captured the attention of audiences on social media and spiked in popularity on music streamers like Spotify.
Chris Pizzello/AP
“And when I’m back in Chicago I feel it.”
For the past 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 artist Djo.
A typical video might feature a self-shot supercut of the city’s greatest hits: the river shimmers underneath the Franklin Street bridge, an L car bustles through the Loop, fireworks burst over the lake and people walk along Montrose Beach.
Other videos see creators write sentimental text on their footage, explaining how great Chicago is, that they miss the city, why they’re glad they visited or that they’re happy they moved here.
Some string together edited clips from Chicago-based shows “The Bear” and “Shameless.”
It’s a trend comprised of more than 14,000 posts mostly centering Chicago, while guitars jangle alongside 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 also meant a boon in the song’s popularity on services like Spotify, where “End of Beginning” has racked up nearly 57 million streams.
The man behind the wheel of this lush nostalgia vehicle is 31-year-old actor Joe Keery — known for his roles in “Stranger Things” and “Fargo” — who makes music under the moniker Djo.
For Keery, “End of Beginning” captures a manifold of emotions swirling during an “alternate time in my life” spurred by major change, he explained to the Sun-Times during a recent 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 said.
‘Another version of me’
A Massachusetts native, Keery graduated from DePaul University in 2014 and stayed in Chicago, cutting his teeth in the DIY music scene with local band Post Animal while pursuing professional acting.
By 2016, his role as Steve Harrington in Netflix’s wildly popular “Stranger Things” kickstarted his acting trajectory. Then in 2019, Keery made the decision to exit the band, leave close friends and meaningful memories in Chicago, move to Los Angeles and, as he sings, “wave goodbye to the end of beginning.”
Yet, as his acting career took off, Keery, who now makes his home in New York, never stopped making music. He has released two albums through his solo project Djo, including 2022’s “DECIDE,” which features “End of Beginning.”
That song, he said, 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 said. “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.”
And almost two years after its release, many are hearing “End of Beginning” for the first time thanks to a TikTok trend that, to his astonishment, is “100% organic on this side,” Keery said.
“It’s kind of cool to see that the song that’s been out for a bit has kind of seemed to of found a new audience and struck a chord with so many people,” Keery said.
A 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 garnered more than 1.3 million views and over 275,000 likes.
The experience of standing on the precipice of change while in Chicago is one that resonates with Kelly, even thousands of miles away where she’s attending college in Dublin.
Kelly said she has visited Chicago twice, and there’s just something special about the city that makes you want to romanticize it, just as others also participating in the TikTok trend have.
“The first time I went there, it was an ‘End of Beginning’-type thing,” Kelly said. “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 come from an outside perspective,” she said. “I’m not even from Chicago and I have really good memories associated with it.”
Seeing so many people like Kelly identify with the song has been powerful, Keery said.
“You write a song and you hope that people understand it. It’s personal to me and I have a really deep connection to the lyrics,” Keery said. “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.”
Performing in Chicago
One of Keery’s first times playing “End of Beginning” live was during a packed-out Djo set at Lollapalooza in July 2022, a couple of months before the song’s release.
Clad in white jumpsuits, he and his band eased into the song, as 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 further.
Keery said that 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 Schuba’s and a free fish and chips dinner — playing his song for Chicago 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 said.
In the crowd watching Keery perform that day was 28-year-old Chicagoan Lyssa Sheng, who in a recent viral TikTok described hearing that song for the first time.
“We hear that lyric, ‘When I’m back in Chicago I feel it,’ and the crowd was just like, ‘Woah,’” Sheng told the Sun-Times.
Sheng first discovered Keery’s music in 2019 and saw him play at Sleeping Village. A fellow DePaul alum, she said it feels like Keery’s song captures what it’s like to live out your 20s in the city.
“[My friends and I] have grown up in this city,” Sheng said. “We’ve lived here the last 10 to 12 years. It’s kind of a running joke in my friend group that Joe Keery went to our college … 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,” she said. “There’s something very special about this city.”