The 2010s File Feature
Takeaway
Takeaway: How The Chainsmokers, ILLENIUM, and Lennon Stella Crafted a Crossover Anthem "Takeaway" arrived in the summer of 2019 as a collaboration that broug…
01 The Story
Takeaway: How The Chainsmokers, ILLENIUM, and Lennon Stella Crafted a Crossover Anthem
"Takeaway" arrived in the summer of 2019 as a collaboration that brought together three distinct forces in contemporary electronic music: The Chainsmokers, the Denver-based producer ILLENIUM, and Canadian singer-songwriter Lennon Stella. The track debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 69 on August 10, 2019, offering a brief but notable presence that reflected the song's rapid streaming traction in the weeks following its release. Its commercial lifespan on the chart extended over two weeks, but the song's cultural footprint extended considerably further, driven by a staggering YouTube audience that would eventually accumulate more than 237 million views.
The Chainsmokers, consisting of Alex Pall and Drew Taggart, had spent the mid-2010s transforming themselves from DJ duo into one of the most commercially dominant acts in pop and electronic music. Their 2016 breakthrough with "Don't Let Me Down" and the Billboard Hot 100-topping "Closer" (featuring Halsey) had cemented them as architects of a polished, emotionally resonant sound that blurred the lines between EDM, indie pop, and mainstream radio. By 2019, they were operating from a position of established industry credibility, regularly seeking out collaborations that could push their sound into new territory.
ILLENIUM, born Nicholas Miller, had built his own devoted following through a brand of melodic dubstep and future bass that leaned heavily into emotional vulnerability. His 2016 debut album Ashes and the 2018 follow-up Awake had earned him a reputation as one of the most emotionally literate producers in the bass music world. His fan base, known for its intense loyalty, followed him from festival stages to arena tours, giving him a reach that few producers outside the mainstream had achieved. "Takeaway" represented one of his most high-profile crossover moments, placing his signature sonic palette alongside one of the most recognizable production brands in popular music.
Lennon Stella brought a different dimension to the collaboration. Born in Ontario, Canada, she had first gained public attention as a teenager through her appearances on the television series Nashville, where she played a character modeled on a young country singer. Her actual musical career, however, moved in a decidedly pop direction. She had signed with major label Republic Records and released a string of singles that demonstrated a fragile, introspective vocal style perfectly suited to emotional electronic productions. Her 2018 EP Love, me had introduced her sound to a wider audience, and "Takeaway" brought her vocal tone to an even larger global platform.
The song was written by multiple collaborators and produced with meticulous attention to the kind of emotional payoff that defined the peak of the future bass era. The production features ILLENIUM's characteristically swelling synthesizer work, with layered chord progressions that build and release in waves calibrated to maximize emotional impact. The Chainsmokers contributed structural and production elements consistent with their approach to pop songwriting, ensuring the track maintained radio-friendly hooks while retaining the atmospheric depth associated with ILLENIUM's catalog.
The release of "Takeaway" came through Astralwerks, a label with deep roots in electronic music distribution. The timing positioned it as a late-summer release aimed at capturing the emotional mood associated with the end of festival season, a period when audiences often gravitate toward songs that blend euphoria with melancholy. This tonal balance was a deliberate creative strategy, and it translated effectively to streaming platforms where the track accumulated millions of plays within its first weeks.
The music video, which contributed substantially to the song's YouTube view count, was directed with visual language consistent with the emotional tenor of the production. Scenes of emotional distance, longing, and interpersonal tension complemented the themes carried by Stella's vocal performance. The visual component helped the song travel on social platforms, where short clips and reaction content extended its reach beyond the typical radio and streaming ecosystem.
The Hot 100 chart run reflected the compressed timelines of streaming-era chart performance. A debut at position 69 followed by a slide to position 98 by August 31, 2019, suggested that the song's initial streaming surge was concentrated in a tight window around release, without the sustained radio support that might have extended its chart life. This pattern was increasingly common in the late 2010s, when albums and singles could generate enormous first-week streaming numbers that inflated chart positions before settling into a slower long-tail performance.
Despite the brief chart run, the collaboration reinforced several important industry dynamics. It demonstrated the continuing vitality of the electronic music crossover formula pioneered by The Chainsmokers, showing that even as their commercial peak had passed, they retained the ability to generate significant streaming numbers through strategic partnerships. For ILLENIUM, the song signaled his readiness to operate at the highest level of mainstream pop, a transition that would be further cemented by subsequent releases and festival headline slots. For Lennon Stella, "Takeaway" represented an important moment of visibility on a song that reached audiences far beyond her existing fan base.
The production infrastructure behind the song reflected the professionalism of all parties involved. The mixing and mastering achieved a level of sonic polish consistent with major label radio releases, while retaining the dynamic range and textural complexity associated with premium electronic music production. The result was a song that functioned effectively across multiple listening contexts, from club speakers to earbuds, from streaming playlists to live festival stages where ILLENIUM regularly performed it as a centerpiece of his sets.
"Takeaway" belongs to a specific moment in electronic music history when the genre's commercial ambitions and emotional vocabulary were at their most aligned. The song stands as documentation of that convergence, a record of what three distinct creative voices could produce when the goal was to maximize both emotional resonance and commercial reach simultaneously.
02 Song Meaning
Emotional Yearning and the Anatomy of Distance in "Takeaway"
"Takeaway" operates on a deceptively simple emotional premise: the desire to extract from a relationship not its complications or its losses, but the singular, clarifying feeling that made it meaningful. The title itself functions as a question and a lament simultaneously, asking what remains when a relationship has run its course and whether the feeling that made it worthwhile can be preserved in isolation from everything else.
Lennon Stella's vocal performance carries the song's emotional weight with a kind of controlled fragility that is central to its appeal. Her delivery suggests someone who has processed loss with enough distance to articulate it clearly, but not so much distance that the pain has fully faded. This tonal positioning is neither overwrought grief nor detached retrospection, but something in between that listeners in their late teens and twenties recognize immediately as authentic emotional territory.
The compositional structure of the song reinforces its thematic concerns. The production builds in waves that mirror the experience of emotional remembering, quiet and contained during the verses, then expanding into the chorus with a force that simulates the involuntary rush of feeling that accompanies certain memories. ILLENIUM's signature future bass production technique, characterized by pitched-up vocal chops, swelling synthesizer pads, and metered dynamic releases, creates a sonic environment that is itself an argument about how emotion works: it is not steady and linear but sudden and overwhelming.
The thematic core of "Takeaway" connects to a well-established tradition in popular songwriting that examines love not in its romantic present but in its retrospective meaning. The song joins a lineage of pop and soul music that asks what a relationship was for, whether the pain and complication were worth what was learned or felt. This is a fundamentally philosophical position dressed in the language of personal emotion, and it gives the song a resonance that extends beyond any specific romantic narrative.
The involvement of The Chainsmokers adds another layer of thematic complexity. As a duo whose commercial breakthrough coincided with a period of intense public fascination with millennial relationship anxiety, they brought to the collaboration a cultural context that their audience had already internalized. Songs like "Paris" and "Somebody" had established The Chainsmokers as chroniclers of a particular kind of modern romantic uncertainty, and "Takeaway" fits within that broader project while shifting some of the creative weight to ILLENIUM's more emotionally raw production aesthetic.
The word "takeaway" itself carries multiple meanings that the song exploits without fully resolving. In its most common contemporary usage, a takeaway is something learned or extracted from an experience, the lesson or memory that remains after the context has dissolved. In the context of a romantic relationship, asking for a single takeaway implies a kind of brutal editing, an attempt to boil an entire human connection down to its most essential emotional kernel. This is simultaneously a very human impulse and a slightly cold one, and the tension between those readings gives the song its emotional complexity.
The cultural moment of the song's release, the late summer of 2019, was one of particular intensity in streaming-driven pop. Audiences were consuming emotionally direct, sonically immersive music at unprecedented rates, and "Takeaway" arrived as a refined product of that environment. Its success on YouTube, accumulating over 237 million views, reflects an audience that returned to the song repeatedly, suggesting that it functioned not just as entertainment but as emotional accompaniment, the kind of music people put on when they want to feel something specific.
The collaboration between three distinct artists also invites reflection on the nature of collective authorship in contemporary pop. "Takeaway" is not a song that any of its three credited acts could have made alone in the same form. The Chainsmokers brought structural clarity and commercial instinct, ILLENIUM brought emotional texture and sonic depth, and Lennon Stella brought a vocal humanity that grounded the production in something recognizably personal. The result is a song whose emotional effect is partly a product of its composite nature, each element contributing something essential that the others could not supply.
The song's placement within ILLENIUM's trajectory is particularly significant. His subsequent work, including the album ASCEND and his 2022 record Fallen Embers, continued to explore the intersection of electronic production and emotional vulnerability that "Takeaway" exemplified. In this sense, the song serves as a marker of his artistic development, a moment when his characteristic emotional themes reached the widest possible audience through a deliberately accessible collaboration.
For younger listeners discovering the song through algorithmic recommendation or social media, "Takeaway" offers entry into a broader conversation about what contemporary pop is capable of achieving emotionally. The song demonstrates that the genre's tools, synthesizers, vocal effects, carefully engineered dynamic builds, can be deployed in service of genuine feeling rather than mere spectacle. That demonstration has lasting value beyond any specific chart position or streaming milestone.
→ More from the 2010s File
View all 2010s hits →
Keep digging