Oliver Tree was remembered at a celebration of life in his native Santa Cruz, with Diplo, Logan Paul and his parents among those who spoke
Oliver Tree was laid to rest Saturday (July 25) in the city that made him. Friends, family, and collaborators gathered at the Quarry Amphitheater on the UC Santa Cruz campus for a celebration of life honoring the singer, who died in a helicopter crash in Rio de Janeiro on June 14 at the age of 32. The service came six weeks after his death, in the hometown where his earliest creative instincts took shape, and it was livestreamed on his own Twitch and YouTube channels so the audience he built online could grieve alongside the people who knew him.
The speakers reflected the strange, sprawling world Tree occupied. Diplo, Logan Paul, Ethan Klein, and Aaron Mercury addressed the crowd, as did Tree’s parents. “Oliver Tree never dies, jokes aside guys,” Logan Paul said during the service, before landing on something plainer. “Oliver was everyone’s best friend. He was an adventurer with an incomparable zest for life and the ultimate ability to make anyone feel seen and heard.” Tree’s parents offered what sounded like a distillation of his entire ethos.
“I think Oliver would say trust yourself, get off the couch, produce art, and it’s really important to get in there and get your hands dirty,” they told the crowd. “He was a doer”
A Memorial as Elaborate as the Man
Nothing about Tree was ever understated, and his family made sure the send-off matched. The program included live music, unreleased video content, and tribute videos, plus a detail that could only belong to him: a separate casket for each of the characters he built across his career. Turbo, the scooter-obsessed provocateur of Ugly Is Beautiful. Shawney Bravo from Cowboy Tears. Cornelius Cummings from Alone in a Crowd. For an artist who spent a decade disappearing into personas, giving each one its own farewell was less a stunt than an honest accounting of how he worked.
That instinct for theater is also why the news was so hard for fans to process at first. Tree built his career on hoaxes, fake retirements, and elaborate bits, and the initial reports of his death were met, understandably, with disbelief. But the crash was real. Tree was one of six people killed when his helicopter collided with another over Rio de Janeiro during his World’s First World Tour, alongside passengers Lucas Vignale, Gaspar Prim, and Lucas Brito Chaves, among others.
Turning a Will Into a Mission
What has given the mourning a sense of purpose is Tree’s own planning. Months before his death, he announced on the Zach Sang Show that he had made his will, and that his money would fund a foundation. “When I die, all the money is gonna go back to artists,” he said. “I want it to go to the actual physical making of art.” That foundation, Dr. Oliver Tree’s Extremely Epic Art Grant for Baby Geniuses, launched after his passing, and all proceeds from Saturday’s celebration of life went toward it, providing grants to young artists exactly as he intended.
The tributes have not been confined to Santa Cruz. Post Malone paid his respects after Tree’s death, and fans gathered at Venice Beach late last month to mark what would have been his 33rd birthday. Born Oliver Tree Nickell, he leaves behind a catalogue that ran from viral absurdism to the unmasked sincerity of his final album, Love You Madly Hate You Badly, the first he made without a character to hide behind. He spent his career insisting he was someone else. In the end, the memorial was for the person underneath all of them.
