Sweet Undertow

Sweet Undertow is a modern explosion of new sound, boiled in blues and simmered in shakedowns. The band has been called a mix of soul-blues, art-country and folk rock. Like Joe Cocker singing with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the heir to Tom Waits, Sweet Undertow's modern musical cousins include The Raconteurs, Wilco, Nathaniel Rateliff and Jason Hawk Harris

Eddy Undertow was born & raised in Chicago with a steady diet of blues on his daddy's stereo. He discovered punk rock and spent nights stage diving at the Fireside Bowl. And when he was 16 he heard Johnny Cash Live at Folsom Prison for the first time. With that gumbo in his musical mind, he took flight, traveling the world for years with his trusty guitar Darlene in tow. 

Alone in India, he spent nights in Parvati Nagar, a slum in Mumbai, where he ran through the corridors throwing colors in a country-wide paint war called Holi. He held onto the roof of a truck racing down a mountain road getting washed out by a storm in Sohra, the rainiest place on Earth. He was stalked by a leopard in the Himalayas and his story nearly ended in a four dollar per night room in Calcutta. 

In Ukraine he lived in The Barracks, a rough housing project in a town near where the war would start. He spent his nights knocking back moonshine shots with communist construction workers in the basement, chasing them with bites of raw pork. 

In Vietnam he played guitar in nightclubs with The Apollo Band, cruising around Ho Chi Minh City on the backs of motor bikes.

He had day jobs. He fought wildfires in Oregon. He sold computer parts. He was a community organizer.

Til one day he landed penniless in San Francisco and started writing songs, working out the parts alone at night on Ocean Beach, singing into the wind over the Pacific Ocean.

From there he built a band and became a fixture of San Francisco's music scene, headlining clubs and building a community. He met Jim Semitekol and Dave Tavel and the three of them formed the bedrock at the bottom of the Sweet Undertow sound. With their powers combined, Sweet Undertow is pulling fans worldwide out to float in the soft soft sea.