David SweetLow

The bed where you once laid 

I sleep but feel the sorrow 

The stove where you used to bake 

I eat but it’s hard to swallow 

The garden you once grew 

Is dead dry and betrayed 

The books that you used to read 

Still sit on the shelves you made 

And it hurts 

It hurts again 

And it hurts 

It hurts again 

David SweetLow  - It Hurts Again

When David SweetLow puts pen to paper and then sets those words to music, those emotions captured in phrases become even more poignant. Most of us keep our deepest thoughts buried in our memories, but David will drag them up from the depths and remind us of our failures and weaknesses that we all gather as we go through life. He will remember small details from his life, and write about them in sometimes the most grueling way in a reverie of truth, poetry, and fantasy.  

If you like your singer-songwriters to be honest and faithful to their art, then David SweetLow is the man for you. David SweetLow makes music that floats on the air, where his words wander and probe the memory of a life lived to the full. His songs are both solemn and dark, but with a beauty that only maturity of mind can bring.  

“I’ve always thought that music, language, and memory transcend modernity or any kind of time limit,” says David. “I don’t see myself in any fixed period neither past present or future. Through my relationship with music and language, I grow closer to who I really am.” That closeness with his own self is reflected in the eleven new songs on his third album {Up_Close] 

“This album is the embodiment of all those memories and self-realization that have been in and out of my head for the past five years since I moved to Japan” 

The story started way back in a small seaside town in Essex, England, where David learned his craft playing guitar with local Rock ’n’ Roll bands to crowds with menacing faces, bar fights, and Teddy Boys. Even then, he was more drawn to the likes of Van Morison, Joni Mitchel, and James Taylor. “I used to sneak into the local folk club and listen to Bob Dylan amid the hippies and the cannabis smoke. At least they were not trying to kill each other.” “I never wanted to be a Rock ’n’ Roller, but I was able to play a few Chuck Berry licks and that got me into my first band “Tonight”, which turned out to be a great, but short-lived, success.  

After “Tonight” broke up, SweetLow was 25 years old and on the dole.  He formed, along with singer Chris Turner from “Tonight”, the band that went on to become “Yen”, where he started to cut his teeth as a songwriter and producer. “The producer-programmer job came through a tragedy,” says David.” “When we formed “Yen” there were five of us. Tony Davis was the guy in the band who did all the tech stuff of which at that time I had no idea. Tragically Tony had an asthma attack on a trip to London and later died at the age of 21. I took over his role as programmer learning as I went along. This, however, gave me a base of knowledge to be able to go on to become a recording engineer and record my own music later in life.” 

The highlights of “Yen” were to be signed to a couple of major record labels and work with the likes of producer Alan Tarney, engineer/producer Gary Langan, and to tour and write with Gary Numan. After a ten year period of success and failure, David found himself back to square one and on the dole once again.  

Disillusioned with the music business in the U.K. David decided to take stock of his life and moved to Barcelona, Spain. There, he soon teamed up with record producer Jordi Cubino and had a string of commercially successful pop songs. “At that time I just wanted to make money and try to make a living out of music, so we did whatever it took. We made music for beer and soft drink companies and whoever was willing to pay us."  

There were many steps along the way, but eventually growing tired of making mindless pop music and commercial jingles, David returned to his routes and began writing songs on his acoustic guitar.  Incidents and memories bled down onto paper as words and then took the form of songs. Driven by a passion for songwriting and to do something worthwhile with all the knowledge he’d accumulated over time, David started performing as a solo singer-songwriter at an age when most musicians would quietly hang up their guitars and ponder back on their careers.  

Cutting ahead to the present day, all of David SweetLow’s threads and experiences are woven together in {Up_ Close], an album which, as the title suggests, is an intimate look under the bonnet of someone who’s known success and failure both personally and in his career as a musician. Now in his snug life in Sapporo on the beautiful island of Hokkaido, Japan, he looks not only to the past, but at the present and the future for inspiration, motivation, and above all passion, to continue to write his story of life in the form of music and words.