Luke Sweeney

* Saturday, July 8, 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm

Smiley’s Saloon presents Luke Sweeney

In the wake of an unspeakable tragedy, when all time and music seemed to stop, Luke Sweeney re-discovered the point of it all.

For years, the ‘calm poseur’ had kept busy playing the part of San Francisco’s gangly trouble-making troubadour: recording three solo records, touring the western U.S. multiple times over, and lending his hand to co-conspirators Tim Cohen and Healing Potpourri. But suddenly he found himself sobbing at the steps of a simple ghat along the Ganges river in Rishikesh, India, delivering his infant daughter’s ashes into the water as his family recited Hindu prayers. Sweeney’s healing process was tracked throughout parts of India via Garageband demos on his iPhone, using only a few crude pocket-sized instruments at hand.

The songs were then brought to life inside the homemade San Francisco studio of co-producers Joe Santarpia (Mac DeMarco) and Roberto Pagano (Tonsstartsbandht), culminating in “an album filled with shades of future jazz melded with tinges of George Harrison’s Indian escapades; the sound of finding beauty in the ephemeral and of the deeply spiritual healing power of music” (SF Chronicle).

Now, with these songs carrying Rishi’s spirit like the Ganges carried her ashes, Sweeney is back on the proverbial horse – straddling that line between the sacred and profane.

The self-proclaimed ‘Calm Poseur’ hops onstage with a basketball and rolls out original psychedelic pop, garage, freak folk and classic rock from his many incarnations “in a manner that summons the peccadilloes of eccentrics like Todd Rundgren and Stephen Malkmus” (Austin Chronicle). In his company, expect steady helpings of “humor and irreverence—both calling cards of Sweeney’s songwriting” (Portland Mercury).