Once upon a rhyme, in a San Francisco scene glittering with gritty wunderkinds such as Thee Oh Sees, Fresh & Onlys, and Girls, a young artist endured 17 months of homelessness while working remedial jobs to subsidize his musical adventures. He made his sanctum inside a studio south of market, where he logged miles of sonic stories on his Yamaha MT-50 4-track recorder. The first collection of such pieces surfaced in 2013 with Luke Sweeney’s self-released debut ‘Ether Ore’, which garnered praises for its “distinctly handcrafted feel” and “melodies that feel like opiates for the soul” (SF Chronicle). Then Sweeney’s 2014 full-studio breakout ‘Adventure:Us’ - recorded in Brooklyn with longtime friend and collaborator Robin MacMillan - “expanded into far-reaching pop, psychedelic, and classic-rock realms with humor and irreverence” (Portland Mercury). The songs for the follow-up album were already in progress in 2015 thanks to tireless studio sessions in Brooklyn and SF, but were left in cosmic limbo while MacMillan meticulously arranged accompaniments from some of NY’s finest (Frank LoCrasto, Christina Courtin, Jacob Silver) and brought the mixes around. Meanwhile, Sweeney was dragging his ‘strange pop sensibility’ through western American landscapes over the course of near-constant tours and festivals - including three consecutive years of SXSW appearances - all while lending a hand to the recording and touring exploits of Tim Cohen and Healing Potpourri. Then an astrological grip knocked Sweeney’s life completely out of orbit when he awoke in the middle of the night on April 20, 2018 to find his infant daughter Rishi not breathing. The death of a child is a pain that no heart can bear, so the whole world of the trouble-making troubadour and self-described ‘Hardest Working Man in No Biz’ came to a halt. After a year’s worth of grieving in relative radio silence, the long-awaited arrival of ‘Peace Meal’ in 2019 felt like something of a rebirth, in that the songs are the fruit of a communicative collaboration between this plane of existence and another; stuff of the cosmos that Sweeney has been personally tasked to deliver. As one writer describes it: “a smorgasbord of influence: there’s Kinks and T. Rex, there’s Mungo Jerry and the smallest touch of Latin vibes; waltzy beats. Above all, the lyrics are clever, kooky and funny and god bless him, they’re interesting… Sweeney writes songs with a connective energy about them. This Sweeney has soul” (TheBayBridged). Dubbed a “pillar of San Francisco's garage-psych community” and “one of the best writers and performers working in the indie scene today”, Luke Sweeney keeps his notebook handy and his microphone on standby. He got back on the proverbial horse with his top-streaming song to date in ‘Natural Force’ from the ‘Critique of Nature’ EP (2021), which was lauded as a “stylish synthpop success” that “hits it out of the park” (Obscure Sound). Two new records are slated for release in 2022 and 2023, respectively, as Sweeney continues to construct mystical sonic sanctuaries for us to inhabit whenever we feel like we’re otherwise just scraping by.