What Teddy Swims is presently doing in music is way better than the constraint of genres.
The 31-year-old powerhouse vocalist, whose actual identify is Jaten Dimsdale, has been shattering the notion of genres since he stepped on the scene in 2019. His moniker is an acronym for “Someone Who Isn’t Me Sometimes” and he sees songwriting as a type of remedy.
“I thought I was just writing songs, you know, and you never know what your heart’s really trying to tell you or your subconscious is trying to communicate to you until you’re like, “Oh shit, no manner,” he tells EDM.com.
In his latest album, I’ve Tried Everything But Therapy, Swims carefully transmutes the weighty melancholia of painful memories into transformative experiences for his listeners. That album, in fact, just broke the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 Chart for the first time in January, with the single “Lose Control” coming in at #8 for his debut entry.
Known early in his career for his viral presence on YouTube, Swims, who is originally from Atlanta, has made a name for himself by forfeiting the stereotypical notions of what an artist should be.
“I’m just so happy for the time because if it had been many times before this I would have not been ready for this mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually,” he says. “I couldn’t have done it any time before right now. I’m happy I’m in a clear space in my life.”
Chapman Baehler
Mostly a soul and R&B singer, Swims had early success importing movies singing covers of anybody and all the pieces—from Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You” to Shania Twain’s “Still the One” and a transferring cowl of H.E.R.’s “Focus”—earlier than catching the eye of Warner Records.
“It’s quite nuts how that can happen, we’ve been writing for like four years or something,” he muses. “And it all just—it all lines up to one particular thing.”
Swims is talking after a number of days off his touring schedule on the day of our interview. He spent that point at Las Vegas’ When We Were Young Festival, the place he sang alongside the famed pop-punk band All Time Low.
“So I received to go up there and play a music with them, which is such a full-circle second for me as a result of I’d seen them once I was developing,” Swims says. “They had been certainly one of my favourite bands, you understand, and going out and taking part in a music with All Time Low was identical to, it was so cool. I used to be like, ‘Dude, that is the form of second the place you are like, man, desires are simply coming true. Stick to your weapons, you understand?'”
With a massive repertoire and an even longer résumé studded with major names in contemporary music, Swims is considered a master collaborator, teaming up with everyone from country superstar Maren Morris to prolific singer-songwriter Megan Trainor. After his move to LA, a close friendship with famed UK dance music producer Stuart Crichton formed on a fluke, leading to electronic music collaborations with the likes of ILLENIUM, Burns, MK, Armin van Burren and Matoma, among others.
“So this guy is a huge collaborator of mine, Stu Crichton,” Swims says of the Scotland-born producer. “He’s just the best at those kind of things, you know? And he’ll come to me and have me work with some people, but we’ll just come up with like… usually, they’ll start as ballads, and we’ll just write the ballad, and then it’ll turn into sending it to whoever and they just kind of have the EDM spin on top of something we’ve already written.”
Crichton, who has recorded and written for Kylie Minogue, Backstreet Boys, Pet Shop Boys, Selena Gomez, Toni Braxton and Kesha, has been nominated for a slew of Grammys and other prestigious awards. “Stu Crichton is certainly one of my finest mates in the entire world… we dwell like three homes down from one another too, so I can at all times pop over there,” Swims gushes. “His spouse feeds us cooked soup and scones and we simply, you understand, take a tequila shot and hangout, man. It’s simply good.”
This wasn’t the primary time Swims had pushed himself to merge his sound, however one of many more difficult endeavors he’s confronted as a recording artist. The first impediment was to face out in a subset of the business whereby feminine artists have pushed the usual in vocal home music for many years, plus veering himself in the direction of a aspect of the music enterprise to which he was a relative stranger.
Swims’ collaboration with ILLENIUM, “All That Really Matters,” begins off slowly, with the previous’s velvety vocals layered atop comfortable keys that shortly lead into the melodic dubstep and future bass sounds for which the latter has develop into so well-known.
“Because of Rable and Stu Crichton, the song with ILLENIUM came about,” Swims recollects. “I came in way later and heard the song and it’s just like, ‘Yeah, I would be honored to sing this song.’ And they shot it to ILLENIUM and we played it every night. It’s such a beautiful song to me and I love that song.”
Driven by lyrics deeply ensconced with which means, the music progresses in undulations, with gentler moments segueing into hovering beat drops—the kind that conjures a sea of heads to intensely nodd in unison. Above all, the observe continues to be very a lot on-brand for Swims, as a result of regardless of the departure in sound, its message weaves again into the narrative mirrored in a lot of his different data.
Swims took a threat with the preliminary observe, “Some Things I’ll Never Know,” on I’ve Tried Everything But Therapy, for instance, by putting a sluggish and haunting ballad in a slot the place many different artists would have chosen to go in the exact opposite route.
“I want it to be the first thing somebody hears… that song for me is something that really has really touched my life,” he says. “And even when we were going to sing it on the record, it took me a while because I was just sobbing. And I still sing it every night and can’t get through without crying. It’s a song for me that’s really special because I think that it’s given me closure in a lot of ways that I needed it. It’s one of those songs like that.”
Moreover, a tie that straight binds Swims’ music to the EDM style is a penchant for emotional lyrical content material touching on numerous life struggles—materials that each audiences discover to be extremely relatable.
“What it’s kind of about, when somebody walks out of your life, it can be a significant other or your friend, but there’s no real closure for why people walk out of your life,” Swims says. “Sometimes they just leave, sometimes they just cut you off and you have no idea what went wrong, what you could have done, or you feel somebody starting to slide away from you.”
“There’s a world sometimes where I feel like I love you so much and I do anything for you and I can do anything to make it better if I can,” he continued. “Just let me know what’s going on, I can try to make it better, I can try to do anything for you. I love you so much and I believe I’m always your best friend and I can do anything for you.”
Regardless of any kind of style restraints, Swims has effortlessly tapped into the collective vitality surrounding the spirit of dance music—one which’s stuffed with ardour, longing and an unwavering sense of want.
The dancefloor, in a way, is a secure house for commiseration, a spot the place people collect to flee their troubles and blow off steam brought on by no matter challenges that exact week, month or life has thrown at them. “Sometimes people have it in their mind that their life would be better without you in it,” says Swims. “That’s a hard thing for me to grasp. If you don’t get closure from that, you don’t get to talk to them again, you don’t get to understand why they do those things.”
“It’s also not about you either, nobody’s hurting you because they’re just out here to hurt you and they want you to hurt. They’re doing something that’s probably best for their life. You’ve got to just reconcile that with them yourself and give yourself some sort of closure that you’re never going to get.”
His likelihood friendship with Crichton, nonetheless, has opened up new pathways in Swims’ profession, but in addition on his personal private therapeutic journey, reflecting capacities inside himself as an artist and as a person that he beforehand didn’t know he had in him.
“It’s hard work. I don’t even know how I tried that,” he explains. “Yeah, I don’t listen to a lot of EDM. I didn’t listen to a lot of that coming up. I’m a fan of course, but just never been like an EDM listener. But I’m a priority in the world.”
Now Swims sees the style with completely new eyes. The farther he’s immersed himself into it, the extra he finds himself in a house away from dwelling he by no means knew was obtainable to him, one which welcomes him with open arms. “It’s such a loving, family oriented… everybody at a festival, when you go to an EDM festival, everybody’s just in this like… moment.”
“Everybody just loves on each other, and sharing love and drugs and all sorts of other things. It’s just beautiful, man. Everybody’s just there getting along and it doesn’t seem like a problematic place. It never is. I got a chance to go to Counterpoint like the first year in Atlanta. It was so fun to do it, man. I just warped out of my mind a lot of it, three days in a row. It was amazing. It was a great vibe to be tapped into.”
Swims was additional shocked when informed of his large following in the LGBTQ+ group, with a lot of his EDM collaborations tracks a staple on the decks in queer membership world, making him a beloved determine each on the dancefloor and off. “I like to think even as this part of my life is happening now and I feel truly ready for the roller coaster that I’m on and I’ve always been so impatient about what this was and what I wanted out of this and I’m so happy that everything’s happening and it’s proper timing, you know?”
With a dwell album model of I’ve Tried Everything But Therapy simply dropped in January and a full European tour slated for early 2024, Swims has hardly been in a position to catch his breath. He additionally had 2023 appearances on the The Voice, the place he duetted “Lose Control” with Kelly Clarkson on the season finale, and the Today Show, the place he was paired with one other celebrity visitor.
“I got to meet Elmo too, that was fucking sick. It’s Elmo. It was fucking Elmo!”
And talking of Jim Henson’s creations, Swims can be a lifelong Star Wars fan who, in highschool, co-wrote and starred in a music theater rendition of the enduring movie, substituting music from Les Miserables. At this level in his profession, Swims can very a lot relate to the phrases of Yoda: “What you are seeking is also seeking you.”
“That’s what you want out of music, you know, something you can celebrate,” he says. “Something you can turn trauma into positive things is just like the greatest part of my job, I think, is turning all my awful shit into good positive feelings and emotions for people. And it becomes a tap into their memories and their specific relationships and their circumstances. And that’s what it’s like. So it’s just no longer about me.”
Discussion about this post