James Apollo is used to wandering. He once lived in the same apartment for a whole year. i went to help him move out before we left on another tour with no end date. He was on the curb with 2 suitcases.
"That all you got?"
"Well there's the piano in there still, but we dont have room for it in the van and i can't get it down the stairs anyway."
James Apollo is used to wandering.

So it was no surprise that after Apollo and his bandmates spent a year of grueling dates in the US and Europe, he wandered off for some time. I hadn't seen him for a couple weeks so i called his mom. Then i called a few ex girlfriends. Some were more concerned than others. No one had any answers.

It was a few weeks later when he was knocking on my front door. He was with his brother. They'd been out in the Utah Canyons penning a slew of new songs, which, after a couple months of arranging with the rest of us, became the record Til Your Feet Bleed.
On asked why he wandered quite that far, Apollo recalls, "I'd walked out on most everyone and everything, so i figured i may as well take it all the way"

Til Your Feet Bleed is touching mix of recurring western themes, dusty melodies, wide open space, and the peaceful loneliness of a man resolved to it. It was those big, lonesome sounds that launched James Apollo from a roadside curiosity to an international curiosity, receiving high praises from radio presenters Tom Robinson and John Kennedy, as well as raving reviews from Uncut, Mojo, Word and Q. It put Apollo into the radio circuit of BBC, XFM, Virgin and others in the US and UK.

Shortly after it's release, Mojo asked James Apollo and the boys to record a tune their 40th Anniversary re-imagining of The Beatles Let it Be. The resulting track "1 after the 909" was a lonesome tango bastardization of the bluesy original. It sold 120 thousand copies in the next month and introduced a whole new audience to James Apollo.

After barely surviving a motorcycle accident in 2010, Apollo relocated the band from Brooklyn to Seattle. "It was time to move," he recalls, "I'd gotten the grit, the saxes, the swagger, it was time to see some sunsets"

The move has proved fruitful. With renewed spirit and constant touring, Til Your Feet Bleed has made fans of many of Apollo's early idols. Elvis Costello and Lucinda Williams have been heartened champions of his exotic tumbleweed sounds, and the list keeps growing.

James Apollo and his band, The Sweet Unknown, are currently in the studio with renowned indie pioneer Damien Jurado. The record is slated for release this Fall.