From Moraga to Coachella: The incredible rise of Still Woozy

“I feel so grateful for everything. It’s a dream," says Sven Gamsky, aka Still Woozy, who is performing three sold-out concerts at the Warfield this week.

Sven Gamsky has always loved music.

“My parents would take me to shows as a toddler and I would go up to the speakers or go up to the stage and like dance around and stuff,” says the 29-year-old Oakland native, who grew up in Moraga.

He’s still dancing around (and stuff) at shows in 2022 — only these days he’s actually the one onstage and making music in front of thousands upon thousands of fans.

The scene at the Warfield in San Francisco on Monday night was a testament to just how far Gamsky — who performs under the stage name Still Woozy — has come in his solo career in a relatively short amount of time.

The show was sold out, with some 2,200 fans singing along and grooving to Still Woozy’s laidback and sunny soul-pop offerings. And, really, it was only just the start. Still Woozy still has two more hometown gigs on the docket this week — with sold-out shows set for Wednesday and Thursday. (See thewarfieldtheatre.com for details.)

Not bad for an artist whose one full-length album — “If This Isn’t Nice, I Don’t Know What Is” — was just released last year.

“I feel so grateful for everything,” he says. “It’s a dream.”

How did we get to this place? The place where this Moraga product, who graduated Campolindo High School in 2010, is now able to play three sold-out shows at the Warfield, and pack other major venues from coast to coast,” as well as draw prime slots at such marquee festivals as Coachella, Bonnaroo and Governors Ball?

Well, it certainly didn’t happen overnight — despite how Gamsky’s exponential rise in fame of late may make things appear. It’s really the payoff of a nearly lifelong pursuit of making music, one that can be traced back to his days attending summer camp as a kid and watching people play acoustic guitar around the fire.

“There was a stage and I would watch people perform and just be kind of amazed at what was going on,” Gamsky remembers. “It felt like this totally mythical thing to watch people play a full song and to hear the stories being told and the music and the instruments and the melodies. I didn’t understand any of it and so it kind of like blew my mind in this beautiful way and made me feel all these emotions.

“From a young age, I just wanted to figure out how to do that — just like, ‘How do you harness this magic?’ It felt like real-life magic. That’s kind of what set me off on the journey.”

He began working on his own music around the age of 10 and, within a year or so, started recording on his parents’ computer.

“With my friends and stuff, we would make these horrible recordings and write these horrible songs,” he remembers. “But it was so fun to do. It was just this big process of discovery.”

He’d start a reggae band with some friends at Campolindo — even though his tastes ran more along the lines of such legendary blues artists as Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Blind Boy Fuller and Bukka White. Still, the reggae group — dubbed Shoot for Roots — would go on to win a local battle-of-the-bands competition.

After graduating high school, he’d attend Porter College, a residential college focused on the arts, at UC Santa Cruz. He remembers hanging out in the quad on one sunny day during his freshman year when something amazing caught his ear.

“I hear this insane guitar music like wafting in from on high,” he recalls. “I figured out which room it was coming from in this big dormitory building. I went up to top floor and found the room and knocked on the door.”

And Robert Ross answered.

“We clicked instantly.”

The two began jamming together and decided to form a band called Feed Me Jack. The math-rock act, which utilized complex time signatures and rhythm structures, soon garnered a following by performing at dozens of house concerts.

“That’s where I learned to perform — in like the sweaty, nitty-gritty house show,” Gamsky says. “That’s still my ideal place to perform — in a place where you can get pushed over by somebody in the crowd. I love the intimacy of that. And I try to bring that to all my shows now, even thought it is getting harder to keep that intimacy.”

Feed Me Jack relocated to Oakland after college, but the change in area codes proved to be a difficult one and the band would eventually call it quits.

“We basically felt like we were reaching the limit in Santa Cruz of how far we could progress,” Gamsky says. “So we decided, after college, to move to the Bay Area and try to make it as a band there. But that proved to be so hard, because Santa Cruz and the Bay Area are completely different places.”

Feed Me Jack had been a band of contrasts, with Gamsky focused more on the pop side of the equation and Ross acting as the driving force behind the technical math-rock.

“I think he is genius, honestly,” Gamsky says of Ross. “He has his own project now called Bobbing. If you listen to that you can see that Feed Me Jack was basically me holding him back from being his fully realized genius.”

After Feed Me Jack parted ways in 2016, Gamsky gave himself the latitude to explore a bit.

“I just took time off to just fully experiment with no expectations or anything,” he says.

He’d deliver his first single under the Still Woozy moniker — an electronic-pop ditty dubbed “Vacation” — in 2017 and followed up with a number of other tunes that served to firmly establish his solo career.

He garnered a sizable following of fans — sizable enough to attract the attention of the mighty Interscope Records label, which signed him to a deal and released his first solo EP, “Lately,” in 2019. The label followed up in 2021 with the full-length Still Woozy debut, “If This Isn’t Nice, I Don’t Know What Is,” which has really taken Gamsky’s career to the next level.

“I really had no doubt in my mind that he was going to be a big performer,” says Jake Thornton, one of Gamsky’s former bandmates in Feed Me Jack. “He just has that energy and presence.”

And Gamsky has the talent, which has helped take him from playing dorm rooms to a prime slot on the bill of this year’s Coachella festival.

“It’s insane. I remember going to Coachella years ago — in 2011,” he says. “It’s so different being on the other side. It’s unbelievable.”

Gamsky is talking from a tour stop in Portland, which, in a cool twist of tour routing, also happens to be the city where he now lives — quite happily.

“This is the place I think where I want to live forever hopefully,” he says.

Yet, he has definitely been looking forward to getting back to his old stamping grounds of the Bay Area and playing these hometown shows at the Warfield.

“I grew up going to the Warfield all the time,” Gamsky says. “This is probably my most important show of the entire tour. I don’t feel any pressure. But this is the most impactful, meaningful thing for me — to be playing three nights in this venue that I always thought was huge and that all these artists who I idolized would come through.”