Conyers, GA · soul · pop · r&b

Teddy Swims

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A tattooed Georgian with a genuinely enormous soul voice, who covered his way to a following and then wrote the heartbreak records to match.

Teddy Swims is the stage name of Jaten Collin Dimsdale, born September 25, 1992, and raised in Conyers, Georgia. His maternal grandfather was a Pentecostal minister, and his father introduced him early to soul music through Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Al Green, laying the groundwork for the phrasing that later defined his singing.

Dimsdale played football through high school before a teacher steered him toward a musical theater class at Salem High School, where he performed in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Rent and Shakespeare, and picked up piano and ukulele. He also sang in rock and metalcore bands around Atlanta, which accounts for some of the grit in his upper range.

He began posting cover versions online in 2019, moving between soul, country, pop and rock, and took the name Swims from an acronym, "Someone Who Isn't Me Sometimes." His cover of Shania Twain's "You're Still the One" became his most-viewed video, and a Tyler Carter tour slot led to a Warner Records deal by the end of that year.

His own material sticks to slow-building ballads and mid-tempo soul-pop about relationships and their collapse, arranged around piano, organ and horns. His third EP, Tough Love, gave him his first entry on the Billboard 200 in 2022.

The 2023 single "Lose Control" topped the Billboard Hot 100 and preceded his debut album, I've Tried Everything but Therapy (Part 1), which reached the top ten in Australia and the Netherlands. MTV named him its Push Artist of February in 2024.

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