Estonian indie rock band Ewert and the Two Dragons comes to S.F.
Ewert Sundja, who leads the Estonian indiefolk band Ewert and the Two Dragons, didn’t get to listen to much contemporary pop music when he was a kid. With his native country under the rule of the Soviet Union, it was strictly forbidden.
Still, through a network of friends who feverishly exchanged bootlegged cassette tapes in the capital city of Tallinn, he was able to get his hands on a few things that mattered: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder, Queen and a bit of Elton John.
“It definitely filtered a lot for us,” Sundja says. The limited musical diet meant that the scruffy blond singer and his future band mates only heard the stuff that justified the effort. It also meant that when it came time to composing their own material, they aspired to nothing less than greatness.
You can hear the influence the classics had on the group’s breakthrough second album, “Good Man Down.” With its big melodies and warm, pastoral sounds, the 2011 release has earned the group widespread popularity throughout the Baltics, placing them on several major music festival bills and earning five honors at last year’s Estonian Music Awards, including band of the year and album of the year.
It also made Ewert and the Two Dragons — which also includes guitarist Erki Pärnoja, drummer Kristjan Kallas and bassist Ivo Etti — one of the few Estonian bands who actually get to use their passports. When we caught up with Sundja last week, the band was recording new music with Lumineers producer Ryan Hadlock at Bear Creek Studio just outside Seattle.
Sundja laments that the embargo, which effectively ended when the Estonian Supreme Council declared independence from Soviet power in 1990, also meant that the people around them who didn’t go to the same lengths to discover Western music were
oblivious to anything other than the country’s traditional fare.
“In that sense, music lovers in England or Western Europe are much more educated,” Sundja says. “Their parents and their grandparents had proper music. In our case, that was not so true. When we finally had the chance to get music from the outside, it was a bit too late for the older generation. That’s the difficult thing about being a band in Estonia. You don’t have a lot of listeners.”
With the entire country’s population not quite 1.3 million people, Ewert and the Two Dragons have found fans in neighboring countries including Finland, Sweden, Germany, France and Denmark. Their music has also made inroads in Mexico and the United States, where it has drawn comparisons to radio favorites Mumford and Sons and Of Monsters and Men.
The group will spend most of this month and next touring North America, including a Monday show at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco.
“I think what struck me most about touring America is that we’re not really that different,” Sundja says. “People working in a similar environment share similar values. The people working here really want to build the same thing — trying to find the right sounds. It doesn’t matter where you are. The only difference is everything is so big here.”