Dan Sultan

Dan Sultan
Southbound Festival, Busselton, January 2011
Background information
Birth name	Daniel Leo Sultan
Born	1983 (age 33–34) Williamstown, Victoria, Australia
Genres	World, roots, alternative rock,
Occupation(s)	Musician, songwriter
Instruments	Vocals, electric guitar, six-string guitar
Years active	1996–present
Labels	TrueForm Recording MGM Distribution Liberation
Associated acts	The Black Arm Band, The Merri Soul Sessions
Website	dansultan.com

Daniel Leo "Dan" Sultan (born 1983) is an Australian alternative rock singer-songwriter-guitarist. At the ARIA Music Awards of 2010 he won Best Male Artist and Best Blues & Roots Album for his second album, Get Out While You Can (November 2009). At the 2014 ceremony he won Best Rock Album for Blackbird (April 2014), which had reached number four on the ARIA Albums Chart.

Daniel Leo Sultan was born in 1983 and spent much of his early life in Fitzroy (a suburb of Melbourne). His father is of Irish descent who was a lawyer and worked for the Aboriginal Legal Service. His mother, Roslyn Sultan, is an indigenous Australian of the Arrernte and Gurindji people. When Sultan was three the family visited his mother's ancestral lands in Yuendumu (300 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs) in the Tanami Desert; soon after they returned to Melbourne. When a teenager his parents separated and, with his mother, he lived in Cairns for three years; at seventeen he returned to Fitzroy.

Sultan started playing guitar at four and wrote his first song at ten. His mother's friend gave him an "old, clapped-out electric guitar" and, when living in Fitzroy, he began singing at local pubs. In 2000 he met Scott Wilson, a guitarist, at a Williamstown pub's karaoke night and the pair began writing tracks together. Wilson later recalled "What struck me at first was that he could play piano and guitar and he was a great foil for what I was doing... After a while playing together he said, 'Can I sing this one?' I said, 'Do you know the words?'... [he had a] mighty voice. A lot of people can play guitar... Not many can sing like that."