Big guitars, bigger feelings: Slacker's San Diego story of growing pains and friendship

Episode 22: Slacker Transcript

Julia Dixon Evans: Here is Slacker.

[Clapping]

Jp Houle: Hey!

[Slacker performs a cover of Elton John's "Bennie And The Jets" live]

Evans: Here at KPBS, we are super excited to be piloting a new music series — live sessions recorded right here at our station, featuring some of San Diego's most exciting up and coming acts. For our first performance, we had a small but spirited crowd — our coworkers and curious passersby who wandered in from the San Diego State campus. It's kind of like NPR Tiny Desk but out in the sun and, at least for our first band, louder.

[Slacker performs "Recessive" live]

Evans: This is Slacker, a young, enthusiastic band on the rise. Dressed in their band uniform, white buttoned-down shirts and ties, they rocked the KPBS patio. Their songs are energetic and assertive, but also introspective and earnest.

[Slacker performs "Recessive" live]

Evans: On today's show, you'll hear that performance, which was a ton of fun and even got a few of us dancing on our lunch break, and also our post-show interview with the band recorded while they were still a bit sweaty from shredding in the sun. We got into the story behind the band itself — three kids who were all searching for something: honesty, a space to express themselves and friendship.

Sam Hockaday: I always dreamed about being in a band, but I literally never thought it would ever happen.

Houle: I'm not a socialite.

Avery Nelson: I have two shy boys by my side, so I kinda have to step up.

Evans: And we'll also dissect the surprisingly intimate stories behind their big, loud rock songs.

Houle: Originally started as a song about this incident I had in 8th grade. It's emotionally distraught, but it's not adversarial.

Evans: Bold guitars, thoughtful lyrics: A trio united by a shared dream.

From KPBS Public Media, this is The Finest. A podcast about the people, art and movements redefining culture in San Diego. I'm Julia Dixon Evans.

[Theme Music]

[Slacker performs "Tic Tac Toad" live]

Evans: Now we bring you Slacker's performance and the stories behind the music.

Just a heads up, the band gets vulnerable and honest about the traumatic experience that inspired one of their songs. Take care while listening.

Houle: I'm Jp Houle. I sing and play guitar for Slacker.

Hockaday: I am Samuel Hockaday and I play drums for Slacker.

Nelson: I'm Avery Nelson. I play bass for Slacker. Sam and I shared a burrito for breakfast because bass and the drums gotta be as connected as they can be. So we are connected.

Evans: Do you always share?

Nelson: Yeah, share the same food.

[Slacker performs "Velvet Worms" live]

Evans: We just heard a set outside our studio, and I want to talk about a couple of the songs that you played. What about "Velvet Worms"? What does that song mean?

[Slacker performs "Velvet Worms" live]

Houle: "Velvet Worms" is a somewhat anti-capitalist political song. A velvet worm is a real animal. What it does is it shoots silk and wraps up spiders and eats them and stuff. I associate velvet with royalty or a higher class. And spiders I associate with lower class. I don't know why, but I do.

And I just thought it was a fun analogy — that it's a worm that's wrapped up, like a person wrapped up in regal attire or whatever is using the means of a lower class person to confine them. And it's basically me saying I don't like it.

Evans: Can you talk about your relationship with music growing up? Like what was music like for you? Jp, do you want to start?

Houle: My dad is a thrash metal drummer. He had a band in early '90s, late '80s. And Black Sabbath is one of my favorite bands. Iron Maiden. I really like Motorhead. The old metal stuff really resonates with me.

Nelson: Well, I was forced to play the violin when I was a kid and I hated it so much. And one day my stepdad started playing that one blues riff, that [hums riff], on the guitar. And I wanted to be able to do that. So I taught myself guitar through YouTube tutorials and I started playing bass in 7th grade — orchestral upright bass. And then once I got to high school, I started playing electric. And once I got to college, I joined a bunch of bands. It's just so much more fun and expressive for me to be able to write my own bass lines and have that influence of classical music.

Hockaday: I didn't have a lot of things to connect with my dad over, but music was one of them. So he would turn on Nirvana or raw Metallica recordings. And then he would just tell me the same things every single time he played them. And it just became this mythology in my mind that this was like the coolest thing ever. And I was so into music that my mom and my stepdad, and they were like, OK you, you need to do this with people because you're not making a lot of friends. So I joined middle school band playing the tenor saxophone, and I did that for 10 years…

Evans: Nice.

Hockaday: … and continued in high school — I was not in middle school for 10 years — and then I decided after that during COVID that I wanted to play drums and starting drums at 18 years old was daunting, knowing how good everyone else was at the drums.

[Slacker performs "Tic Tac Toad" live]

Evans: Why are you in a band? Like, why do you keep making music? Why is it something that you put all of this effort into?

Houle: So when I first started playing music, all I wanted was to be the next Jimmy Page. I only ever played lead guitar for anything and I had been in like six bands over the course of from then to now and it was a lot of time and investment and emotional investment into stuff that just never seemed to be getting pushed by anybody else. So then I decided, well, I guess I'm just gonna have to do it myself. I also started writing songs at a time where I was deeply, emotionally disturbed, just like everybody gets, and writing songs was how I made sense of myself and how I made sense of the world around me and how I coped with just the constant discomfort of being alive. That felt way more meaningful to me than just being like, I want to shred.

[Slacker performs "We Were There" live]

Hockaday: I always dreamed about being in a band, but I literally never thought it would ever happen. It was a pipe dream. And then I met Jp in college and well, I told him yes, I'm a drummer, even though I didn't really feel like one 'cause I didn't play much. And then we got together and played and he had this original called "Puzzled," which is gonna be on the upcoming album. And I was like, dang, this is a really good song, and I feel like a real drummer when I play with him. And then he was talking to me about how his dream is to get everyone together in a big room and just make everybody feel the same way that he's feeling with music. And then since then, I've just been kind of locked into like, well now this feels like my dream and one of my best friend's dreams, so I gotta make it happen.

And it's easy because he makes incredible songs.

[Slacker performs "Tinted Windows" live]

Houle: And then Avery came along and completely just the piece to the puzzle that was missing.

Nelson: I was in a band where I was playing, backing up a singer, and that's where I met these guys. And once I got to play Jp's songs, I was like, man, this is it. He is someone who just writes songs that are so true and so not for anybody but himself. I really just admire that so much. And so I feel like being a part of this project is so important to me because I'm contributing to something that is so genuinely art, which feels really cool to be a part of.

Evans: The last song, "Skin Scratch," is that right?

Houle: Yes.

Evans: It was incredible. I loved it. I think it was my favorite of the set.

[Slacker performs "Skin Scratch" live] 

Evans: Can you talk about how that song originated and what it means to you?

Houle: Yes. Uh…

Nelson: That's a touchy one.

Houle: Yeah, "Skin Scratch" specifically is deeply… It's about a traumatic event that happened to me, this incident I had in 8th grade where this woman was kind of forcing herself on me like sexually — and I don't wanna say it was sexual assault, but the more, every time someone asks me to talk about it, it sounds more and more like it's sexual assault.

[Slacker performs "Skin Scratch" live] 

Houle: It was originally about that, but also at the same time, I was seeing stuff about Gaza and the white phosphorus stuff that they were using and stuff like that. So that's why there's that one line in there. It's just kind of a mess of a bunch of really deeply disturbing things that I was feeling all at once. Yeah.

Evans: Yeah. It's a really, like, it has this gentle build. You could have taken that trauma and been really abrasive with it, right, with the sound? Can you talk about that decision?

Houle: Yeah. The song is just how I feel. I didn't harbor any hatred or anything like that. It's just confusion. I just feel for that person. And I also feel for myself. Yeah, it's emotionally distraught, but it's not adversarial. It's just like confused.

[Slacker performs "Skin Scratch" live] 

Nelson: We also had originally made that song where it starts out with drums and bass, and then I went back and I listened to the first demo that Jp sent of the song and it just, like the version that we had created sounded so different. It felt different to listen to than what it felt like Jp's original message was. So we decided to go back to just having him sing with the guitar 'cause it felt like that made it a lot more personal and really brought out the meaning of the song.

Houle: Yeah, that's awesome.

Nelson: It sounds gentle like it was supposed to. I think it's awesome.

[Slacker performs "We Were There" live] 

Evans: "I Was There." Can you talk about this one too?

Houle: Oh, yeah. Yeah. "We Were There" is…

Evans: Is it "We Were There"?

Nelson: Yeah. Yeah.

Evans: Sorry. "We Were There." I was there.

Houle: Yeah. I is included in we.

[Slacker performs "We Were There" live] 

Houle: That one was more so based around a memory I have of being a small child and going to my grandparents' house in Arizona during a Fourth of July event. And I didn't like it. I was very scared of it, and that's the starting point of the song. But the general gist of it was just me kind of figuring out how I do kind of feel like, I don't know, like a coward in very non-confrontational situations. I don't know.

Nelson: You've been saying that word. Cow-...

Houle: Yeah, yeah.

Houle and Nelson: Coward…

Houle: Well, I don't know how to say it. That's why I made it a song.

[Slacker performs "We Were There" live] 

Houle: Yeah, it's about a person being sensitive and wanting to participate in the world, but being too afraid of it. And yeah, the verses are just different settings where that applied to me.

[Slacker performs "Giving It to You" live] 

Evans: And then "Giving It to You."

Houle: Yeah, "Giving It to You" is pretty straightforward. It's just a song about self-loathing. You're defeated by yourself. You are so unbelievably upset with the fact that you can't cope with stuff, and that now you can't cope with the fact that you can't cope. It's just an emotional negative self-image spiral.

Nelson: So the you that you're giving it to is actually you?

Houle: Yeah. Talking to myself.

[Slacker performs "Giving It to You" live] 

Evans: After the break, we'll hear how Slacker recorded their debut album in a legendary room using a legendary bass guitar made famous by what's arguably San Diego's biggest band of all time. Stay with us.

[Clapping]

Houle: Thank you, thank you.

Evans: This week, Slacker announced their first album, the culmination of more than a year of songwriting, rehearsing, performing and growing together. For them, bringing it all into a finished record they're proud of has been nothing short of magical.

[Slacker's "Puzzled"]

Nelson: We recorded our album at Big Fish Studios with Skyler Deci. It's where Blink-182 recorded "Dude Ranch." I think "Damnit" was one of the songs they recorded there too. And I got to actually use the bass that they used on the recording to record our album.

Evans: They just keep it laying around the studio.

Nelson: They do. Yeah. It's like "The Sword and the Stone," it's waiting for that right bass player to come pick it up. But it honestly felt like being in a spaceship. It was really cool. It was intimidating and terrifying, but it just sounds so good. So yeah, it was one of the coolest experiences ever.

Hockaday: Skyler was like a wizard. He found the exact thing for each of the songs that we needed.

Houle: He's great.

Nelson: It's what's gonna make the album so special and what's gonna make it sound so good, because I don't think we could have captured it better than we did. So I'm just so excited to have that put out for everyone to hear.

[Slacker's "A Low Hum"]

Evans: What do you want listeners or audiences to walk away with, from your shows or listening to your album?

Hockaday: I would say one of the things is you can go do what you enjoy because that's what we do. We wear the suits no matter how hot it is. We go out and hit the drums and play the bass and the guitar. We're all friends. We love each other on and off camera — most of the time. And I think a part of the message to me is you can do this too, whatever it is for you.

[Slacker's "A Low Hum"]

Houle: I also would like people to walk away with the idea that life is really hard and unforgiving, but you're still gonna make it over all of it. Like you just have to, it's a foregone conclusion that you will make it the way you want to make it. And also the idea that you are so much stronger than you think you are. You can do some insane stuff at the hardest of times if you just allow yourself to try. And I think that is what I am trying to do.

[Slacker's "A Low Hum"]

Evans: A special thanks to Avery, Jp and Sam from Slacker for their help with this episode. And a big thank you to our audio engineer Ben Redlawsk, who handpicked Slacker out of the local entries from this year's NPR Tiny Desk Contest. Ben, you have great taste. Ben also mixed the audio for the performance. Keep an eye out on the KPBS social media for the full video of Slacker's set.

Next week on the Finest, we'll explore some supernatural lore and legend right here in San Diego — just in time for Halloween.

I'm your host, Julia Dixon Evans. Our producer, lead writer and composer is Anthony Wallace. Our engineer is Ben Redlawsk and our editor is Chrissy Nguyen.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.