Summary:
Jacob Slichter, drummer for Semisonic, shares his journey in the music industry and the lessons he has learned along the way. He discusses the band's rise to success, the challenges they faced, and the importance of gratitude and perseverance. Jacob also talks about the process of writing his book and the recent release of Semisonic's new album.
About The Guest:
Jacob Slichter is the drummer for Semisonic, an American rock band known for their hit song "Closing Time." He is also an author and a professor.
Key Takeaways:
Quotes:
Becoming Undone is a NiTROHype Creative production. Written and produced by me, Toby Brooks. If you or someone you know has a story of resilience and victory to share for Becoming Undone, contact me at undonepodcast.com. Follow the show on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn at becomingundonepod and follow me at TobyJBrooks. Listen, subscribe, and leave us a review Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Summary:
Jacob Slichter, drummer for Semisonic, shares his journey in the music industry and the lessons he has learned along the way. He discusses the band's rise to success, the challenges they faced, and the importance of gratitude and perseverance. Jacob also talks about the process of writing his book and the recent release of Semisonic's new album.
About The Guest:
Jacob Slichter is the drummer for Semisonic, an American rock band known for their hit song "Closing Time." He is also an author and a professor.
Key Takeaways:
Quotes:
Becoming Undone is a NiTROHype Creative production. Written and produced by me, Toby Brooks. If you or someone you know has a story of resilience and victory to share for Becoming Undone, contact me at undonepodcast.com. Follow the show on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn at becomingundonepod and follow me at TobyJBrooks. Listen, subscribe, and leave us a review Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
At the time, I felt wronged. I felt frustrated. I was angry. I felt like the record company had blown it. And I felt denied something that had been rightfully mine. And it took writing the book and really sitting back and taking a longer view of things to understand that our story was not one of a frustrating career that got away from us. It was a story of improbable success and something for which I ought to be exceedingly grateful because if I'm not grateful, then I just lose it. I can't have it unless I'm grateful for it. And I definitely am grateful for it. I'm Jacob Slichter, I'm the drummer for Semisonic and I am undone. Hey friend, I'm glad you're here. Welcome to episode 62 of Becoming Undone, the podcast for those who dare bravely, risk mightily, and grow relentlessly. I'm Toby Brooks, an athletic trainer, strength and conditioning coach, and a professor. Over the past two decades I've been blessed to work with some incredible achievers, and over time, I've grown more and more fascinated with what sets them apart and how failures can frequently be the necessary steps on our path towards success. Each week on Becoming Undone, I invite a new guest to examine how high achievers can transform from falling apart to falling into place. I'd like to emphasize that this show is entirely separate from my role as a professor, but it's my attempt to apply what I've learned and what I'm learning and to share with others about the mindsets of high achievers. If this is your first episode, my hope is that you love it, that you find enough value in it that you'll commit to making me part of your weekly routine, maybe on your walk or on your workout, during your commute, or at the end of a long day. I'd love the chance to become a regular, welcome, and meaningful source for good and growth in your world. So stick around. And if you're already a regular, thank you so much for that love and support. I'm excited to share that in the most recent data available from Chartable, the show has continued to climb and we're closing in on 5,000 listens for the year. So for real, thank you. For Illinois native Jacob Slichter, it was a slow and steady climb into the world of commercial music, but once it happened, it was a whirlwind. The son of a professor and Harvard-educated scholar himself, Jake played from coast to coast and points in between before connecting with eventual bandmates Dan Wilson and John Munson to form the hard-to-genre late 90s and early 2000s group Simasonic. The group released three albums on MCA Records, with their 1998 Feeling Strangely Fine and its opening track Closing Time going platinum and reaching iconic status the world over. Unfortunately, after the release of their third album, MCA bailed and the group found themselves without a clear path forward. with Jacob writing and publishing his book, So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star, in 2005. While a lesser person might be angry and bitter for the way things didn't end up, Jacob's thankfulness for the unlikely, unpredictable, and eventually abruptly ending ride is inspiring. And luckily, the group's now back together and released their first full-length studio album in over 20 years, Little Bit of Sun. So do yourself a favor, queue up some Semisonic on the streaming app of your choice and listen in to episode 62, Gratitude, with Jacob Slichter. This week I am super excited. We've got a fantastic guest, just finished his book, and great stories. But Jacob Slichter is joining us, drummer of Semisonic. I almost said former drummer, but new music coming out this month. So we'll get to that a little bit later. But Jacob, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Toby. As I shared with you off camera before we started, this podcast is really about how we can take things that the world would view as setback and kind of reframe them and talk about how they set us up for success. So I always start off with a little bit of a softball. What did you want to be growing up and why? It's morphed. I think when I was a little kid, I wanted to be an archaeologist. And that may have been because I was digging in the garden with my mom, and I liked just getting my hands in the dirt and all of that stuff. And then I think for a while, I thought about being an architect because we knew an architect, and I had seen some of the models of houses and buildings that he had designed and I thought, �Oh, that�s cool,� like thinking about space and three-dimensional stuff. All the while, I had been playing music, but it was not until I got into a band in high school with some very serious and much better musicians that it occurred to me that music, becoming a musician, was something that not only I could do, but as I got rolling in that band, I realized it really was what I wanted to do. So I think I realized that I wanted to be a musician somewhere around the age of 15. That's great. Yeah. I know you mentioned in the book how it was a diverse group. You were the only, I believe, white member of an all-black funk band. Yeah, for the first iteration of it, at least. Yeah. Yeah. And you end up going to Harvard to study in an area maybe related to that. Did your early formative musical experiences influence that pursuit or was it different altogether? No, that was definitely part of it. So in college, I majored in Afro-American studies and history. And I think part of that was definitely shaped by my experiences playing in a mainly black band. It was also shaped by my grade school lessons in black history, the civil rights movements, and things going all the way back to slavery and things like that. So, the subject matter had always felt very important in terms of how I was looking out at the world. And as a music listener, I really had gravitated to Black artists. And so I think when I got to college, I started reading Black writers who were talking about how their art intersected with how they think about the world at large. And those were very much questions that were on my mind. So that was all kind of part of what led to that decision. That's great. We have that in common as well, not on the scale of yours, but I was the white drummer in an all-black church, and it was a running joke that the guy with the least amount of rhythm was up there leading the rhythm section. That's great. There is a great tradition of white drummers playing in black bands. Greg Yericho, Sly and the Family Stone was not all black, but it was mainly black. And Greg Ericco was the drummer for a while, and then Andy Newmark. And then, of course, it goes the other way, too. I think there are so many great rock musicians who are black. And I think a lot of people wrongly assume that rock and roll, though it was first black, is now mainly a white art form. And I really heavily dispute that. Yeah. I've been trying unsuccessfully to get Will Calhoun on the show, big inspiration for me, Living Color, and that group was transformative for me. I find it ironic because I was a late adopter of your band and your music because I gravitated toward black bands too. I had Garfield Bright who went on to get a PhD, he was in the group Shy. That early to mid-90s R&B was really where I hung my hat as a listener to music, but I love the fact that those early influences, you can still, you can smell them in the recording and you definitely got chops that were formed in that funk and R&B stream. Yeah, I was definitely highly influenced by drummers like James Gadsden and Earl Young and some of the 70s were a major, and Fred White of Earth, Wind & Fire, people like that, were all big sort of influences on how I think about drumming still. Yeah, Semisonic just jumps on the scene, right? Overnight success, that was years in the makings, as so often is the case, and your bandmates had been involved in a group of their own. And so I guess start at the beginning of your semisonic journey and wherever that is for you. I had graduated from college in the mid-80s and had moved to San Francisco with the idea of pursuing a career in music, but it just wasn't happening. Meanwhile, my friend Dan Wilson, who I had been in bands with, had moved to Minneapolis and was playing in a band called Trip Shakespeare, which had been started by his brother. They were amazing. When Dan got married, I visited Minneapolis. I went to the wedding, and I visited Minneapolis and I thought, this feels like a more promising place for me. So I packed up and moved to the Midwest from San Francisco. And I was an outsider in Minneapolis, but it's a very friendly place. And I started doing things like arranging, doing arrangements and demo production for people and I would do string arrangements for studio things. And I was writing and recording my own songs and performing them in open mics and with various people. Jacob had found himself crisscrossing the country in search of his dreams. He grew up in Champaign, Illinois, the son of a physicist, and then he headed east to Harvard to major in Afro-American studies. After college, he loaded up and went to the West Coast, landing in San Francisco, but never quite finding the opportunity needed in the music scene there. Looking for a shot somewhere else, Jake connects with his friend, Dan Wilson, who had already learned a thing or two about the oftentimes brutal music industry. Hungry for a shot, he heads back to the frigid land of Minnesota, where a vibrant and growing live music scene awaits, and it provides the backdrop for his artistic ambitions. While nothing about the next few years would come easy, it was trouble and friend Dan's group that would provide Jake with the opportunity that he needed. And then Dan's band, Trip Shakespeare, hit a number of sort of speed bumps and eventually ended up disbanding. And by then, of course, I'd gotten to know all the members of that band. Dan's brother, Matt, the drummer, Elaine Harris, who's amazing, and also the bass player, John Munson. And Dan and John and I had started making music together almost as a side project to Trip Shakespeare. But when Trip Shakespeare disbanded, we just decided to go all in on our trio, which was originally called Pleasure, but then was later changed. The band name was later changed to Semisonic. While an accomplished and growing musician himself, Jacob was a relative newcomer to the music industry. And being a musician is art. But being a successful commercial artist is something different entirely. It's commerce. But thanks to their previous go-around with Trip Shakespeare, Dan and John had learned a thing or two about what to do and what not to do on the way to commercial success. And it would pay off, giving First Pleasure and eventually Simasonic the jumpstart they would need we actually were plugged in at that level pretty early on and so it wasn't long before I within a year and our people from various labels are coming out to see us and Like within a year and a half We were signed. Something like that. Crazy. Early on, you're still determining whether or not you're going to be the drummer. Are they going to cut me? Am I going to have a place? And then you start touring the country in a van with your bandmates. And then not long after that, you're in a bus tour with Soul Asylum and Matchbox 20. I'm curious to know, was there ever like a thought process that made you realize like what I've accomplished is pretty awesome so far or were you always future-minded in terms of I want to get that bus tour like Matchbox 20, we want a headline. Talk me through that process for you as an artist. It's interesting because really where my head was because I was experiencing a lot of stage fright. So the speed at which we got attention and audiences was such that I was dealing with a lot of stage fright and imposter syndrome, because it just all came so quickly. I think my main thought was, I don't want to blow this for Dan and John. I was going on stage every night and thinking, don't let this be the night I have a meltdown. Don't let this be the night I have a meltdown. And I think that I wasn't even thinking about what are my own personal goals right at the beginning. I was more like thinking, don't blow this, don't screw it up, which is not a great headspace to be in. But it was where I was at. Psychologists have a term for what Jacob just described here, the motivation to avoid failure, or MAF for short. It's highly common in sports and as we hear here, also in the arts. Jacob was the last member of the three-piece group who had come together to form a new band and he didn't want to let his new bandmates and friends down. But unfortunately, such thoughts are destructive. Many sports psychologists have pointed out that when we have a motivation to avoid failure, our brain tends to filter our internal dialogue. If I step up to the free throw line and silently think, don't miss, don't miss, don't miss, my deeper cognitive centers that coordinate my muscular actions actually trim off the word don't and instead I process miss, miss, miss. For Jacob, it was a frightening and debilitating season that he managed to power through without incident. But it's the first glimpse we get to see in the cerebral, soft-spoken, somewhat reluctant rock star he was destined to become. Once we got done with our first album cycle, so we recorded a record which was a critically acclaimed commercial disaster called Great Divide, and it's a great record. I still love it, and I think our fans really love that record a lot. Once we got done with that, and I had been around the circuit once, I made a lap around the track, as it were, then I started to think in terms of, damn it all, here's what I want. I want us to have, I want us to get successful. And I went from being on defense to being on offense. So I think that's when I shifted over. Great Divide is a great record, but through promotion challenges, a record company that isn't sure what to do with such a unique sound and group, and with a musical sound that kind of defies the pigeonholing like Top 40 or Alternative or Metal that would make the group fit somewhere on the radio, Simasonic's first effort stumbles out of the gate. Making things worse, the songs picked as singles fell flat on the radio too. With a three album deal in hand, the group knows they need to turn it around with their sophomore effort and that's when they put together what will become the multi-platinum Feeling Strangely Fine, which included the song they'd become best known for, Closing Time, the anthem of exhausted service industry staff the world over. While it wasn't exactly overnight success, it was still pretty fast success. But being a rock star isn't all you've probably imagined it to be. So that transforms from a bus tour in the U.S. to international success. Closing time is everywhere. It is played at the end of Realtor conferences and for relief pitchers who come in. And while children are being born, what was that like to go from that first effort to pour your heart in and not see it translate into commercial success? And then all of a sudden you've got this song that is literally everywhere. It was exciting. It was validating. At the time I was in my mid-30s, and that's a point at which you think you're over the hill, but things were just beginning for us. I felt like at last now I can hold my head up about what my chosen career was. I think that's a mistaken idea, by the way, but at the time, that's how I viewed it. stop hearing. And even to this day, people send me, if the radio is playing closing time or someone in the UK hears Secret Smile, which was a big hit around the world, I get emails and messages all the time from people I know, hey, I heard the song again. I think what it is now is, it's this incredible gift of feeling like you were part of something that is now part of the sort of larger cultural mindset or something. Absolutely. Yeah, it was without a doubt a phenomenon and it probably planted a seed within you and your bandmates that there's more closing times in our tank. We're going to continue to leverage and build upon this success. Absolutely. I thought, oh, now we've figured it out, or now they've figured us out, and now they'll know that we have lots of great music. But it didn't work that way. And I think that by the time our third record came out, the singles did not do as well as Closing Time and Secret Smile had. And as a result, eight months after the record came out, we had just decided, the record company told us we're not supporting the record anymore, and we just decided to take a break. The band's third album, All About Chemistry, failed to meet with the same success as Feeling Strangely Fine had, and at a difficult time for the music industry, specifically at their label MCA, the thought of creating a fourth album was put on pause. As Lee Dan Wilson would be quoted, I honestly believe we'll make another record, but I don't know when that will be. As it turns out, the answer was never, at least not on MCA. Jacob penned the words to the closing time of this whirlwind chapter of his life in his fantastic memoir, So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star. Within it he writes, Two days later, as Dan and I took a break from recording a drum track the phone rang it was Jim from MCA calling to tell us that MCA had just dropped and solo record and dropped Simasonic I Stepped out for a walk Wondering if I was a fool to have been surprised I was but a dot in a wide white plane and a year earlier. My face had filled billboards For Jacob, it was an incredibly humbling and difficult time. At the time, I felt wronged. I felt frustrated. I was angry. I felt like the record company had blown it. And I felt denied something that had been rightfully mine. And it took writing the book and really sitting back and taking a longer view of things to understand that our story was not one of a frustrating career that got away from us. It was a story of improbable success and something for which I ought to be exceedingly grateful because if I'm not grateful, then I just lose it. I can't have it unless I'm grateful for it. And I definitely am grateful for it. So I think that was an important kind of shift for me to recognize that worldly standards of success. It was at that point that I realized that my earlier self, who had said, oh, finally we have a number one hit, had missed the point. Like our success had actually come much earlier. And it was just merely the fact that we had an audience and that we had a band and we were making music that really spoke for us and we had a process through which our songs and our musical ideas had an outlet. Jacob's wisdom here is powerful and his words come from a place of deep introspection and heavy personal work to reach a place not of anger or resentment but thankfulness and gratitude. It would be easy for any of us to understand if he felt slighted. The band had gone from international tours, videos on MTV, multi-platinum. Closing time had reached number one on the Billboard Modern Rock chart and charted in Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and an uncertain future lay ahead. Over time, he came not to resent what never came to be, but to love and be thankful for what had passed. of artistic success for me, commercial success is utterly separate from that. Right. I think that's so well said that you mentioned that it was an unlikely success. I think it's safe to say that you all were reluctant superstars in many ways. You weren't the type that would throw a temper tantrum because something was running behind schedule. You didn't insist on your own way. And in some ways, that may have allowed you to be taken advantage of or maybe not given the due that was maybe rightfully yours. It's almost like nice guys finish last. Did you get a sense of that? Sometimes there were situations where I thought our amenability cost us respect points, but you really can't do it any other way than just be who you are. I think people who have some swag in them and who just move that way should move that way. For us, I don't know if it's our Midwestern programming or what it was, but we just weren't like that. And I think that any attempt to be something other than who you are derails you. I don't think we could have done it any other way and have it work. Yeah. Third studio album came out in 2001, the book came out in five or six. So what was that space in between? You said the book was in many ways therapeutic for you. What happened in the interim between the third album and the book? The writing of the book. So it took me a couple of years to write it. And while I was writing the book, I was talking with a couple of friends who were writers, my wife is one of them, a good friend of mine who's an editor at the Wall Street Journal was another, and my book agents. And as I would show them chapters and think about it and answer their questions and hear their responses, it was all giving me much more perspective on what I had just been through. So I think that in addition to writing the book, what was going on was a lot of re-evaluation of what my life had been up to that point. Great. I think for a lot of people to experience the success, certainly on the scale that you did, that's once in a lifetime, and you can't help but be thankful and grateful for that. But then there's also a seed that makes you think, there was more in the tank. We could have, we should have, we would have done different things, and that season of your artistry came to a halt. How would you describe the emotions that followed that? I think any writing that is worth doing is going to force you to reconsider what you are writing about. That's why you write. You don't write to just transcribe what's already in your mind. You write to figure it out. I think that's part of it. I also think that while we were, I remember very distinctly, we were flying to the UK to play a sold out show in London and we were riding business class. I was in my business class seat and we had just taken off from Minneapolis and I was reclining and I thought wow We're flying it to play our number one song at a sold-out club in London, and I'm flying business class I am so grateful and about 10 seconds later this voice in the back of my head said you asshole It took you that to be grateful, and I was like, oh my god. And then I started doing an inventory of all the things in my life for which I really ought to be grateful that had nothing to do with status or worldly measures of one very important moment in my sort of achievement and value. arc of understanding like, wow, you've And I wrote a bunch of thank you letters actually when I got back to Minneapolis really got to start paying better attention to all of the riches that are in your life right now and be thankful for them because only by being thankful for them can you have them. That's so powerful. I read a quote to my students earlier in the week about how it's cognitively impossible to experience stress and gratitude at the same time. It is not feasible within the circuitry of our neurology to simultaneously process stress and gratitude. Yeah. And that for me was so eyeopening. If I'm stressed, just stop for a moment and be thankful for what I have accomplished or what I have seen. We don't hear much from the band, an EP here and there, a single here and there. And then suddenly 20 years later, out comes a new album, a little bit of sun on Pleasure Sonic, which I gather that's maybe your own label from Pleasure and Simasonic, so much has changed since the first three albums. The entire music industry has changed. MTV isn't what it used to be. I loved this description of the album, that it looks at the past with appreciation rather than longing. And I think a lot of times we can be introspective, but then we can come across like that sad high school jock still wearing his varsity letter jacket around 40 years later. This is not that. Talk to me about the new album. Where the genesis for that idea came from and what it means to you. I think that we had always been intending to make more music. When we took a break in 2001, we were not disbanding, but Dan lives in LA and I live in New York. Dan has this amazing career as a Grammy-winning songwriter, producer. He's co-written smashes for Adele and the Dixie Chicks, and he's nominated for Best Song this year for a song he wrote with John Baptiste, and he's nominated for Best Country Song for a song he wrote with Chris Stapleton. So he's had this incredible career as a songwriter. And so all of that was happening. And then John has this amazing sort of jazz trio in Minneapolis that plays punk rock and indie classics. So it's upright bass piano vibes and they're playing London Calling and Hey Ya by Outkast and all kinds of music. They're not old standards, they're new standards. And so he's been doing that and he's done a lot of things on public radio and things like that. And then I moved to New York and wrote a book and became a teacher at Sarah Lawrence. So we all had these different lives going on, but all the while we were on the phone with each other all the time saying, hey, when are we going to get back together again? And I think what happened was Dan started accumulating a pile of songs that actually felt like semisonic songs instead of Adele songs or Not A Surf songs or any of the artists with whom he had been collaborating. They really sounded like semisonic. started getting together in, I think, like 2017-ish to start recording what became our EP that came out in 2020, which is called You're Not Alone. And then the ball just kept rolling, and the songs just kept coming, and we got together more and kept recording. And as has always been the case, Dan writes way more songs than we can ever fit onto an album. And so there's a lot more recordings than there is visible output in terms of what the public sees. But you know that this has been, we've been waiting for it and in the past five years or so we've really started making it happen. And of course last summer we toured with the Bare Naked Ladies and Della Metri and we've been playing shows in Minneapolis and here and there. And I think that the time was right. There was a sort of, we just had to wait for the planets to line back up again. And they did. Yeah, the album's great. And I love just how positive and through the lyrics and the music as well, how you're able to look back on those experiences you had as this world traveling rock band and recognize that there were human elements to that as well. And it really is a fantastic lesson. So congrats on that. Thank you. How would you say you're different as a result of what you've been through? Had you just gone straight from Harvard, finishing your degree into a teaching career? How has this foray into rock stardom changed you as a human being? I think that, I don't know about the stardom part, we never really were stars. We were near stars, but our songs were the stars. So everybody knows our songs, but people generally don't know our faces, especially mine. I think some people know Dan and John just because of their sort of slightly higher profile in the world. But I would say that one thing that experience really taught me was like it doesn't come quickly and it doesn't necessarily last and you've got to take pleasure in doing the actual work. You've got to actually enjoy the work because that's really what you have in the end. That's the only thing have learned this in other ways, so you never know, but one thing that I learned is that You've got to actually, I think that a lot of, I think creative pursuits are daunting because generally our taste is way out in front of our chops. So we have much better taste as readers than we are able to produce as writers. We have better taste as music listeners than we are able to produce as musicians, at least for the first many years of our work as artists. So you've got to be willing to just hang in there and keep showing up and just trust in the power of showing up. So that's one thing I really stress to my students is trust me you've got to show up. Right. I loved reading about how you're in the back of a tour bus with a rudiments book and working on just the same fundamentals that any sixth grader that's picking up sticks for the first time would learn. You're on a tour bus on a rock show. If you're listening then you can't see it but Jacob pauses mid-conversation and grabs his practice pad and a few sheets of rudiment sheet music that he's been working on that are within reach of his computer. A couple of years ago I was sickened when watching the Mariah Carey Master Class when she admitted that she didn't know how to read music. An otherworldly talented once-in-a-generation vocalist, there's no doubt she worked on herself as a musician. But it somehow cheapened my perception of her as an artist. But not Jacob. A skilled writer, an established scholar and teacher, he's also an artist who understands the value of honing your craft, and it has served him well. Yeah, it's fantastic. That growth never, it should never stop. If you love the process, then the outcome takes care of itself many times. Yeah, I still take lessons. It's important. There's actually one passage in the book that I stopped in my tracks and I just huffed. My wife and I will read our respective books at the end of the day, and she says, what? If you hear that breath that somebody just read something worth sharing and the quote was, I wondered if we looked special enough. And it crossed my mind that here's a band, you had a record deal with MCA, I could go in a store and buy your album. The thought never crossed my mind that someone with that on their resume would have a seed of doubt or imposter syndrome or in your case stage fright. So it's tempting to make assumptions about people based on what they've accomplished or what they've done, but we don't know the underlying thought process is going on there. You don't. And in fact, the underlying thought process is probably very much like what most people have out in the world, because musicians are just taken, they're the same people that are out in the world. They just do music instead of other things. I'm sure there are neurosurgeons who have terrible, like, imposter syndrome. I'm sure there, I know that as a teacher, you can have imposter syndrome. I know that there are people who, as parents, have imposter syndrome. Kids have imposter syndrome. It's just out there. And I think an important path to take if you're one of those people is to find someone to talk to because one of the first things you're going to find out is the people don't view you the way you view yourself. Often imposter syndrome is a protective stance to say if I view myself as worse than anybody else does, then at least nobody can surprise me with their criticisms because I'll have already criticized myself. But I think that it's really important to get outside of your own head and talk to other people and find people you can trust who are good listeners with whom you can knock around this stuff. When I had stage fright now, I didn't share it with Dan and John because I certainly didn't want to freak them out, but I did have friends who I said, oh my God, I don't know if I can do this band thing. I'm freaking out before every show and I'm having kind of panic attacks on stage. I think maybe I chose the wrong career. And they were the ones who persuaded me to hang in there. And thank God they did. Find friends, find people you can trust, find trusted listeners, find counselors or therapists or whatever it is you need to do to get outside of the little tape loop that runs through your head. Yeah, absolutely. My daughter is a vocal performance major and we've had this conversation several times. She's fairly introverted and we talk about how it's a curse of a musician who isn't that extroverted life of the party person in that you want to create art, but in order for it to really feel like it matters, we need that affirmation from an audience of some sort. But if I'm not necessarily really driven to put that out there, or I'm terrified my imposter syndrome tells me that they're not going to like it, they're going to reject it, then that's a really lonely place to live. It is a lonely place to live, and I think that there are certain things that artists have to reconcile themselves to. Number one, your art will be rejected. People will not like it. There are people who will not like it and a lot of those people are the You're not going to be that good as you start out. The first people you perform in front of are going to be people who are very first people who will hear what going to be embarrassed for you. And that's also just, that's a universal experience of artists everywhere. you're doing and you have to know that And I think every musician, for instance, has had the experience of playing a ahead of time and you actually have to recording of their music for their family. And the minute they press play, someone in their family gets up and says, who wants ice cream? They just can't handle being in the room with what you've done. So I think that's like part of what you've got to expect. And I think that you've also just got to expect that you're gonna have to hang in there and get your butt kicked. And that if you do that, you're going to get better. And it's worth tracking the careers of sort of some of your favorite artists and noting that a lot of them weren't great right away. They were good or maybe okay, but people do get better and you've got to and self-compassion built in. It's impossible to grow without it. Because if you don't have you have to have faith in growth. that, you become intolerable to yourself. And then you just can't even face what you're And what growth demands you absolutely doing and what you're trying to get better at. So you've got to learn how to have compassion must have faith in growth, for yourself. And you've also got to learn how to walk this fine line of knowing that growth requires compassion and persistence. And you've got to have the persistence coach on one shoulder and the compassionate person on the other shoulder, and they have to work as a team to help you continue on. Yeah, that's a fine balance to strike. A lot of folks are perfectionists by nature and they want to produce art that the world loves but that can lead you to a dark place and feeling like you don't measure up or that it was a failure or that people just don't like what you're bringing into the world. And I think that another important thing to recognize is that making arts is hard. It's hard work. People say I'm black, I have writer's black, I have songwriter's block, I have performer's block. And I think that having a block is not having chicken pox or something like that. It's more like the nature of the work. Like, the reason we write songs is to figure out something that we're stuck on in our mind. And being blocked is part of the work. The difficulty that we have making things is part of the work. And we may have friends who are much more prolific than we are. That's great for them, but we have to recognize that for Yeah, that's so well said. I think many times people think if they're blocked, that there's us, our work is to do our work. And anybody's nothing they can do. The key is being disciplined enough to push through that initial moment of work is going to be difficult. You can inertia. If you only practiced on the days you really felt motivated to practice, how much become more facile at it with practice, further behind would you be than the fact that you've been disciplined all these years and you've done the hard part, the process, goes back to what you said earlier, you weren't enamored with the outcome so much as in love with the process. Yeah, and I think that for that reason, I think your process has to have both persistence and compassion built into it. So for instance, my writing process is 15 minutes or more a day, five days a week. The reason I said it's so low at 15 minutes is you've got to have a number that is scandalously low that you can hit it even on your worst day. And then what happens is, and if you tap out after 15 minutes that's allowed, what it does is it builds the ability to start. And as any creator will know, the first 15 minutes are the hardest 15 minutes. Once you get those 15 minutes under your belt, the next 15 are a little easier. And then you start to get into a role. And then, of course, at a certain point, you will become exhausted. But I think that being compassionate in your goals is what allows you to be also persistent and show up. That's fantastic. I have a Post-it stuck on my wall right beside my computer at work that says, two crappy pages. And I love to write and I don't want I don't set the bar of writing an entire chapter that doesn't need any more editing if it's two crappy pages sometimes you get in that zone and you crank out 20 they may still be pretty crappy but it's much easier to edit you get it all right let's close this thing down a little bit here if you could go back in time and impart some wisdom to young Jacob what would you tell him I would say don't let your distaste for your own singing voice dissuade you from writing more songs. That would be one. I would have tried to institute the routine that I have now, that I've had for the past 15 years or so, as a younger person. I went in and out of having intense super routines of five hours a day and then I'd wipe out and then I'd try and go full bore and then I'd wipe out again and I think I would go back to younger Jake and say, hey man, just try and show up for a little bit on a regular basis that might work better for He doesn't have to go out of his way to do that because that's just built in. you. Yeah. And yeah, I'd invite him to be I think that's actually true for a lot of people who are hard on themselves. I think they worry that if they're not hard on themselves, they'll become softies and more compassionate with himself. I'd they'll start slacking. I don't think that's the case. I think actually there's a way in which becoming too hard on yourself is what shuts you down. invite him to know that he doesn't have That's wisdom. Young Jake would be served to listen well. My next to last question, I love music and the emotions that it can frequently represent. What song would you pick as the soundtrack to a montage of your life and why? It's got to be Stevie Wonder. I don't know, for some reason the song Smile Please comes to mind. And for no other reason than just the mood of it is it's both mysterious and joyful and generous and I think Finding the generosity within yourself for yourself and for everybody else is important And I feel like Stevie Wonder's music may be more than anybody else's just kind of overflows with generosity. That's fantastic I've created a Spotify playlist with all of my guests pick. It's like a mixtape of all of my Becoming Undone guests and the music that they chose from that question. Last one, I ask it of every guest, what for you remains undone? I've got some books that I want to finish. I think those remain undone. I keep practicing drums and my growth as a drummer will never be done. I think my growth as a writer will never be done. So I don't necessarily know in terms of bucket list items other than like maybe manuscripts I have in progress that I would just love to get done with. But in the bigger picture, I think I just want to continue growing as an artist and making connections with people out in the world to build better communities in the circles that I run in. Those might be my main goals. That's great. I've seen video of you playing a keyboard and drums and even singing, maybe all three simultaneously. So as a musician, your dexterity is unmatched. I can remember playing a drum set and not being able to communicate and form words to people that were asking me questions. I can't do that. That's really hard. I don't know how people do. Some people do that, and I don't know how the heck they do. Yeah My friends and I we saw it was an Eagles video Don Henley singing lead while playing drones I'm like, I don't even know how that's possible Jake it's been fantastic. I really appreciate your time if Folks want to connect and follow whether it's you or the band What are some links they can go to to check you out? I'm on Facebook and you can read my blog which is called portable philosophy.com and you can email me at semijake at aol.com and the band's music is out there on various semi-sonic is our music is out there on various streaming services and we even have vinyl and CD versions of our newest record out. So I would guess those are some of the ways. That's super cool. As I was reading about your platinum record, wondering like what was actually cut into the disc. What do artists get today for going platinum? Digital download with a play button. I don't know. Yeah, you get an email. Yeah, exactly. It's lost some of the luster. I'll never forget the smell of opening a new CD, that plastic-y scent that my kids don't get. And we didn't really have time to go into it, but I love that it's a full-length album. So many artists, whatever's going to get the most streams, you tell a story. I appreciate that. Thank you. Jack, thanks so much. It was great to have you. I'm Jacob Slifter. I'm the drummer for Semisonic, and I am undone. Semisonic closed out. What we were all left to think in the early 2000s, at least, was the band's last album, All About Chemistry, with a song that Jacob had written himself, called El Matador. Fittingly, he titled the closing chapter of his book, written years later, with the same name. The song dropped at a time when the future of the group was more in doubt than certain. It's soft and introspective, it's poetic and tender. For me, most of all, it's timely. My wife, Christy, and I recently had a road trip to Waco to watch our son, Tay, play in what will undoubtedly be the final football game of his life. He's our youngest, and he's a senior. So much of this school year for me has felt so final, so somber, so heavy. As we drove the five plus hours I put on All About Chemistry. My wife nodded off and I felt the need to play El Matador on repeat for hours. The early December Texas autumn was a beautiful backdrop as I could see the literal change of seasons out my window while contemplating the figurative ones in my mind. Since Jacob wrote the song I emailed him to get the backstory. And his email response was powerful. He writes, When we were making our first album, Great Divide, we began with six days of pre-production rehearsals with Paul Fox, our producer. They were exhausting, long days of working on arrangements, and a lot of the attention was on the drum parts. That Sunday, the day before we began recording, we had a day off, and at Paul's suggestion we drove to the beach at El Matador State Park just off the Pacific Coast Highway. We drove there through the canyons which opened up into a glorious vista of the ocean. Down on the beach I lay mostly in the sand recovering in exhaustion. Eventually I got up and because it was hot I went for a swim. The water was refreshing. A couple of years later when we were making All About Chemistry I wrote the song. Thinking about that day on the beach, and not only this moment in our career, but also my parents. The lyrics, please don't go away, stay a while, stay a while, was referencing all that, he concluded. For me, I immediately connected with the sentiment of the song as a bit of a love song and a farewell to a past that lay behind and an uncertain future that lay ahead. When my family was younger, our El Matador was a theme park in Indiana called Holiday World. It was the closing verse on our summer for several years, and it's safe to say that the very best days of my life were spent with my wife and two young children right there in that park. No phones, no worries, just the whole day set aside for unfettered, unrestrained joy taken in one another. As I heard Jacob's words, please don't go, stay a while, I felt grief and longing for those days, now forever left behind. My kids are now young adults. All that I have left of those days are a few photos and my cherished memories. But thanks to Jacob, thanks to his song, and thanks to Simasonic, I see that honoring the past doesn't have to dictate or mandate sadness. It can merely be the prelude to another chapter or another verse. In their hit closing time, the song's producer, Bob Clearwater, notoriously added a dramatic pause where the group lingers for a measure. If you've heard the song, and honestly at this point who hasn't, then surely you can recall the musical pump fake where the anticipation builds. I can envision Jacob behind a single rack tom kit with his sticks raised in the air, poison ready to slam down as the song rockets on from one part in the past to what's next. So if you're feeling stuck, like some aspect of your life is just not moving forward, maybe you could do like I used to do. Grieve, regret, long for what used to be. But as Jacob Slickter and his group Simasonic have taught me, maybe you aren't stuck at all. Maybe the verses behind you that are already gone were all just a magnificent, glorious, wonderful setup and you're hanging there just for a moment in the space between your own clear water paws. Or maybe, just like in El Matador, there's There's a key change coming So take courage lift your head steady your breath and Prepare yourself for that next verse It's gonna be a great one I'm thankful to Jacob for giving of his time and sharing his journey and I hope you found as much enlightenment and inspiration from this episode as I did. For more info on it, be sure to check it out on the web. Simply go to undonepodcast.com backslash EP62 to see the notes, links, and images related to today's guest, Jacob Slichter. Coming up, I've got entrepreneur Nick Hutchinson, podcaster and financial planner Paul Finner, and a whole boatload of other exciting guests. This and more coming up on Becoming Undone. Becoming Undone is a Nitro-Hype creative production written and produced by me, Toby Brooks. If you or someone you know has a story of resilience and victory to share for Becoming Undone, contact me at undonepodcast.com. Follow the show on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn at becomingundonepod. And follow me at TobyJBrooks on X, Instagram, and TikTok. Listen, subscribe, and leave me a review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so🎵