In Conversation With Silver Cup: Night Games
Holladay Utah, a suburb tucked away near the Great Salt Lake and the Jordan river feels like an Eden of sorts. Certain times of the day the sunlight leeks through the greenery and casts a beam of light on the large houses below. Such a lovely sight could be dangerously mistaken for a proxy for G-d’s light. Despite the beauty that Holladay, Utah holds, like anything else it has its faults.
“Those are fake, is she gay? Susie May has been drinking, I hate the way they keep their yard.” Silver Cups a family band that has recently sprung out of Holladay, chants on their track Sabbath. Silver Cups was founded by Logan, Campbell, and Hadley Nelson. A trio of siblings who are native to the suburb and are now using their musical roots to illustrate their hometown
“Holladay is a bubble. It’s a small world. Everyone knows each other. That’s a great thing for the most part, but there is some stuff in that aren’t that great. I think there is the connotation that eighty-five or ninety percent of the people who live in that area are LDS, and there’s stuff that comes with it. Everyone’s got dirty laundry, but no one talks about it, and if you do everyone knows about it. I think that’s a part of any small community, and religious aspects are tied to it. That’s why we call it Sabbath.” Logan explained about the title of their first single.
‘Sabbath’ video opens with Hadley’s angelic vocals as the siblings begin biking down Holladay. Shot completely on 16mm the video is a love letter to the hidden suburb. However, in juxtaposition to the scenic fall reel, the lyrics feel like a criticism.
Recently, Salt Lily Magazine sat down to talk to Silver Cup about Holladay, their sound, and everything else in between
Q: You’ve all played music before, but what made you start playing music together as a family?
Hadley: It definitely began just ‘cause Logan brought up the idea. It was after I moved to New York already, right? So, I go to school at FIT in Manhattan. I moved there three months ago and I got a call from Logan one day saying ‘hey, I have this idea’ and it sounded cool to me. It would just be chill playing music. I’ve been playing music my whole life. I played the violin for many years. I was involved in choir and musical theatre in high school, but I never had done this side of it. It sounded fun and I love singing, I love music, and I love my brothers.
Logan: I don’t know if these guys feel the same way I do, but music is my whole life. I think they both did music on their route. We all have very different tastes musically. I think that’s because our family is very independent. Everyone has a thing that they do and they stay in that lane and work hard on it. Like Campbell skates, he knows more about skateboarding, skate shoes, and skate apparel than you could ever imagine. Hadley is an incredible technical vocalist. She’s great at musical theatre and art in general. She’s very academic and super smart. Campbell and I like music and stuff but we don’t know what we’re doing.
Campbell: Yeah, we’re dumb.
Hadley: You’re not dumb. You guys are smart. You guys just didn’t care.
Logan: It wasn’t that important to us [school], so at least in my opinion to answer that question, we’ve done music our whole lives. I think I just took music as my thing, my lane. So, it’s not that these guys didn’t like music as much, it was just my lane. It’s probably why we didn’t start a band or did much music stuff together.
Hadley: I always loved music, but I never planned on it being any sort of career. Now we’re here, but that was never my plan when I was young and doing it. It’s always been a huge and integral part of my life.
Q: What are the strengths and weaknesses of playing with family?
Campbell: We haven’t gotten in any fights yet so I think we’re doing pretty good.
Logan: Yeah we haven’t. Here’s my thing, I had been in bands before. I had been in bands where the dynamics were very different. In Solar Suit and Villa Theatre Co. I was kind of the leader in those groups. I was always the frontman and we kind of interacted in a way that was hard. In Villa, I had hired musicians. A lot of these other guys played in other groups and I was just more or less using their talents to incorporate into Villa. Solar Suit was more of a collective effort, but I was the leader so I had to be careful about their personalities and what they needed and what they wanted to do. Villa was more like ‘play your parts and let’s be done’. So part of me going into this was nervous. It kind of a place of safety to call my siblings. We’ve known each other our whole lives, we know how we react with one another. So, we haven’t fought yet, but I have a really strong feeling we get each other. I really hope it gets to the point we still get each other if it gets to the point where we are super successful. We all understand how we work, we all understand what we like doing, and we’re family. There is safety there in my opinion. At least, that’s why I wanted to call them and start this band more than anything. I want to come back into that world of collaborating, but not being scared of being rejected. I feel like with family there is a bond there.
Hadley: We’re comfortable with each other. We can be honest with each other, which is really important for everything.
Logan: Yeah, I feel like it’s a safe place to be at a collaborative level. Regardless if you like what they are doing or you don’t like what they are doing, we’re still siblings. I use to make fun of Campbell for playing too many video games when he was younger or I don’t know it could be anything. At the end of the day, he says he doesn’t like something or I don’t like something, we’ll take it and be emotional about it, but I don’t think we are going to blow up or hate each other for it. We still argue all the time about these things.
Q: How would you describe your music?
Hadley: Do you want me to try? I don’t know? We were having a conversation the other day how genres aren’t really a thing anymore.
Logan: I actually submitted to a few blogs when we released Sabbath and I put it under Indie-Pop because I didn’t really know what it should be classified under. I can’t put it under hip hop. I can’t put it under R&B. It’s kind of this mixture of those two genres, and people were like ‘this isn’t Indie-Pop’. We released it and submitted it to six different playlists and I got rejected after four of them. All of them were like ‘this isn’t Indie-Pop its R&B’ and one was like ‘this is contemporary’. I was like ‘what’s contemporary’. Everyone has their own opinions, I think that’s where Hadley is coming from.
Hadley: I get tons of people asking me ‘oh you’re in a band, that’s so cool, what kind of music do you play?’ and I’m like “umm alternative” and that’s so broad it doesn’t even make sense.
Logan: Billie Eilish is alternative, but is she alternative? I guess. Is Post-Malone hip hop? One of Campbell’s and I’s favorite albums this year is Lizzo’s album. It’s a pop record, but it’s not. It’s serious chops. It’s incredible, and honestly, it’s not a pop album. It’s not an R&B record like what would you call it?
Campbell: I don’t know. It has like six different genres in it technically. You have ‘Jerome’ which is this anthem song, and ‘Juice’ which is a glam pop song.
Logan: Like 80’s glam pop
Campbell: Then there’s Truth Hurts’, the popular one, that’s a trap song.
Logan: So I think where we’re at with the sound of our music right now, is we don’t really know. I think everyone answers that question like that now. I don’t think it’s just us, because genre lines are blending. I honestly think that within ten years the only people who are going to be classifying genres are award shows. That’s why I was saying hip hop is such a cool genre right now because it’s just so vague. We’re just incorporating sounds of indie rock and indie pop, the stuff that I’ve always written. Then incorporating stuff from Hadley and Campbell’s end of hip hop and R&B, and this urban style. We’re sampling records, pushing boundaries with those samples, and putting those things together. So, whatever you want to call that, that’s what it is.
Q: Do you guys think you’re appropriating urban culture and urban music?
Campbell: I don’t really feel that. I’ve listened to hip hop my whole life. I heard Nas’s Illmatic when I was ten, and the record changed the way I listen to music. It changed the music I listened too. When I was growing up I listened to what my parents listened to and then I heard that record and it changed the way I looked at rap music. Not that I know what they are talking about at a story level, but at a production level I feel like it’s relatable. I really like the way the snare hits. I don’t really know about the struggles they are talking about. I can’t really connect with that, but I know ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ is a good album.
Logan: We understand that it is talking about stuff that does matter in the grand scheme of things. I think for me at least, music is an escape from your reality. Good music is always an escape it takes your mind, thoughts, feelings, and emotions into another world. Appropriation is a hard one. I don’t know if we’re appropriating music. I will say that I really love tapping into that world because I’ve never experienced it. I don’t think I ever will. I think it is [urban music] such an influential part of the world right now. Go look at the top ten it’s all urban, in some shape or form. It’s connecting with people. Whether it is appropriation or relatability or just trying to understand a different part of life, a different group. I think that’s powerful. I think it’s cool to see these collaborations happen because it’s not something we’ve been through. ‘How Does It Feel’ by D’Angelo, it’s just pure raw urban emotion. I never felt that. I don’t think I’ll understand it ever, but I know there is something really special there and I like it. It’s like the first time I listened to a Tribe Called Quest, it’s a really similar ideology. I don’t live on the East Coast. I don’t understand the East Coast, but I know Wu-Tang was over in Staten Island. You had De La Soul up in north New York. I’m watching all this content about it like ‘what is this?’ ‘what is this like?’ ‘what is this beat I’m hearing’. I think it’s more about sharing this culture. I wouldn’t say we are appropriating, but I will say that it is a world that we don’t understand. Maybe that’s the whole point, we’re trying to. I don’t know if we ever will, but this pursuit is a quest to understand different forms of life. I think we’re taking our spin on it
Q: What was the story you guys were trying tell on Sabbath?
Logan: Well, we are all members of the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter-Day Saints (LDS). We all have a very open mindset about the policies and understanding of the church. Having said that regardless of what religion you live in or culture you live in; there’s a culture in Holladay. There are unsaid rules or unsaid norms that are apart of it. I’m not saying that we don’t like some of these aspects of culture, because we’re in it. But there are aspects of any culture that are not nice. The one thing we kind of found when I was writing this with Campbell is Holladay is a bubble. It’s a small world. Everyone knows each other. That’s a great thing for the most part, but there is some stuff in that isn't that great. I think there is the connotation that eighty-five or ninety percent of the people who live in that area are LDS, that there’s stuff that comes with it. Everyone’s got dirty laundry, but no one talks about it, and if you do everyone knows about it. I think that’s a part of any small community, and religious aspects are tied to it. That’s why we call it Sabbath. Those are things you talk about at church. I don’t think its Church of Jesus Christ and The Latter-Day Saints’ fault. I think that just natural in a tight-knit community. We picked Sabbath because we’re given these Christian norms to live by right? But there is also this quest for perfection that comes with those norms. We all try our best, but in reality culture, everyday lifestyles, different opinions when they all feed into we don’t want to talk about it. There is a line that I love on the second verse that I sing that's “those are fake, is she gay? Susie May has been drinking, I hate the way they keep their yard.” They are four things any of us have heard in our communities. What you think about them is your own place to think. I know those four things have been said by a parent or by families all the time. I don’t love that personally, but I think that song more or less represents tight-knit religious communities. How it feels to live there and be an outcast.
Hadley: It’s interesting to me because growing up in the bubble that is Holladay. I definitely, especially when I started going to high school, wanted to just get out. I wanted to experience something different and I did. Now I’m living in New York, but now that I left I realize how much I love my home. It’s difficult because like Logan was saying there are two sides to everything. That’s what it sort of tackles too.
Logan: The first verse is the perspective of somebody you grew up in Holladay and understands its issues but overall stays because they know it’s safe and they connect with the people they live with. The second verse is about somebody who lived in Holladay but is looking back at it and saying I don’t like these aspects of Holladay. I don’t like what it’s like, but overall saying together we grew here, we understand, what it’s like to be here, but it’s ok to take paths to get out of this world or come back to that world. I don’t think we’re saying necessarily we like Holiday or we hate Holladay. We’re just posing the thoughts of people who have lived in Holladay grown from it and have either expanded their thoughts by leaving to or expanded their experiences by staying in it. I think we kind of all those feelings. There are things you love about your hometown and the things you hate about your hometown. I think that’s what we’re really tackling, that’s why suburbia is used so much. I think anybody, not just people who live in Holladay, but anybody who lives in a tight-knit small community they known exactly what this feels like.
Hadley: It doesn’t even have to be religious in my opinion. I’ve met a lot of people at my school who are living in the suburbs of Westchester which is just out of New York. I hear a lot of the exact same things and they aren’t religious.
Q: Tell me more about your new single ‘Night Games’
Logan: I’ve never written music from my own perspective. I’ve always written music in other groups that I’ve been in about other people. I was kind of nervous to talk about myself, my family, or anyone else who was close to me. Because it’s terrifying. I think I always grew up as this kid who was talkative and trying to hang out with people. I wanted to be a social butterfly and look cool in my band, but I never really showed vulnerability. That’s kind of what ‘Night Games’ is about and kind of what this band is about. I want to open up our family, how I grew up, and where I grew up to the public. The people who know what it’s like will know what it’s like. People who don’t will get to see a little into that. ‘Night Games’ is kind of about vulnerability and being young in that phase of junior high. It’s about that phase of getting invited to go play night games and it suddenly turns into playing ‘Kick the Can’ to maybe ‘Truth or Dare’. You’re kind of uncomfortable and you’re a little nervous ‘I don’t want to do this or I wasn’t to do this’ ‘I think this boy is cute’. It’s kind of that vulnerability that we all neglect.
Logan: the first part of the song really reminisces good moments, what’s it’s like, and how mean it can be too. Kids in junior high are ruthless, but also really nice. It’s this weird dynamic of ‘I’m scared of life and so are you. We’re all trying to figure it out, so you have to stronger or weaker in comparison to what you live or grow up to be’. The song is kind of about how we neglect those times, vulnerabilities, and rough times. In life, those vulnerabilities manifest themselves all the time. We handle them differently because we’ve been through experiences that have made us change our outlook on these vulnerabilities. Like sitting in a circle playing ‘Spin the Bottle’ and seeing the cute boy you look that you’re kind of nervous to talk to, but you’re in this position to kiss. It’s kind of like that in life you’re nervous about taking a job or moving on to grad school. You’re nervous because there is an appeal there, but you’re also nervous because of your abilities or your financial position. I kind of wanted to relate all of that. I wanted to bring vulnerabilities we have as human entities as mankind, and how we acted on them as adults and how we acted on them as pre-teens or children. I think it’s a really interesting outlook. That’s what ‘Night Games’ is about. It’s about the similarities of playing ‘Kick the Can’ outside with your friends and real everyday life.
Q: Do you have plans for an album?
Logan: I don’t know my goal this year is to release sixteen tracks. I’ve never done that in a year. I’m noticing how hard it is to mix and do everything all in one shot without having fresh ears. That goal may be changing. I want it to be good content, but I also don’t want to release stuff and be like ‘here you go’. But I don’ t know it’s hard to say because people release bad stuff all the time and the song they don’t think will blow up, blows up. Then they become successful and make money. We aren’t sitting here thinking about a conceptual record. I think we’ll just drop little gems for a while and then maybe do an EP. The goal is sixteen songs whether that’s collective, EPS, or singles. Campbell and I want to write according to the seasons, that’s why had a lot of fall vibes on ‘Sabbath’. This song [Night Games] was supposed to be more fall vibes, like the end of summer, early fall vibes, but I don’t think it’s going to turn out that way which is ok. There is kind of a darker serious undertone to this song which I wouldn’t say is winter but there is more of that. I think it will work, it’s more by the seasons. I like the idea of people looking back at our music and being like ‘oh it kind of wraps the year for them’ rather than we’re talking about something specific.
