Slimdan, aka indie-pop singer-songwriter Danny Silberstein, is sitting at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records, not far from the Wienerschnitzel on the corner of Magnolia Blvd. and Laurel Canyon where he one dared to devour a non-kosher hot dog — a “pretty game-changing moment” that not only inspired the track “Wienerschnitzel” off his quirky and clever debut album, Second Dinner, but changed his actual life.
The song is 100 percent kosher, so to speak, based on a true story. “I literally biked to the Wienerschnitzel and took a hot dog and shoved it in my face,” Slimdan laughs. “I thought I was going to die. I thought I was going to eat it and then a thunderbolt was going to come hit me. … When I realized that I didn’t die and I wasn’t going to die, it broke the whole illusion for me.”
Slimdan was raised in the tight-knit and insular Modern Orthodox community of nearby Sherman Oaks. “If you grew up in the Valley, you probably saw the Orthodox Jews walking around on Saturdays. That was my people. I was one of those people,” he says. However, his parents weren’t especially strict (the second verse of “Wienerschnitzel” is about drunken house parties in Encino and Slimdan’s “experience of testing my boundaries and limits in high school”). And they never had a problem with his love of pop or with the musical career he first stared “chasing” after a counselor at his Jewish summer camp played him “The General” by ‘90s roots-rock band Dispatch.
“[My mother and father] tried the strict thing, and then very quickly realized that it wasn’t going to go anywhere good, so I think they changed. My parents are fucking awesome. I think I just was built a little bit different than them. And then once all got on the same page, which was the middle of high school, it was smooth sailing. It was awesome,” Slimdan says. “And I was lucky enough to have a mom with great taste in music, so she was dealing with the Paul Simon and the Beatles of it all. So, I was getting a good steady diet of that. As far as discovering music on my own, I would sneak off to the TV room and watch MTV, TRL. So, it was a weird hybrid of me getting deep Simon & Garfunkel cuts and Flo Rida and the Black Eyed Peas. And I feel like I land somewhere in the middle of that.”
YouTube was also just becoming huge when Slimdan was in high school, so he started to “go down these rabbit holes” listening to indie bands like Local Natives, Grizzly Bear, and Death Cab for Cutie, which gave him the encyclopedic musical knowledge he has now. But no amount of Encino high school parties or YouTube and Total Request Live binges could have prepared him for life outside his Modern Orthodox community bubble, when he moved to Boston to attend the Berklee College of Music and experienced a massive culture shock.
“I hid in my room for the first semester. Literally. I would go to class and come back. I was so scared,” he chuckles. “I had only met Jewish people. I only knew my kind of Valley people, really. Then I went to school and there was all these different types of people. And I had never had formal music training. I was all self-taught, and all these kids were ripping jazz players. And I was wearing a fedora hat from Gorrin Bros. and trying to do Mumford & Sons songs. … I mean, I had carved out this identity in my head when I was 18. … I was pretty dead set on singing [the Lumineers’] ‘Ho Hey’ and slamming an acoustic guitar. And then I got to [Berklee] and somebody showed me Channel Orange by Frank Ocean and my brain exploded. And then I was living with three dudes from Georgia who were all gospel players, and I’d never heard gospel music before. I think musically and interpersonally, I just grew a lot and I was exposed to a lot more stuff, which killed my musical identity — in a very good way. It kind of made me build from scratch and figure out who I was, and I had a lot more tools to use to build myself back up.”
While Slimdan says he “ran away for a big portion of my life,” first to Boston and then to various unexplored parts of greater L.A. (“as much as I feel like I grew up in Los Angeles… I didn’t even know East L.A. existed until seven years ago”), eventually he returned to the San Fernando Valley, where he currently lives with his wife and 1-year-old son. “I thought if I moved back to the Valley, that meant I’d lost the game,” he admits. But once he moved back home, even though he was initially “pretty set on being in a band and doing that thing,” he soon linked up with Sasha Alex Sloan, who he describes as an “amazing artist” and “the LeBron James of songwriting.” Slimdan ended up co-writing Sloan’s 2019 breakout hit, “Older,” and from that point, he was “thrust into this pop songwriting world.”
But while Slimdan still love to write for/with Bruno Mars and Jason Isbell, and his ultimate career dream would be to land a song on the Shrek 5 soundtrack, eventually he “crashed and burned pretty hard” from constantly, randomly pitching songs for other artists. And so, he went solo. “I had to sort of look myself in the mirror and say, ‘Who do we want to be when we grow up, Danny?’ And I wanted it to be Slimdan.”
And in many ways, on Second Dinner — which just celebrated its one-year-anniversary vinyl release at Licorice Pizza Records, and was recently reissued as a duets version titled (Second) Second Dinner featuring friends like Medium Build and Lennon Stella — “Danny” has also returned home. While he’s not especially religious anymore, he says he’s “found my own path” with Judaism and has a “very strong Jewish identity,” which weaves its way into his plainspoken, storytelling lyrics.
“I think it’s my job as a songwriter to talk about myself ‘n’ shit as honestly as possible. … I try to be myself, and whatever comes with that is what’s going to come out,” Slimdan shrugs, adding with a laugh: “I don’t know if I’m intentionally trying to be like, ‘I feel like we could Jew this song up a little bit!’ … I’d imagine Larry David probably faces this a lot, and Seth Rogan, where [industry people are] like, ‘Just do the Jew thing!’ But I feel for me, as long as I’m being myself, all parts of me will come across, hopefully. And that is definitely part of the Slimdan salad.”
