Today we’d like to introduce you to Patrick And Heather Slender Dan.
Hi Patrick and Heather, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
Slender Dan started with the two of us playing together in a band called Tiger Rider in Seattle. Patrick had been making electronic music on his own for years, and during the lockdowns he asked me to listen to some of the tracks he had been working on. I immediately started hearing melodies and lyrics over them, so we started collaborating and recording in our basement.
One of the early songs had the working title “Slender Dan,” which was a play on Slender Man. We liked the name enough that it eventually became the name of the project.
We started writing and recording in Seattle, then moved to Nashville in late 2021 and rebuilt our little basement studio here. Since then, Slender Dan has really become more of an art project than a traditional band for us. We make the music ourselves, but we also put a lot of time into the visual side—album artwork, music videos, lyric videos, and all the weird little details that surround a release.
We’ve released several collections of music, including GESTALT and I Had A Feeling Today, and we’re still writing, recording, and experimenting. We’ve never been particularly interested in following a traditional path with the band. We mostly just make the things we want to make and see where they take us, which has honestly been one of the most rewarding parts of it.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It’s a fun project for us so in most ways it’s been smooth. But we also tend to make things pretty complicated for ourselves, haha. We’ve made albums where we gave ourselves ridiculous amounts of work to do—GESTALT had 12 music videos and 3 lyric videos, and I Had A Feeling Today took almost three years from the beginning of recording to the final mixes. We’ll get an idea and then somehow turn it into a much bigger project than we originally intended.
There’s also the practical side of making music independently. We record everything ourselves in a basement studio, so we’re constantly trying to make creative decisions while also being the engineers, producers, editors, and occasionally our own worst critics. We can spend an absurd amount of time obsessing over a tiny sound that most people will probably never notice.
But I think those struggles have ultimately shaped the project in a good way. We’ve learned to be patient, simplify when we need to, and focus on making things that actually make us happy rather than worrying too much about fitting into a traditional idea of what a band should be.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Slender Dan is an avant-garde electronic pop project at its core, but we think of it more as an art project than a traditional band. We write, record, produce, mix, and create most of our visual content ourselves.
Musically, we like combining catchy pop songwriting with unusual rhythms, textures, and experimental production. We also put a lot of emphasis on the visual side of each release, from album artwork to music videos.
We’re most proud of being able to follow our ideas wherever they take us without worrying too much about genre or convention. We like making things that are accessible and catchy but still a little strange, unexpected, and uniquely ours.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
Make music—or art, whatever your thing is—because you enjoy making it. Life’s too short, and there’s too much incredible stuff out there to spend your time chasing one particular sound or trying to fit into someone’s idea of what you should be doing. Make your own. Once we stopped worrying about expectations and started treating Slender Dan as an art project, it became much more fun and creatively fulfilling.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://gestaltproductions.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slenderdanofficial
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/slenderdan
- Twitter: https://x.com/slenderdan_
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@slenderdanofficial
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/slenderdanofficial
