About Me
THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE SLATER SISTERS - written by Lauren Lanning (so maybe that makes it a “Half-Auto Biographyâ€, but I’m not sure):
These days, Jillian and I have been classifying ourselves as an “acoustic duoâ€. Soon, we hope to have a band to back us, but we’ll still be a duo. In fact, we’ve been a duo for as long as I can remember. We are the dorky cousins who, during get-togethers, used to beg our parents to let the whole family sleep over at the other family’s house, just so we could hang out longer and talk in our secret language in our clubhouse. And by clubhouse, I mean under her desk in her room. We lived 2 hours from each other, and would write letters back and forth, adorned with cat or flower stickers and Tweety Bird stamps. Every holiday, we would sneak away to a secret location where our brothers couldn’t find us, and we would choreograph a brilliant song and dance routine, which we would then force our entire family to watch several times. If one of us found a new hobby, or started some strange new collection, the other one did it too. We each still have several large shoeboxes filled with Pez dispensers, rubber stamps, and troll dolls.
When I graduated high school, we took our first trip on our own together to New York City. We saw five Broadway plays, and after every show, we’d stand by the stage door to see the stars. But we were too embarrassed to talk to them, so instead, we would just watch everyone else talk to them, and we would talk to each other in strange voices under our breath, telling the people in front of us to get out of the way. When my dad heard this strange funny voice we both did together, he started calling us the Slater Sisters. We don’t know why, but it stuck.
For a few years, I was writing songs, singing, and playing guitar as a solo musician, in coffee shops and open mics around San Diego. I made a little cd, and I remember Jillian calling me one day, singing along to one of my songs at the top of her lungs. Since she knew my songs so well, and could sing, of course, the next time she came to town to visit, I had her sing three songs with me at an open mic night. We threw a few harmonies in there, and got a great response, which, from a drunk, loud bar crowd, is hard to come by. I know we both thought, maybe this could work as a duo. We had been singing together for so long that it just came naturally. There was a small discussion, but nothing serious, so we both went back to doing our own thing.
Our next major adventure together was in 2005, travelling through Europe for three weeks. I brought my backpacker guitar, and we vowed to play on the street, at least once. We wandered around London, found a spot in a park to set up our performance space, and sang the same three or four songs several times each. We made sixty-four Pence. And so the fever began. We played again in Florence, Italy, after working out a few more songs, for variety, of course. We did our best, amongst the purse sellers, gawking men, and a bum who drank wine from a carton. This time, we made fifteen Euros, and three people bought my cd. It was then that serious talks of a band began to take place. We returned home and booked our first show within a month or two. Three months later, we had both moved to Los Angeles, and were calling ourselves The Slater Sisters.
Now here we are, not even two years later, and we have moved along at a great pace. What happens next, we don’t know, but we’re feeling pretty good.
