Q&A: Sibling Duo Silver Cup Opens Up About Their Unique Sound, Inspirations, and the Importance of Authenticity in Music
IT’S ALL IN THE FAMILY FOR — Silver Cup. The Utah-based sibling duo, Hadley and Logan Nelson, have been captivating audiences with a fresh, electric indie sound. Both members adamantly agree that working with their sibling has provided endless collaborative chemistry. “It’s like there’s a genetic ear,” Logan reports. Even the band’s name has family ties — Silver Cup is a reference to their family’s business that goes back generations.
Silver Cup’s sound is experimental, authentic, and energetic. Above all things, they strive to be vulnerable and genuine with their music, deviating from trying to write pop hits and instead following their inner compass toward a sound that’s true to them. In Hadley’s words, with their upcoming album, “we weren't trying to be anything — we just were.”
Their recently released single, “Away,” a debut off their upcoming album, Songs From a Broken Laptop, is about the all-encompassing anxiety of being a twenty-something feeling adrift, a topic Hadley opens up about as being very personal to her.
The album, out in August, is self-described as their most personal, intimate project yet. Quite literally produced on a broken laptop, the gritty, raw sound is echoed by the theme of the album.
“I just wanted to feel broken,” Logan shares. “I don't care if people love this. I don't care if people hate this. But it will be what I'm feeling right now.”
You’ll be hard-pressed to find a more genuine, down to earth group than Silver Cup, and this is only the beginning for them. Read on for an intimate look into their processes, challenges, and inspirations, as they’re coming of age as an emerging name in the indie scene.
LUNA: So I hear you’re about to go on tour, tell me more about that!
HADLEY: Yes! We're supporting Flamingos in the Tree. It's the biggest tour we've gone on — it’s 29 dates, I believe. We start in Salt Lake, go east up to Montreal, back down the East Coast through the south and back up over through California. So it's a long run, but we’re excited.
LOGAN: I feel like the inner child in me was always like, “Oh, I’m gonna be in a band, traveling around the country,” and … that's actually happening. It's even more interesting that it’s happening with my little sister. I never imagined in a million years that I would be in a band with my sister going across the country and doing this. We're really excited to be along for the ride. We've just trying to tie everything up before we head out, so a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of preparation, but very exciting.
LUNA: I'd love to hear a little bit about how you guys came together and how this group formed.
LOGAN: I had been in bands growing up my whole life — in the family, I was the music kid.
Hadley was super involved with music as much or more so than me, but I felt like I was one that really wanted to be in a band. I recorded my first EP when I was 14. I had a band that had broken apart after kind of falling out with a major label, so then I did some short film work, and I was just really tired. I was 23 or 24 at the time and I was exhausted.
Hadley had just graduated from high school and headed to FIT in New York, and I'd seen her in plays and I'd seen her perform on violin and piano, and I was like, “You're too good to just stop.” Because a lot of people, once they get into school, you know, that's a really big discovery phase. So I didn't know whether she was going to keep at it or not. So I just said, “Hey, let's write some pop songs. Whenever you're in town, we'll record a bunch.” My little brother, who plays bass, was in the band at the time as well. And yeah, that's kind of how it started.
HADLEY: In extracurricular ways and involvement at school, music was 24/7 for me — [but] more in the choir, musical theater, classical violin kind of route. Then I suddenly wasn't doing anything anymore after I graduated and I was like, “This does not feel right.” So as soon as Logan called me up and was like, “Hey, keep doing music,” I was like, “Yeah.” But I had never before that point really been involved in a band, singing to a live audience as myself. So that was a new thing for me, but it's been a blast.
LUNA: What's the process like for writing music? Do you guys collaborate on everything together? Or do you each come together with separate things and then go from there?
HADLEY: Put briefly, Logan will produce something out like a beat or even arrange a produced song, and then we get together and write together. So it's Logan on the production side and then we co-write. But we're pretty much always in the room together when anything is happening, so it's very collaborative.
LOGAN: Going into this project that’s coming out in August, the approach was very much one of trying to [not] sit in the confines of what we think is gonna blow up or what’s the most pop thing that's going to be picked up. For the first time really ever, we tapped into our inner emotions and our backgrounds and our lives and our trauma. I think it's interesting being in a dynamic with your sibling in the writing stage. I've been in bands with people that are not family, and it's a fine line between pissing somebody off and hitting something really great. But with Hadley there's like a genetic ear, or she just trusts me. I guess it's probably a combination of both.
I collaborate very well with Hadley, and I like to believe that's because we grew up around the same influences — and we can tell each other off, and it's okay because we're siblings. As long as there's respect between us, it's a lot easier to say, “Hey, I don't like that” to your brother or your sister than it is to a longtime friend, because it can get hairy.
LUNA: Would you guys say that you have certain inspirations when it comes to songwriting? Do you draw from shared experiences?
HADLEY: I think for the most part when it comes to coming up with a concept to write a song, it's very much inspired by the sound. A lot of the time we start with little pieces of something Logan's produced and we kind of just sit there and listen to it. We even have a few creative exercises we'll do sometimes — we’ll draw what we feel or randomly flip through a book and point at words. A lot of it comes from the way it sounds and how it makes [us] feel. From there, we usually just talk until we come across a concept. And then basically we take that and run with it. It's kind of just throwing paint at the wall until we run into something.
LOGAN: Yeah, it's incredibly collaborative in that way. Both of us are kind of viewing what each other is doing in this sort of collaborative game of throwing paint on the canvas.
LUNA: I love that. I also wanted to ask about the story behind the name Silver Cup.
LOGAN: It's all in the family, you know what I mean? (Laughs) We say that all the time, but it kind of is. My great, great, great grandfather created a grain or a feed mill, and they would basically manufacture grains or different types of wheat. Then it got into selling fish feed for fish hatcheries. I always give context about what it is because if I just say my dad makes fish food, everyone always made fun of me when I was growing up. It was called Nelson & Sons Silver Cup Fish Feed. So point being, it only made sense that my brother, my sister, and I, when we were first starting, [to take] the name Silver Cup. That's where the story comes from — it’s our way of continuing the family business in a way that we could capitalize on as a family and as a band with our music.
LUNA: How would you guys describe your sound?
LOGAN: Sampling records and pulling from the public domain and the internet have been a huge priority for us since day one. And that's actually because of my brother Campbell, who was originally in the band — he got me into sampling by listening to artists like J Dilla and Madlib and early DOOM Records and A Tribe Called Quest. I think for me, being a white kid from Holladay, Utah, that was just a line of music that I never really got to. I had heard the commercial rap that was on the charts, like Wiz Khalifa, but I never listened to true underground hip-hop, and it kind of blew my mind. That came later in life, and so I started [getting into] sampling. The earlier stuff we had was really sample heavy.
Then there’s some indie instrumentation that I grew up with, like Arcade Fire and Death Cab for Cutie. So as we've developed each project, sampling has been continually a huge part of what we make, because it's a big tool to influence. I almost look at sampling as a medium when you're in an art, right? It’s less about “I like this red color” or “I like this green color.” It's like, “I like oil painting” or “I like watercolor.” So for me, that was a new thing that I really loved and so Hadley and I were just wanting to paint that or do different colors and make it into something interesting with these inspirations.
I would say right now, we’re kind of moving more in an electronic direction because that feels the most natural. [We’ve gone] from this kind of weird indie hip-hop thing to writing more kind of pop stuff and embracing sampling, to being like, “Alright, let's move into more of an early 2000s sort of IDM,” very sample-heavy but very cool and eclectic and electronic, yet with very great songwriting.
HADLEY: Said in a few words, the direction we're going in is indie electro-pop. That's what I would say. In terms of inspiration, Logan mentioned the early 2000s — a lot of the artists we grew up listening to and loving, a big one from our childhood is Imogen Heap. A more modern-day example of [that] similar sort of energy is Caroline Polachek. The Postal Service is another huge one from our childhood. Those are three that come to my mind first when people ask us our influences.
LOGAN: Yeah, I love Four Tet — those records are amazing. I think a lot of songs were influenced by that period. So yeah, anything by Four Tet, The Postal Service, Imogen Heap; obviously Caroline Polachek is doing that now. Pink Pantheress is actually doing a [sound] like that right now but in her own way. That’s why I [brought up] sampling, because that's what ties all of those artists together, although they're different: they all utilize that tactic as a form of painting a picture. That's been the biggest thing that I think makes Silver Cup different from any other project I've been in or other artists that I've listened to. It's not about interpolation of a song — it's about recycling an art form that maybe people haven't heard a lot of and then giving it a new life. I think that's really freaking cool.
LUNA: What are each of your favorite songs that the group has done?
LOGAN: It's hard because there are songs that I feel like I'm really proud of because they did incredibly well, and then there's my personal favorites. My personal favorite is probably “Annabel Lee.” The Edgar Allan Poe record about Annabel Lee and the poem — I love poetry, so that was a really cool semblance. I don't know if you know Basil Rathbone, but he's a famous actor from the 1950s. He had this vinyl record that read the poem, and we threw that in there. So I think I'm most proud of that, and it commercially did pretty well. It was everything that Silver Cup embodies.
HADLEY: For me, this is a hard question just because I do feel like we have eras, so it's hard to pick only one out of everything. But I'd have to say “Kill For You,” [which] was the first single we released for this project a couple months ago. I love that one for multiple reasons, but a huge one is because it's really fun for me to sing, and it feels very authentic to my identity as a vocalist. And it's also about being into your best friend, which I think is very relatable and heart-wrenching, but also a fun concept, especially as a queer person.
LUNA: You mentioned your project coming out in August — I'd love to hear a little bit more about that!
LOGAN: When we started this project, I was kind of at a point where I was like, “I'm done.” I'm 28, I'm married, and my life has changed a lot. I've gone through various phases: being with a major label and then being dropped and having that band implode, doing short film work and that being really exhausting with no financial reward, and then doing this for fun, but then it started to pick up. So I felt this responsibility, like, “Okay, well, I have to take this on more seriously like I have in the past.” I have a sales job that I won't say if I love or hate (winks).
But, point being, I had just come back from a work thing and I was flying home and I saw Action Bronson in first class. I’d just been promoted to a new position, and at that time Silver Cup was kind of plateauing. We'd been fighting really hard to try to get to that next level, but in that moment I was just like, “What’s missing?” Like, I've done all this work all my freakin’ life to be this rockstar kid playing venues. And I'm getting promoted at this job that I “love” and I've seen Action Bronson in first class and, like, I want to be Action Bronson in first class. I want to do that — I don't want to be in the back here talking about my next sales opportunity.
So it all came down on me, what I want to do for my family in the future, and I texted Hadley and I was like, “I'm done, I don't wanna do this anymore. This is too hard, it's too time consuming, it's too much.” So many of my vulnerabilities are being put into music, and I just feel like no one cares. And because she's my sister, she talked me off the cliff. She took me to lunch the next day after I landed, and she was like, “What should we do? What do you need?” I just felt like I was trying to write for other people and write all these pop hits and stuff to land the perfect playlist or land the opportunity. And “I'm not happy, because it isn't fun. It's just hard, and we don't know where we're going.” And she said, “Why don't you just go and lock yourself in and write?” And then I wrote nine songs in three weeks, and that's the mixtape.
It's called Songs From a Broken Laptop because, on tour — which was just a few weeks prior to this moment — I had run over the laptop with all of my music on it in a parking lot. I thought there was a beautiful metaphor with that, where there's a lot of bleeps, bloops, crunch, and fuzz on this record. And I honestly don't know how much of that is because I was working from a laptop I couldn't afford to fix, and if it's a computational error. But I also love this metaphor of the fact that I just wanted to feel broken a little bit and write from a broken mindset of, “I don't care if people love this, I don't care if people hate this.” But it will be what I'm feeling right now, about my life, about my trajectory and things like that. And so I got with Hadley and we really brainstormed, and that was how the record started.
HADLEY: To describe what this project is sonically and conceptually, it feels like the culmination of our maturing as a band when it comes to our sound. It combines a lot of the different techniques that we've used in the past when it comes to production. It just felt so unbelievably right and correct — we weren't trying to be anything, we just were. In terms of concept and lyrics, it touches on themes that have to do with growing up and coming of age and time and the way it feels like it's getting away from us, [as well as] family roots and generational trauma; it feels like it's a coming-of-age record.
And I say that because it is that in every way, shape, [and] form. As I said, sonically and conceptually it's Silver Cup’s coming of age, and it's a very raw telling of our experiences as young adults who are growing into ourselves and growing into our lives as musicians and people.
LUNA: Tell me about the process of your recently released single, “Away.”
LOGAN: So we do these exercises where we'll write a song in four hours. We'll go in and do production and rough melody and stuff, and Hadley will just do scratch vocals with some basic underlying lyrics, and I'll produce it out. We were calling it a TikTok dump series — one of our biggest songs, “Gaslight,” came from that methodology. It's just a way to force something out without overthinking processes. “Away” was one of those songs. We kind of imagined it like Legally Blonde's final credits, with a hair flip. Like, I've come to my senses about what I should do with my life kind of feeling.
HADLEY: When it comes to concept, this song is very important to me. It’s a very cathartic and a very raw telling of some of the things that I struggle with that I would argue every twenty-something has at some point. It's basically about having a weird, jealous nostalgia, if that makes sense — being at a point in your life where you're assessing your situation and what you want your next step to be and [asking], “Am I the happiest I could be right now?” And asking yourself sort of unhelpful what-if questions, like, “What if I went to a different school? What if I hadn't made that big decision? What if I didn't move away from home? What if I stayed in that relationship or left a different one? Would I be happier than I am now?”
It's pretty obvious that nine times out of 10, those questions don't make you feel good, and they're really not productive. So the song touches on those difficult feelings, as well as being sort of an empowering statement of “No, I made the decisions I've made in my life for a reason, and I am here today for a reason.” I can have compassion for my past self without being jealous of them and their ignorance or without resenting them. I can also have compassion for my current self and where I'm going, and that should help me have hope for the future. So again, coming of age — it's about being an adult and not knowing what to do with your life and being scared that you haven't made the right decisions. Very relatable, I think. Very, very personal and dear to me, and it's something I think about and struggle with a lot.
LOGAN: The second verse kind of explains that concept: “Sometimes we close an open door to step into the one that was before / because hands will shake, and embraces will be warm / and I've come of age, but I've not been reborn.” So just the idea of saying, you may pass that door, you may shake that hand for the next opportunity or give a hug to that person that you were leaving, but I think the next lyric is: “On one hand, you're safe and sound / but the other one may break you down / so just cut the hands off and turn around / that'll do it, that'll do it.” It's like the idea of saying, “I'm afraid of moving forward, so instead of just embracing whatever's in each hand, I'm just gonna cut my hands off and sit here.” That's the idea, and I think that's kind of powerful.
HADLEY: Yeah, it's about not staying where you're comfortable. That verse is about questioning whether you should go back to where you were or stay where you are because it's safe and comfortable. But then realizing no, this is not where I'm supposed to be, so I need to cut it off and move on. It doesn't have to mean cutting off relationships, of course, but it means I'm going to stop staying where I'm comfortable, because I know it's not where I'm supposed to be and I know that I have to move forward.
LUNA: Yeah, I love that. I'm 22 and I just graduated college, so all of that is very much speaking to me. What are your goals going forward with Silver Cup?
LOGAN: I think that this is a really great question because I feel like mine have changed in the last few months. I was a kid that wanted this dream singularly from the age of 10, you know — I needed to be a rock star. I had all these [dreams of] Glastonbury, Coachella, number-one plaques, all this stuff. But recently moving into my later 20s [I’ve had] this experience of, “Man, this is freaking hard, I just want to write music that I just unapologetically love.” And I want to get better at doing that every single time I sit at that recording desk or every single time I sit with Hadley.
I think that the more honest that approach is and the more I love that music listening back to it, whatever success will come will be good enough for me. Instead of it being like, what commercial, what TikTok do I need to make to blow up, I’m making it less about being the biggest star in the world and writing the biggest hit in the world and more about being the most honest writer in the world.
That's been my goal. I just want to write good music with my sister, and I want to be able to look back on it if nothing happens and show my kids and say, “That was your aunt and I — look how sick we were!” That's the kind of perspective I want to have. Of course, any accolades that come along the way would be great. But I think that the more honest and the more loving I can be to myself and the writing process and what I make, the better things will turn out.
HADLEY: Yeah, for me, on a similar vein, I just like doing this for the people that it touches. We have a really, really tightly knit close community in our Silver Cup listeners. We've gotten to know so many of them, and they're such amazing people and we love the way that we've connected other people together and the way we can comfort or excite or make people feel things with our music. So I would just say the goal is that I want to do that for as many people as possible. So of course you can list out this many Spotify monthly listeners by this point or we played to this crowd, but basically my goal is just to build this community to be as special and big as it should be. So that's why I keep doing it.
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