When the world first met Kenny Vasoli, he was a fresh-faced teenager who rocked bleached blonde hair and a puka shell necklace in the music video for his pop punk band’s debut single.
That was 2003, and a lot has changed for Vasoli since then. For one, said pop punk band — The Starting Line — is only semi-active as its members pursue other projects. Now 34, the Philadelphia-native Vasoli makes chilled-out jams under the name Vacationer and will appear at the High Noon Saloon on July 20.
“I feel like I’m acting my age when I’m making this music,” he tells The Bozho. “It doesn’t feel like I’m trying to force my range into something that I wrote when I was 17 years old.”
But Vasoli was always a cut above his peers, at least in terms of outside influence. The Starting Line’s final album, 2007’s Direction, incorporated elements of post-hardcore and shoegaze, and he also fronted a short-lived indie rock project called Person L. But Vacationer is even harder to pin down. Their 2018 LP Mindset puts them in a grey area that’s not quite rock and not quite hip-hop.
“I think when Vacationer started, I just didn’t want to make loud music anymore. I didn’t want to scream,” he says. “I wanted to be in a band were I could relax and not be sweaty every night.”
Before the “eastern seaboard’s foremost relaxation specialists” bring their good vibes to town, I chatted with Vasoli about crate digging, hip-hop, and maturing musically.
With ‘Mindset,’ it’s not so much about what went into making the record as it is about what didn’t. How do you juggle such a broad range of influences when putting songs together?
I took things, in a sense, back to square one. I learned a lot of the ins and outs of production, so I could do a lot more on my own at my home at my own pace. And at the same time, I also started collecting a lot of records and crate digging and getting into heavily sample-based material. Artists like Madlib, who’s my favorite beatmaker and I think one of the greatest living musicians right now. I wanted to really capture these sort of magic moments that I was feeling on these records; this X-factor feeling that I have when I hear this combination of sounds. It could be a free record that’s all covers of Beatles songs done for dentists’ offices or whatever, but sometimes there’ll be an arrangement that’s so well put together that I feel like it’s sort of my calling on this record to re-imagine moments like that and take things that were just hiding in crates and bring them into my music and recycle them in a way.
You don’t have to really guess what you were listening to when you made it, because you actually show it to us in bits and pieces, using your own lyrics to tie it together.
Yeah, totally. I’d like it be an experience like that. With guys like Madlib, it is that experience where you feel like you’re getting a peek into their record collection. And I wanted to do that, but without it sounding like something, or something where you could just easily draw a comparison. I hope that it’s not easy for someone to say, “Oh yeah, this sounds like this record, or that band.” To me, it’s a unique potpourri of a lot of different styles that just exist in my record collection.
You keep mentioning Madlib, so I’m curious to know more about your relationship with hip-hop. I remember you covering a Roots song back with Person L on one of those ‘Punk Goes…’ compilations, so it seems like a pretty serious relationship.
The Roots were definitely my gateway drug into hip-hop. Coming from Philadelphia, I was aware of The Roots from an early age. I can’t remember the first time I saw them, but their live performance is always something. It’s like the gold standard of live performances in Philadelphia, as far as I was concerned. And even in the beginning, back when I was covering The Roots — I think I was like 23 or so at that point — I was still really rooted in rock music. And then I linked up with the guys who mentored me with this Vacationer project, Grant Wheeler and Matt Young. They were in a band called Body Language, and they first showed me J Dilla’s Donuts.
They sent me this beat while I was on the road, playing bass with another band, and they titled it “Dilla Trib.” It was like hip-hop tempo and all chopped samples, and I was like, “This is something that would be really fun to sing over.” I feel like I don’t really hear music like that, where people are singing over what’s typically rap music. So I wrote the lyrics to that, and it ended up being the song “Trip” (from 2012’s Gone). Once I was exposed to that (instrumental hip-hop), I feel like I was given the keys to the castle to really enjoy hip-hop, because now I’m a freak for it.
‘Mindset’ feels a bit like a release of a lot of pent up creativity. Coming from pop-punk and emo — both genres that don’t necessarily reward taking creative leaps — what has it been like being able to make music without those constraints?
I think you described it pretty well. I don’t know if I was conscious of that, but I think that’s why I make the choices I do. With The Starting Line, there’s a limit on how much you can expand the sound while still keeping it the same band, especially with my instincts. I want to take things super far-out, and I guess it’s good and bad that I had other guys in the band who would reel me in. But after doing that for eight or nine years, it just became a little more frustrating to try to express myself. So I made Person L records and included like every kind of music under the sun that I could fit into it (as an outlet).
You seem like a pretty restless worker. Do you have anything planned out for the next Vacationer record?
I have between like 32 to 35 instrumental beats that I really like, so I’m trying to decide if I want to mix those instrumentals and just put out an instrumental beat tape or take those songs and start writing from it. Part of me wants to keep following the heavy sample-based approach to making music — because I love that sound and have a lot of fun doing it — but part of me wants to see what we could do with just two guitars, bass, and drums, and then maybe some percussion samples on the drum kit. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Vacationer is performing with Sego at the High Noon Saloon on Friday, July 20.
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