Jack Johnson Reveals the Surprising Way His Longtime Friend Kelly Slater Helped Kickstart His Music Career
Jack Johnson Reveals the Surprising Way His Longtime Friend Kelly Slater Helped Kickstart His Music Career
Rachel DeSantisSun, March 15, 2026 at 4:34 PM UTC
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Jack Johnson in Los Angeles in October 2022; Kelly Slater in Spain in April 2025Credit: ALLISON DINNER/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock; Stephane Cardinale - Corbis/Corbis via Getty -
Jack Johnson reveals how Kelly Slater helped kickstart his songwriting career
Johnson says in his new documentary SURFILMUSIC that Slater was the first person he ever knew who wrote a song
The documentary premiered at SXSW on March 13
Jack Johnson has a rather unlikely person to thank for the very early days of his music career — his good friend Kelly Slater.
Johnson, 50, and the legendary surfer, 54, are longtime pals. And in his new documentary SURFILMUSIC, which premiered at SXSW on Friday, March 13, Johnson reveals that a fateful move by Slater is what opened the doors to him discovering the joys of songwriting.
In the film, Johnson recalls being in Hawaii with Slater, who brought with him a 4-track tape recorder.
“He would leave the thing at my house and we kind of started learning chords on the guitar at the same time,” he says. “I was 14 when I started playing guitar.”
Jack JohnsonCredit: Tahnei Roy
The Grammy nominee goes on to tell Slater that he was the first person he ever knew who actually wrote a song.
“At that point I‘d just been learning other people’s songs,” Johnson says. “I hadn’t even got to the point where I could think, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll try writing one.’”
When Slater left Hawaii for Florida at the end of the winter, he left his 4-track behind, much to Johnson’s delight.
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Jack JohnsonCredit: K. Johnson
“I was like, ‘Wait a second, he’s gone?’” Johnson recalls in the film. “And I just remember thinking the 4-track was still at my house and I was so stoked. That was the beginning for me.”
Slater, who is widely regarded as the best professional surfer of all time, has performed multiple times with Johnson at various events, festivals and jam sessions. In September, they teamed up with fellow surfer Rob Machado for “A Pirate Looks at Forty” at the Solento Surf Festival in California.
Johnson and Slater have also worked together on both of Johnson’s surf films: Thicker Than Water in 2000, and The September Sessions two years later.
SURFILMUSIC follows Johnson’s unlikely career path from aspiring surfer to filmmaker to successful musician.
“Blending rare footage from those formative surf films and Johnson's personal and family archives with present-day reflections, the film weaves together how lived experience, friendship, and exploration shaped the sound and stories behind the music,” a press release says.
The film, directed by Emmett Malloy, includes interviews with longtime friends as well as Johnson’s wife Kim, whom he married in 2000 and with whom he shares two sons and a daughter.
The musician’s most recent album, Meet the Moonlight, came out in 2022.
on People
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
