Photograph courtesy of Slater Nalley
Slater Nalley was a typical student at The Lovett School until Hollywood came calling earlier this year. He’s now one of the top 14 contestants for the hit show American Idol.
Nalley has always had an ear for music, picking up the piano about 5 years ago when he was 13. “I didn’t like it because I can’t read music,” he says. “I tried my best to teach myself chords.” His aunt gave him a guitar shortly thereafter, which changed things for him. “It was a lot easier. I learned to play guitar on YouTube and wrote music. It’s when I knew that music was my thing,” he says.
From there, he began playing gigs and fine-tuning his songwriting skills. One day last year, while sitting in an English class, his teacher, Michele Davis, gave him a poem about her son Carter, who passed away in 2016. “She said, I know you write music, here’s a poem,” he recalls. “So I took it home and scrolled through it with my friend Rebecca Powell, and we just wrote this song. It felt like we had immediately done a good thing.”
He decided to play “Traces of You,” the song he wrote for Davis, at his American Idol audition. Knowing it was a risk to play an original song, Nalley felt confident in what he was doing—and rightfully so, as the moment went viral with 5.9 million views on TikTok alone. He even made judges Carrie Underwood, Lionel Richie, and Luke Bryan cry.
Thanks to his confidence in himself and his abilities, he’s now spending the second half of his senior year in Los Angeles. He’s played everything on the show from “Over the Rainbow” to “Soulshine” by the Allman Brothers, a song he used to sing with his dad.
“This has been a big opportunity, and with that comes stress, but I’m ready to take it on and get everyone’s vote,” he says. He credits his parents for “raising him very well” and to “always respect and love everybody,” which keeps him grounded.
As for what’s next—a big question to ask a high school senior—he says he’s taking it one day at a time. “As of now, it looks like music is going to be it for me. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. I lie down and think about it every night.”
Catch him this Sunday on the next episode of American Idol at 8 P.M. on ABC.
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