John Vanderslice
American musician, songwriter, record producer, and recording engineer

John Warren Vanderslice (born May 22, 1967) is an American musician, songwriter, record producer, and recording engineer. He is the owner and founder of Tiny Telephone, an analog recording studio in San Francisco and Oakland, California.
Vanderslice has released nineteen full-length studio albums and five remix records and EPs on Dead Oceans and Barsuk Records. He has collaborated with musicians such as the Mountain Goats, St. Vincent, and Spoon.
Early years
Vanderslice grew up in rural North Florida before his family moved to Maryland when he was 11. In 1989, he graduated with a degree in economics from the University of Maryland, where he also studied art history. In 1990, he moved to San Francisco, where he supported himself as a waiter while taking classes at the University of California, Berkeley, with the intention of becoming an English teacher.
Vanderslice spent five years as a member of the experimental band Mk Ultra, with whom he released three albums in the 1990s. The last of these, The Dream Is Over, received a 9.2 rating from Pitchfork.
The public source identifies “John Vanderslice” as american musician, songwriter, record producer, and recording engineer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around John, Vanderslice and American.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q575133. VIAF identifies the subject as 41580674. The Library of Congress control number is no2005097048. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1967, 1989 and 1990.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Vanderslice” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.