Son of Sublime: Jakob Nowell on His Father’s Legacy and Finding His Own Way

Sublime is heading back to the beach.

The legendary Southern California band is part of the lineup for the inaugural Ocean Way Festival, a two-day music and culture festival taking over the sand in Santa Monica Sept. 26 and 27.

Produced by Goldenvoice, the team behind Coachella and Stagecoach, Ocean Way will be the first major music festival held on Santa Monica beach, with The Killers and Olivia Dean headlining alongside Jack White, Khruangbin, Sublime and more.

For Sublime frontman Jakob Nowell, playing a major festival on the Southern California coast feels especially fitting.

“The whole SoCal and beach culture is very close to me,” Nowell told KFI’s Heather Brooker. “I think we’re getting a renaissance right now in Southern California.”

Nowell believes the return of Sublime is part of a larger resurgence in West Coast alternative music and he hopes the band’s platform can help introduce fans to a new generation of Southern California artists.

“I think it’s going to help a lot of other smaller bands eventually get their time in the sun,” he said.

Jakob Nowell carries on his father’s Sublime legacy

Jakob is the son of Sublime founder and original frontman Bradley Nowell, who died in 1996 when Jakob was still a baby, shortly before the band’s self-titled album became a massive success.

Thirty years later, Jakob is now standing at his father’s microphone.

Sublime’s influence has endured across generations, something Jakob said becomes obvious when he looks into the crowd at the band’s shows.

“When you come to the Sublime show, you have people of every single generation,” he said. “It’s a wide, wide span of humanity that gets into my father’s music.”

But stepping into the band his father created has also been far more complicated than the full-circle story it may appear to be from the outside.

Jakob said performing alongside his father’s longtime bandmates has given him a different understanding of the man he barely had the opportunity to know.

“I’m around the people that he spent the most time with in life, and I think we leave an imprint of our souls on those close to us,” Nowell said. “You see the evidence of that everywhere.”

He called the experience “an emotionally challenging process.”