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After tossing his Christian songs, Slade wrote about the breakup with his first girlfriend. "It was a lot more honest than I had ever been," Slade says. "It was scary being that honest and open."

Slade pushes through the fear with song after song that are every bit as candid. The title track to How to Save a Life recounts Slade's mentoring relationship with a teenager at a Christian halfway house who seemed hell-bent on destroying himself—but, fortunately, did not. With the power of a biblical lament, Slade mourns and cries in anger at the same time:

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life

"This kid had a thousand opportunities to get into trouble and he got into all of them," Slade says. "It was heartbreaking to see all the sacrifice that went into trying to save this kid. A lot of it came out of love, but it came across as self-righteousness."

The song, Slade says, actually is "a case study" of a point in time of struggling with the teen, whose life is finally turning for the better. "I talked to him just last month," he adds.

The hit "Over My Head (Cable Car)" recounts the struggle to maintain a relationship with his brother. "We had our ideological differences," Slade says. "We were not seeing eye-to-eye on a whole lot of things, and we had to figure out whether or not the relationship was going to continue."

Slade's songwriting skills are apparent in two lines of the song, which capture the pain of wishing his brother were someone else so the situation and accompanying pain could summarily be dismissed:

I wish you were a stranger I could disengage
Say that we agree and then never change

"I think that's the part that a lot of people can relate to," says Slade, acknowledging that most people think the song is about a girl. "All real relationships don't just happen. They take so much work, sacrifice, compromise and understanding and determination to keep going."

Getting his emotions on paper

Slade says he tried to follow a musical mentor's advice and stay away from writing about his own relationship. "I just couldn't figure that one out," Slade says. "It seems the only thing I could write with authority about were things that happened to me or to people closest to me.

"The reason I started writing songs was because I have a talent for it, and I just love getting an emotion in my head out on paper," he continues. "It helps me make sense of life. It's the same way people write in journals so they can look back in years. I basically just put my journals to music."

With his typical wry sense of humor, Slade adds, "Then we try to tighten them up a bit and make them catchier than the average diary."

The band's diaries include entries trying to make sense of what has been essentially an overnight success after four years of playing any place that would have them. Just six months ago, they were still driving themselves in a van from one concert to another, setting up and tearing down their own equipment, eating fast food and then moving on to the next town.

Wysocki sums up that lifestyle: "You're just completely wiped out."

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