We couldn’t be more excited for Local Natives to hit Penn’s campus. Hailing from Silver Lake, CA, the band made waves last year for their globally-inspired indie–folk sound on Gorilla Manor. In preparation for tomorrow’s SPEC Fall Concert, we spoke with Kelcey Ayer, the band’s jack–of–all–trades (he does vocals, keyboards, percussion and guitar!). Check them out at the Rotunda along with The Ruby Suns — for only a dollar.
Street: Where does the name Local Natives come from? Why the redundancy?
Kelcey Ayer: We were all thinking of names while we were writing that record. We wanted to have a new name and Andy came up with it. We just wanted something that embodied who we were and everyone liked how it was a little redundant and how it conjured up the thought of a tribe and its natives. You think of a community, and we’re definitely a collaborative community of musicians that all participate in one common goal. We’re like a collective — you’ll see places in San Francisco, for instance, where everyone does the same job or switches off.
Street: How did the five of you come together?
K.A.: Taylor [Rice] and Ryan [Hahn] had been playing guitar together since junior high, and I went to a neighboring high school of theirs. By senior year, I was playing music with them, and then throughout college we’d been playing music and singing together. Andy [Hamm] got into the mix five years ago and Matt [Frazier] got into the mix four years ago. Taylor and Ryan had started a band in high school, and when we played with them we kept the name for so long. It just [had] so many different incarnations that it was just a clusterfuck by 2008. Everyone wanted to start anew. We moved into a house together and just started writing most of what is Gorilla Manor today, and after we had recorded a lot of it, we decided to change the name and to really take it seriously.
Street: So would you say it was a change in spirit? That you were really going to bear down and do something?
K.A.: Yeah, definitely. It was a maturing of everyone’s ambitions and figuring out what people really wanted to do — like quit their day jobs and really make something of it. I think that’s what it was. We finally had all these songs that we really were proud of and we really liked. We thought we had a more cohesive sound than ever before, and so it just kind of all made sense right in that time.
Street: Your album does sound very cohesive, but it seems like in order to create such a unique piece of work, you need a bunch of different perspectives. How like–minded is everyone in the band musically?
K.A.: Everyone definitely has different tastes in music. No one’s completely on the same page, which is cool because it makes something that not one of us could have made on our own. It’s all these ideas that a lot of people bring into the mix that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. I think it’s different for every band. A lot of bands have one or two songwriters, whereas we have pretty much five. It works really well for us.
Street: What’s the songwriting process itself like? Is everyone pitching their own thing?
K.A.: Yeah, everyone will have their own ideas and things that they’re working on — little chord progressions or melodies that they’re coming up with on their own. And so every song on the album kind of started a different way. Like for “Wide Eyes,” Ryan wrote a lot of the main melodies and parts and then worked with me and Matt [Frazier] on getting a beat solid. Once we got that done, everyone else kind of came into the mix. And then on a song like “Airplanes,” I wrote the chord progression and the lyrics. It’ll usually start with one to two people working on something, and then move on from there. Eventually, pretty much every song’s process ends the same, where everyone’s in a room, sweaty and yelling at each other about how a guitar lick should be different. It all ends up pretty much the same.
Street: When will you start writing new material?
K.A.: It’s very bare–bones. It’s been very hard to write on the road just because we need a lot of time and space to dive into our creative process. But it’s been cool. This is the first tour we’ve ever had on a bus — like a proper tour bus. That’s given us some time to just mess around, and we have been a little bit. But everyone’s just pretty excited to take a break during the holidays and then really get to writing the next album next year.
Street: You’ve been compared to just about every big alternative band these days. We think you sound like the Cold War Kids or the Dodos, except not so sad. Who do you think you sound like? And who do you want to sound like?
K.A.: I don’t really know. All the band comparisons have been really flattering. I don’t think there’s necessarily anyone we’d like to sound like. Ideally, we want to try and make a sound that’s our own — unique to us. It’s great to be compared to really great bands and not really shitty bands [laughs]. We all really dug that first Cold War Kids record and we’re labelmates with the Dodos now, which is cool because we all really dug their last couple records. We’re big fans of contemporary music as well as older music, and so I think that definitely shows up in what you hear on the record.
Street: It’s an overused term, but can you try to describe the sensation of being a buzz band?
K.A.: It’s kind of a funny thing. We worked so hard last year and built up something from the ground up and then everyone started talking about it earlier this year. All of us are so engrossed in the task at hand. We’re just touring constantly and we always have our heads down, going full speed. You don’t feel too much of it until you’re playing these shows that are actually sold out. I can just attribute it to working hard and being passionate about what you’re doing. I don’t know. It’s a funny thing. We try to just be really thankful that everyone’s been so receptive to the record — critics and fans. That’s been awesome. We’re really stoked.
