“When you’re in high school, it’s almost not even conscious. You’re just like, ‘This is who I am. This is what we do,’” says singer-guitarist Taylor Rice in a recent phone interview.
Rice met fellow singer-guitarist Ryan Hahn when they sat next to each other in science class on the first day of seventh grade. The pair became fast friends and spent middle school learning how to play guitar. They soon met Kelcey Ayer (vocals, keyboards, guitar), and the rest is history.
In high school, the Orange County natives spent their free time writing and playing songs in their garages, or, if they were lucky, booking a basement gig.
Since all three of them wanted to write and sing, Local Natives were inspired by great bands of the past like the Beatles, Beach Boys, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.
“Our first shows were really fun,” says Rice. “We played in the cul-de-sac in front of [Hahn’s] house for our parents and all our friends, when we were like 15. And then our first real house party show was at my dad’s house.”
Rice shared that the writing process for the now five-piece’s latest album, Time Will Wait For No One, was a callback to the band’s roots.
“The first record as Local Natives is [2010’s] Gorilla Manor. It was through college, graduating college. We were just around each other all the time, living together, so it would be like putting songs together in the living room at the piano, or in the backyard with acoustic guitars,” says Rice. “[Time Will Wait For No One] started over the time where we were isolated from each other for the first time since we were 15 years old. And when we got back together, we were meeting up in the backyard and starting songs on acoustic instruments, kind of in a similar way.”
The band’s writing process consists of Rice, Hahn and Ayer bringing in initial concepts, and the band flushing them out together. They have a habit of tweaking lyrics up until the last possible minute.
“I am so melody first. Lyrics are always the hardest thing to finish for me. It is for all the band members,” says Rice. “I feel like we spend half of the time making the song, and then half of the time finishing the lyrics.”
After the pause in group work brought on by the pandemic, they were overflowing with ideas. Rice refers to Time Will Wait For No One as the “first chapter” of the band’s outpouring of post-pandemic musings.
Prior to the Time Will Wait For No One tour that brings them to Cleveland, Local Natives had yet to play the new record live, apart from a small, acoustic album release show in L.A. in July. That’s when the band discovered how well “NYE” translated in a live setting.
“That’s like this really fast song. Way more intense and energetic than normal. I was joking, ‘It’s like a fun song, and we don’t really have fun songs,’” Rice says of the band’s tendency to gravitate towards slow-burn, melancholy grooves.
Local Natives tapped actress and singer-songwriter Suki Waterhouse for a feature on a recently released version of “NYE,” a departure from the band’s usual approach.
“It’s really an outlier story, which is probably why the song is the way it is,” says Rice, “But the story for ‘NYE’ is that Local Natives has this ongoing tradition where when somebody in the band has gotten married, the other band members make up the wedding band.”
Hahn got married as the band was working on Time Will Wait For No One. They played covers requested by the couple including Oasis, Bee Gees and the Strokes.
“Ryan got to watch us play onstage. I got to at my wedding too, which is like, you never get to see that. Usually, we’re up there together. We only hear what it sounds like onstage,” says Rice.
Hahn had so much fun watching his bandmates change up their typical tempo, that he wanted Local Natives to experiment with a song in that vein. He brought in the initial concept, and the song evolved much quicker than most Local Natives songs do.
“We kind of figured it out in like a day, and just played the whole thing live, basically. Mostly, that song is a take,” says Rice. “It was kind of wild and really fun, and I think we really captured that spirit of it. I’m just so glad that whole thing happened the way it did, because now we get to play it live.”
Another track on the new album with an interesting origin story is one of Rice’s favorites, “Featherweight.”
Rice brought in the concept as a “sad piano ballad demo” he had written in isolation.
“It just felt like being barraged by the world, and all these uncontrollable elements that are happening in and around our lives and to us,” he says, “But it’s the feeling of being light-on-your-feet with it, and being a fighter, and being able to ride that wave a little bit.”
It took an experience they all had together as a band to make the song what it is on the record.
“That was kind of the emotional place the song came from, and then one of the early stories, that’s like, lyrically, a jumping off point for it was this awesome night after a show in New York,” says Rice.
Band members found themselves on a friend’s small boat, kept at a scarcely known dock in Brooklyn. They drove it all the way out to the Statue of Liberty, before being forced to fight choppy waters on the trip back.
To Rice, it felt like a movie.
“It was just this wild kind of experience. And there was a really cool kind of magic about it,” says Rice. “Like, when you pull on this thread in life, and open these doors, you could just find some really amazing stuff.”
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This article appears in Aug 23 – Sep 5, 2023.