Song Exploder - Local Natives - Dark Days

Episode Date: August 2, 2023

It can be hard to be in a band, or really, in any kind of group where there’s creative collaboration, and you’re supposed to act like it's a democracy. Because what do you do with an idea that you love, if nobody else believes in it? That question is a big part of this episode with Local Natives. Local Natives is a band from Southern California. Their first album came out in 2009, but the three vocalists and songwriters in the band, Taylor Rice, Kelcey Ayer, and Ryan Hahn – they’ve been playing together since they were in high school. The lineup also includes Matthew Frazier on drums and Nik Ewing on bass. They’ve put out five albums, including their most recent, Time Will Wait For No One, which came out in July 2023. But for this episode, I talked to Taylor, Kelcey, and Ryan about an older song of theirs: “Dark Days,” which came out in 2016. It’s their biggest song to date; it has over 100 million streams, and it's been certified gold.  It’s a duet with Swedish singer Nina Persson, from The Cardigans. In  2020, they put out a new version of the song, featuring Amelia Meath from the band Sylvan Esso. I talked to the guys here in the studio, and to Amelia Meath remotely. And together, they told me the seven-year story of how “Dark Days,” was first made and then eventually remade. For more, visit songexploder.net/local-natives.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. It can be hard to be in a band, or really in any group where there's creative collaboration, and you're supposed to act like it's a democracy. Because what do you do with an idea that you love if nobody else believes in it? That question is a big part of this episode with Local Natives. Local Natives is a band from Southern California. Their first album came out in 2009. But the three vocalists and songwriters in the band, Taylor Rice, Kelsey Ayer, and Ryan Hahn,

they've been playing together since they were in high school. The lineup also includes Matthew Frazier on drums and Nick Ewing on bass. They've put out five albums, including their most recent. Time will wait for no one, which came out in July 2023. But for this episode, I talked to Taylor, Kelsey, and Ryan about an older song of theirs, Dark Days, which came out in 2016. It's their biggest song to date. It has over 100 million streams, and it's been certified gold.

It's a duet with Swedish singer Nina Pearson, who is in the band The Cardigans. In 2020, they put out a new version of the song featuring Amelia Meath from the band Sylvan Esso. I talked to the guys here in the studio and to Amelia Meath remotely, and together they told me the seven-year story of how Dark Days was first made and then eventually remade. My name is Taylor Rice, and I sing in play. play guitar. My name's Kelsey Air and I sing and play the keys. My name is Ryan Hahn and I sing and play guitar. For me to write, I need a lot of like alone time and I hadn't had a lot of that for a long time. Our band had been on this kind of crazy whirlwind for the past few years. We'd put out

our second record and basically toured 11 months out of the year in 2013 and you know that record was also pretty heavy. Kelsey's mom had passed away. The songs, there was a lot of sadness. And I think the shows felt the same way. And so combine all this insane touring and the physical exhaustion, I think there was a sense of kind of mental

and emotional fatigue as well. That's kind of the headspace I was in, I think, leading up to working on dark days. Our booking agent, Jackie, asked if I wanted to just house sit for her because I was just couch surfing at the time. suddenly I was living in this big house in Silver Lake by myself. I would just make coffee and sit out on the balcony and play guitar.

And I remember, you know, I was so down and yet suddenly I felt excited to write. So many of our songs tend to start from this kind of small point and then grow to this like epic crescendo. And so I think for whatever reason, maybe a reaction to what we'd done before or just like wanting to feel something different, I was like, I want a song that just kind of grooves. and I think I wanted something simple. But in order to do that, I almost had to go against my instincts. And so I kind of made this small writing experiment for myself. I was just going to put on a drum machine, just start with a bass line. No chords.

So I was just like outside, you can hear the birds and everything. Around that time, I was listening to Talking Heads, This Must Be the Place, and Fleetwood Mac's Dreams. And both those songs are just incredible songs, but, you know, they're very simple and just kind of this great bass loop while everything else like ebbs and flows around it. And so I was like, all right, I'm just going to basically freestyle and see what comes from there. I have never heard this. I have never heard this either. You never expect, yeah, a lot of people to hear these voice memo.

So you're like, like, I'm free to just like spout gibberish. but here we are. The first thing that makes sense in English is dark days. I love hearing this because I and Kelsey will send songs in this gibberish state to each other to each other pretty freely. Well, not. And I think that's why we've never heard it. Ryan likes to wait until his idea is like really fully formed and whatever before he presents it. If I'm like really honest, I think at the time it kind of stemmed also from an insecurity.

I didn't feel as confident in my voice just to sit down and kind of show someone a song. And I think over the course of touring, I'd started picking up production and really enjoying that part of it. And so instead of just kind of feeling like hyper vulnerable, you know, these voice memos, I can present a more realized vision. And so I went inside and just basically opened up Ableton and started making a demo. Each of us have a different way that we communicate our music. So Ryan is always more production first. I try to write words really quickly. But then Taylor, he's extremely melody focused.

And we're not always doing it this way, but now that we've been brighting together for almost 20 years, that's been how it's kind of come about. About a month later, I sat down to work on the demo again in Ableton, and I pulled up the first voice memo, and you can hear this random car horn, and it's beeping on this really cool rhythm, and I was like, that sounds like a synth.

And so that's what inspired the synth in the song. That definitely felt like the thing it needed to kind of push it forward. Something about that, the juxtaposition of the bass with that synth, just felt like something new and kind of exciting. I can't remember when I first shared it with the guys. What I do remember, though, is that it didn't really get a big reaction. Yeah, Ryan's right, I think, because it's the first time that we ever had something that's a groove that goes the entire time.

I remember liking the song, but I was like, where's the epic outro, you know? and I was a little bit baffled by it. There's nothing scarier than showing somebody something that you're really excited about and then having them being, yeah, cool, man, that's all right. And you're like, oh, I thought it was amazing, okay. You know, it can be a tough environment putting the songs out there and like politicking

and trying to get people on board. So I just think Ryan gets so much credit for persevering. We rented an Airbnb just for a few days in Josh in July of 2015. And I specifically remember being like, all right, it's go time. I'm finishing the lyrics. And the phrase, dark days was going to be my North Star. I'm going to, like, build a song around that phrase.

I don't know what it means, but I'm going to figure it out. Like, how could dark days maybe be like some kind of good thing? It brought to mind growing up in Southern California and how like stormy, like cloudy, dark days were kind of a rarity. And so in that way, they felt kind of special. And that made me think of, you know, this time in high school with friends jumping in someone's pool while it was raining. That memory just kind of kicked off this like series of other kind of ideas about that time in your life, you know, first loves, first sexual experiences, getting your first car, sneaking out to your girlfriend's house, and then you're racing home. It also brought up, well, me and a couple of the guys grew up Christian.

And so I think there's also like, you know, a healthy dose of, like, religious guilt that you'd feel doing those things and feeling like these sins you've committed are somehow like the seventh sign of the apocalypse. Might as well be the seventh sign. And it's like kind of starting to question faith, trying to feel less burdened by shame, feeling more free. So those are my original. scratch vocals for the demo. Historically in our band, Taylor, Ryan, myself, we write the songs. And Kelsey will sing the songs that he brings to the table.

And same with Taylor. He'll sing the songs that he writes. And then between the three of us, we'll figure out who will sing the song that Ryan writes. But for Dark Days, I just wanted to try to sing something in a lower register. And I tried my hand singing the song. These are Kelsey's vocals for the finished version of the song. Poor Kelsey had to deal with me when it came time to singing the song. I was just coaching him to an insane degree where I think he really didn't like me that day. I just kept asking him to sing it softer and softer and softer.

because I wanted it to reflect the feeling that I had from the demo. It is hard to thread the needle for. It is hard to thread the needle for what's in somebody's head. It's definitely not my first instinct to sing very softly. Racing home from her house. Looking out for black and white dark day. In the summer We don't usually do background vocals

in the classic sense of just doing pads but we thought we would just try something different and so yeah that's me and Taylor who would go sand in hand with fear for the afterlife one of the most fun parts is when we do vocal harmonies the three of us have been singing together since we're 15 By that point, obviously I'd had the song for so long I think I was holding on to it tightly

I was like I don't want anyone to mess with it I still even wanted the drum machine from my demo and it was like, whoa, how about we try to recreate something that sounds like a drum machine? I think we crammed into a closet and had so many blankets up everywhere to create the deadest sound possible. And then I think another piece of the puzzle too was again trying to get everyone on board with this song

Maybe it was a bit of politicking, but I was like you know it'd be cool as if we had a duet It did work I was excited by the duet idea yeah that that seemed really cool just something we'd never done And it did feel perfect for this song I thought it almost felt like two partners talking about this romantic story you know and it felt like having a female voice to counterpart with Kelsey's voice would just heighten the song. Then that kind of kicked off a fun part, which was like, okay, who could sing this song? For whatever reason, the cardigans popped into my head. The cardigans are a Swedish band who had a big hit in the 90s with their song Love Fool.

The band's lead singer, Nina Pearson, has also released two solo albums. I'd always loved Nina's voice. It's just this perfect combo of like, relaxed, nonchalant yet so confident and beautiful. Obviously everyone knows like love fool. So there's that maybe nostalgic pull towards it too reminding me of kind of like growing up. And so if we're making a list of you know, wild ideas like she would be at the top of it. We basically were just hoping that through the channels of maybe our label or somebody, our management could reach out and get a message to her. And so we kind of just put it out into the ether and hoped it would come back. But unfortunately, we didn't really hear anything for a minute.

We were basically about to go to London to mix the album. And we still didn't have the duet. So just decided to take matters into my own hands and just emailed her completely cold call, wrote like a long letter saying what the song meant to us and how much it would mean to us if she could sing on it. it. And thankfully, Nina said yes. And so that kind of kicked off her recording it and sending us takes like back and forth from her place in Sweden. We got this like really great performance from her. Like I love the way she

pronounces certain words. Like the way she says corner like is so great. It's like sensual. It's just so cool sounding to me. Dark days in the summer, in the rain, the water's finition. We slotted those vocals in the day before mixing it. It was really the last second possible. Thankfully, Dark Days ended up making the record and, you know, it was never a single. But we did start playing it live. And yeah, our fans started to respond to it.

And we just loved having guest singers come and sing Dark Days with us. But it never got like its moment. And yet it's our number one streaming song. So the song had been out for about five years. And in March 2020, we got asked to perform live on Jimmy Kimmel. And so we decided to play Dark Days. Yeah, I think maybe this was just a way of us trying to like say thank you to Dark Days and, you know, give it like at least a little bit of a proper presentation and give it a little bit of a spotlight.

And we asked our label mate and new friend Amelia Meath from Silvan Esso to come and sing the duet part with us. My name is Amelia Meath and I am a songwriter and singer and producer in the band Sylvan Esso. When we met up, she basically was like, I have an idea for some new lyrics and a new kind of melody. And to be totally honest, I was kind of like, wait, wait, what? I found that in general, if I sing things that I write, it's just much easier to get a better performance out of it because I know where the words are coming from.

Her and I ended up talking on the phone, and I explained kind of my headspace and where the song came from. And she basically had a lot of images in her head of similar things. I started identifying the song as like a discovery of sensuality and talking about those early summers when all of the sexy feelings are new and there's so much to discover and so much to feel that it's completely overwhelming and also really exciting and fun. I just felt like the song was in really safe hands.

For me so many of my early flirtatious moments where I in the ocean or in the pool, getting to be near somebody who I thought was cool and smart, which is why I wanted to add the part about swimming in a pool. Listening to it now, like, I just love her lyrics and I love her take on it. Dark Days, for me, in a lot of ways, was a big turning point. I think it gave me just a lot of confidence. I knew what I wanted the song to feel like, but I also knew what I wanted it to sound like.

having it become the song that it's become pushed me on in a lot of ways to keep experimenting and growing as a producer. Dark Days is also a turning point for how local natives operates. Prior to this, we had this very strong feeling that if all three of us didn't touch everything, then it didn't count in some way. But we really learned how to trust in each other.

And that's just shifted. I think our entire dynamic. based really off of this song. Now when we play it live, in lieu of finding someone to sing the duet part, we just have Ryan sing the second verse. It's become this moment that I think our fans really enjoy because he sings lead much more rarely than Taylor Array.

So then when he sings, our fans, it feels almost like the Beatles are on stage or something, and everyone starts screaming. A lot of times I just start laughing. A lot of times I just start laughing. like while I'm singing because everyone's kind of screaming, but it's a really sweet moment in the set. Coming up, you'll hear how all these ideas and elements came together in the full song. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th.

It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh, Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists. And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April.

and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In The Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now.

You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishi-kesh.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. And now here's Dark Days by Local Natives, featuring Nina Pearson in its entirety. You'll find links to buy or stream both versions of Dark Days, and you can watch the music video. You'll also find links for the new 2023 Local Natives album. If you like this episode, and you want to listen to another one, try Silvanesso's episode from way back in July 2015. You can hear more from Amelia Meath and her bandmate, Nick Sandborn.

You'll find that and all the other episodes of the podcast at songexploder.net, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This episode was produced by me, Craig Ely, Kathleen Smith, and Mary Dolan. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. You can follow me on Instagram, and I guess on threads now, at Rishi Herway, and you can follow the show on Instagram at Song Exploerator.

You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at Songexploader.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.