Co-founder Kelcey Ayer on how the band got 4.9 million SoundCloud followers, one creative experiment at a time.
Welcome to Sound Advice, the weekly interview series spotlighting artists’ creative process and their SoundCloud journey. We’ll get the inside knowledge straight from the source on how musicians, producers and creatives are leaning into the many facets of Next Pro to reach their audience and grow their careers.
Over the course of six albums, Los Angeles-based indie rock band Local Natives have shown they’re open-minded about their sound and style. Sometimes they lean more towards the traditional alt-rock stylings of contemporaries like The National, Vampire Weekend and Grizzly Bear; in other moments, they embrace a more electronic pop sound or blast through with bursts of noise rock. When we linked up with co-founder Kelcey Ayer to talk about the group’s most recent album, ‘But I’ll Wait for You,’ he informed us that the band isn’t “precious” with the work they create. Whether offering stems for free to fans, laying bare the demo and mixing process on SoundCloud, or collaborating with producers, filmmakers and a ton of remixers (including Foals, Tiger & Woods and Sofi Tukker), Local Natives have tried out some unique creative endeavors that have gone on to net them a substantial fanbase.
In Part 2 of our interview with Kelcey, we talk about the ways Local Natives have used SoundCloud since 2009, their favorite things about the platform and the inspiration behind the short film that accompanies their latest album. (And if you missed Part 1, where we talk extensively about Local Natives’ studio process and their new record, you can go back and read it here.)
You have 4.9 million followers on SoundCloud. When did you start on the platform and how have you grown such a huge fanbase?
Ever since our first record in 2009, we’ve loved SoundCloud. We love how creative you can be and how it’s so easy to express yourself on SoundCloud. You’re just uploading sounds and you don’t have to deal with any BS. From the first record, we were always really into electronic music and remixes. We thought how fun it would be to just give our stems out to everyone and be like, ‘Go nuts and create something.’ The response was overwhelming and we got so many rad remixes from doing that. Since then, we’ve put up the stems to almost all of our records, and grown that community. We’re not precious about our stuff and we’re excited to hear it turned into something else. And it’s also led to a huge following, which is super awesome.
Learn more about the First Fans feature on SoundCloud.
Did any collaborations or proper releases come out of doing all these remixes and sharing stems?
We got so many remixes that it’s hard to remember but there was an artist named bretonLABS that did a remix for “Who Knows Who Cares” back when we put out ‘Gorilla Manor,’ and we were all really excited about that. We got Sofi Tukker to do a remix of “Dark Days” just before they blew up like crazy, and they’ve come on and done the song with us live at different festivals. It just feels like remixes really get the pot stirring and get people talking to each other, so that’s been awesome.
One thing SoundCloud listeners really seem to respond to is when artists offer versions of their songs in different styles, such as acoustic, sped up or demo versions.
It’s cool you bring that up because we had so much fun doing this thing on SoundCloud that I don’t think we could have done anywhere else. We decided to put up 25 different mixes of the song “When Am I Gonna Lose You” off our album ‘Violet Street’ so fans could see the evolution from the bare bones mix all the way to mix 25, which is the final version that you hear on the radio. I feel like people got a kick out of seeing certain things come in and certain things disappear, EQ changes and lyrical changes. I felt from the audience on SoundCloud that they liked being involved in the process.
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Are there any other things you’ve done on SoundCloud that you wouldn’t find yourself doing on other platforms?
The other streaming services are these marketplaces where it’s like you’re in a record store and you’re just looking at the final product. I feel like on SoundCloud, you’re looking under the hood and seeing how things are made. You’re seeing all these extra things and it helps build a community around what it’s like to create something – that is a really fun, unique thing about SoundCloud.
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We’ve talked about so many different creative things you’ve done over your lifetime as a band and I wanted to ask about the short film you’ve made around this most recent record. How did you come up with it?
Jonathan Chu is a filmmaker who is also a musician; he used to play in bands when we were coming up. He made the music video for our song “Tap Dancer”, off our album ‘Violet Street,’ and then the music video for “NYE” off the record that came out last year. He’s always been a friend and a great collaborator and someone where we really trust his aesthetic eye and his sense of humor. [When coming up with the concept,] we were all thinking about the “Who Is Harry Nilsson?” documentary that has footage of Harry Nilsson from the 1970s playing a bunch of songs on the piano and showing multiple versions of himself doing funny skits with weird, awkward moments; plus, he made this concert film. The idea is basically trying to show the creative process of making a record but in an abstract form. It’s a scary thing to put yourself out there in that way. It’s already scary making the music and then acting in some weird, abstract version of your album is also weird and scary. I’m excited for people to see this side of us.
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It strikes me that so many of the things you’ve done as a band over the years could be considered “scary” in the way you’ve put yourself out there. Bands and artists can be reluctant to reveal the inner workings of their process or can be wary of a large level of collaboration or fan involvement.
After doing this for this long, it’s so much more fun and fulfilling to achieve things with other people and there’s so many amazingly talented people out there in the world who just want to be creative and make cool shit with you. So let’s let them and let’s have fun doing it. Maybe the result is not the most groundbreaking thing or the best thing in your career, but it’s a really fun way to express yourself. I think it’s a trope but the older you get, the more you don’t give a shit what people say and what people think – I feel like that’s a good place to be because you can’t control that and [your artistic career] can’t just be about that. That’s been a lesson I keep learning: let’s just make things and let’s be happy about the journey. Whatever we come up with, let’s be proud of what we did; and let other people decide what's good or bad. It’s just not up to us.
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