Gabriel
::
Native Speaker is your first album. Considering you haven’t released much music prior to this, how do you react to the amount of press and hype you’re getting now? Does it fell rushed or did everything come together organically?
Austin
::
I think it grew very organically. We’ve been a band for four years now and we are just releasing our first full length. That’s a pretty steady growth. But yes, the amount of press is a little overwhelming. Lots of interviews and lots of business stuff we have to deal with, but it’s all a part of the process. I wouldn’t say overwhelming… It’s sort of exciting.
Gabriel
::
Don’t you feel like you’ve had nothing released and then suddenly you have a big monster in your hands?
Austin
::
It’s not a big monster, it’s just our first record.
Gabriel
::
Your songs are so complex. I’m curious to know about your writing process.
Austin
::
Everything is composed collectively.
Katie
::
Someone usually comes up with an idea, which could be a sound, or a riff, or a specific emotion and we just jam it out. But sometimes it comes on the spot too, without any thinking beforehand. Then we pick it apart, and it can take a really long time to finalize it.
Austin
::
Yeah, because everything is being created by everybody at the same time, there’s a lot of ideas being thrown out. And we try to push every idea to its full extent and see its full potential before saying yes or no to it. Unless if it’s a blatantly bad idea.
Katie
::
It’s good to let people come to a conclusion with their idea.
Austin
::
Exactly, we try to get to the point where everyone is satisfied with their own ideas and see if they keep them or discard them. Which is also why the songs are often very long and very dense. I think the reason why we write such long songs is because the writing process itself is so long. It takes us months to write a song. Because of how meticulous and careful we are about how things flow, and making sure we are capturing the right emotion. We often have to go through a lot of different parts and experiments to get that feeling.
Gabriel
::
About the actual record, can you explain the cover art and how it relates to your music ?
Katie
::
Yeah, we collaborated with our good friend
Marc Rimmer to do the
album art. He’s done a lot of our photos as well. We’ve always had problems agreeing on the art, and don’t want to have just one person in the band to do it because we are very critical with each other. So having someone else who we trust was really important to us, and we asked Marc to do our cover art. I guess it took him a bit to figure out what he exactly wanted. He played with photographs he had taken before, but then, one day in French class, he just left halfway through and bought a piece of those fluorescent light plastic coverings for offices. On his computer screen was this beautiful photo of a forest that he had taken, and he put the plastic covering in front of it and the colors came through. Marc said he liked the idea of it being textural, something that you’d want to touch and feel and how he wanted to create a flow with the colors in representing the feelings you get when listening to the album.
Austin
::
And there’s a contrast between the sticker, which is very sleek and simple, in a glossy finish with the art being a matte print. I think that separation has parallels with our music as well.
Gabriel
::
How about the name, Native Speaker?
Austin
::
Native Speaker refers to your native tongue, the language you’re most comfortable speaking. Between the four of us, our language is music. Also, “Native Speaker”, the title track of the album, deals with the conversation between two lovers, and how the connection they have through the conversation is their native language.
Austin
::
Like when you share a bond of love with somebody, it’s almost an unspoken language that you speak with the other person, where you know what each other are thinking. It’s a totally different kind of communication. It’s an exploration of communication. It expresses more than words, more than the vocabulary we’ve been given by the language.
Gabriel
::
The word “native” struck me as a link to your music, notably to the ritualistic aspect of drumming and chanting. Is that a consideration in your songs?
Austin
::
It’s not like saying, “Hey, I really like the way that native people play music” or anything like that.
Katie
::
We’re not taking it from the native culture.
Austin
::
I think a lot of that stems from our inspiration by the band Animal Collective and a lot of the tribal-esque drums that were written on their Feels record. It had a big influence on the way that I think about drums and feel rhythms and mostly realizing the energy you can get from having a tribal and raw approach.
Raphaelle
::
Yeah, it relates to the tribalness, if that’s even a word, because it is so raw and very emotive. And like how you (Austin) are always talking about being grounded or taking energy from the ground and conveying that through your parts. It’s the connectedness that we have with our surroundings and each other.
Gabriel
::
Connectedness really is a focal point for the band.
Katie
::
It’s the basis of the band for sure. If it weren’t for that, we wouldn’t be called Braids.
