Native

Native have only been around for three years, but they’ve already developed a name for themselves with their unique blend of hardcore music and an indie aesthetic. Inforty’s own Matt Sokol teamed up with Jon Scranton of the college radio station WHNU to interview the band in Boston during their ongoing tour with This Town Needs Guns. 

Q: Let’s go around and introduce ourselves.

Ed: My name’s Ed and I play guitar.
Bobby: I’m Bobby, I play bass and do some vocals.
Nick: I’m Nick, I play drums.
Dan: I’m Dan, I play guitar.

Q: Where are you guys from and how long have you been playing together?

Ed: We’re from a town in northeast Indiana called El Porrazo. We’ve been playing together for almost three years as Native.

Q: What are some of your major influences as far as other bands out there?

Dan: One of my favorite guitarists of all time is Kaki King. I would really enjoy to – not in a weird way – just to hang out with her, just to see what she does. A day in the life. So if you’re listening – hey, my name’s Dan.

Ed: This Town Needs Guns – it’s really a pleasure to be touring with them right now.

Bobby: I would say they’re an influence, we listened to them even before we ever met them and we had their album Animals and listened to that quite a bit at home so it’s pretty cool to be out on the road with them now.

Dan: It was cool because we saw them in a record shop, in an in-store, they did an acoustic set and it was really cool to see that. Just to see them as humans moreso than superhuman music making machines. It’s cool to see how it’s broken down and see some thought process behind the music you can recognize and stuff like that.

Q: You came out with the most recent album Wrestling Moves last year right, ’09?

Bobby: Well, it technically came out in January but we’ve had it for over a year now so it’s been way too long. We finished writing that in April and went and recorded it the day after we finished it which was really good timing on our part, and then it was in our hands pressed and everything in October and we just kinda sold it at shows locally for a while and then it officially came out in January like we said.

Q: Can you describe how you worked out that album, how you put it together and all that? As far as production and writing?

Ed: We kind of tortured ourselves to write that album, we just locked ourselves in Dan’s parents’ basement and wrote it over the course of about three months.

Dan: Our writing process is kind of interesting, but nothing new to anybody. It’s write a song and then scrap it and rewrite it… and then maybe take one of those parts from the two versions that you have and then rewrite that and then make it backwards and then rewrite it, and then rewrite it, and then scrap everything again and rewrite it. So that’s kind of our writing process, so it was a long process of that. So that ten times. So we got down to the wire eventually.

Bobby: We probably wrote 25 songs for Wrestling Moves, we only kept ten of them. It’s because we weren’t very happy with a lot of it. So it was a pretty extensive process, writing it.

Q: Are you working on anything new for an upcoming album? That just came out a few months ago.

Ed: We’re not writing so much in the sense of writing for an album, we’re just trying to write new songs in order to stay fresh for us.

Dan: Write things that represent us now, moreso than it did a year ago or a year and a half ago. I mean the oldest song on that CD, the first song we wrote for that album was Legoland, and that was written the summer after we were a band, so it’s old compared to the other ones. So what we’re doing now is just essentially taking our process of rewriting rewriting rewriting and applying that to now so that it makes sense and everything.

Q: What’s the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to you at a show?

Bobby: The first time we went to Canada in October of 2008, we played the major cities Ontario and Montreal, and then we needed a show between Toronto and Montreal so the band that we were going on tour with met some girl who threw together a show in Napanee Ontario which was the hometown of Avril Lavigne, and I think actually a lot of her high school classmates were there. They were all “oh we’re so proud of her” and everything but really it was just the backwoods of Ontario.

Ed: I don’t remember them being proud of her.

Bobby: No, I remember they said that they were proud of her.

Ed: I heard a lot of horrible things about her.

Bobby: Well yeah, they said a lot of horrible things about her too but they said they were proud of her and her music or whatever. The house was on a hill and then in the back it was just like a huge backyard and they had built a stage but the stage was one level and then where the drummer would sit was like ten feet above the rest of it.

Ed: The stage was bricks and piles of rocks with plywood on top of it. That was the stage.

Bobby: We were pretty much ready to leave when we got there but we saw that they had put the trouble into building that stage so we thought we should play so us and the band that we were on tour with were gonna play two songs each. When we were setting up the guy who was running the show was super drunk and he was singing Journey karaoke through the PA system and he ended up stepping on Dan’s glasses and smashing them on the stage. It was just a disaster.

Dan: Don’t forget the bonfire.

Bobby: Oh, they started this huge bonfire and it was so big that the Napanee fire department came and put it out five minutes into the bonfire, it was huge. It was like as tall as the house.

Dan: They lit it and then the fire department put it out. It was insane.

Bobby: Yeah, so that was pretty extreme. And then we seriously played and then left. We got out of there as soon as we could. I guess a bunch of fights broke out after we left. Our friend was watching us that was in the other band and the mom of the dude that was running the show was like hitting on him or something and then the dude wanted to fight Derryl, it was ridiculous.

Q: So how did this tour come about, with This Town Needs Guns?

Ed: That was more set up, because we didn’t actually know this Town Needs Guns until they got here, it was more set up by Sargent House and they wanted This Town Needs Guns to come over and they thought it would be a good match for us to go out with them and it has been, it’s been actually a really great match. Kids that are coming to see them will watch us and vice versa, and I think people really appreciate and have a good time watching both of us, so it’s been a really awesome time thus far, really awesome dudes.

Bobby: Not to mention we have very comparable senses of humor, which is really nice. We weren’t really sure what to expect but there were a couple lines early on in the tour that a couple of them said that were like wow that’s something we would say. So that’s pretty entertaining thus far.

Matt: How did the whole Sargent House thing come about? How did you get involved with that label?

Ed: I guess it was weird, Sargent House doesn’t take submissions so it was always a label that even when I was in high school a lot of bands that I liked were on it and it was always something kind of cool that I kept up with. Randomly one day they messaged us on myspace saying that they thought we were cool and just wanted a demo. I guess we released something on Big Scary Monsters in the UK and they work with Sargent House or they kept in touch and Kev told Cathy about us and she heard about us so she wanted a demo. We sent her one and she was really cool about it so we kept in touch with them and then over time she just said “fuck it, let’s work together” and we’ve been working with them ever since. It’s been pretty cool.

Bobby: Ironically enough I think Kev was on the phone with Cathy about This Town Needs Guns when he first told her, he’s just like have you heard of Native from Indiana and I think when she checked out our myspace the first thing she said was oh they’re very young, or something like that. She’s been very cool to us ever since.