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 Rishikesh Herway.

It can be hard to be in a band,

but 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 Eyre 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 Persson, who is in the band The Cardigans.

In 2020, they put out a new version of the song featuring Amelia Meef from the band Sylvan S.O.

I talked to the guys here in the studio and to Amelia Meef 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 and play guitar.

My name is Kelsey Eyre 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, a loan time and I hadn't had a lot of that for a long time.

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