Sunlit Youth was recorded all around the world, in Thailand, Malaysia, Ojai, and Nicaragua. Why?

RYAN: We tried to shake things up a lot when we were working on the record, and wanted to see what would happen if we were writing in different environments and locations.



TAYLOR: Thailand and Nicaragua are especially interesting because they book-ended writing for us. Thailand was the first big trip, at the end of 2014, and kicked off a lot of the record, and was the first time the songs were really starting to come together. Nicaragua was at the very end of writing. This whole writing process has been an evolution for us, to chase the excitement of writing music, and connecting to that kind of “pure essence” of finding something inspiring, and pushing ourselves outside of what writing songs as Local Natives has been in the past.

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In Nicaragua, we wrote about ten songs in about eight days. It used to take maybe six months to do something like that. It was just follow the inspiration, and follow the joy of making music together. If something wasn’t working, we moved on, and that process helped this explosion of prolific creativity, where we wrote more like 50 songs for this album, instead of in the past where we had done maybe 18. And Nicaragua was probably the least hard that we worked: it was a casual environment and atmosphere. You just wake up and go to the beach, and just enjoy being in this place, and then you can focus on writing some music in the afternoon.



RYAN: We would record as we went more, too. I can point to a bunch of songs on the album that are like, “Oh, the guitar track is from our rehearsal space, but the drums are from Thailand. This vocal was sung into an iPhone in our hotel room,” or whatever. It’s just all pieced together from all these trips, and for us that’s new. Rather than just slogging it out in our rehearsal space, we were able to take from everywhere.