Jaws of Love.
interview by Liz Watts | November 2022
Jaws of Love is the solo project of Colombian-American recording artist Kelcey Ayer, co-lead vocalist and co-founder of renowned Los Angeles indie-rock outfit Local Natives. Now stepping into a more experimental realm with his solo material, Jaws Of Love see’s Kelcey deliver emotional, thoughtful soundscapes decorated with inventive production and delicate, intriguing instrumentation.
Having released his debut Jaws Of Love album, Tasha Sits Close to the Piano, in 2017 to critical praise from outlets including Paste, Stereogum, Billboard and Noisey, the solo artist now returns with the visceral sophomore album ‘Second Life.’
Album Release Day, November 11, 2022.
HPM: How's day one of the release? Are you nervous? Are you relieved?
Kelcey: I'm relieved. I feel like I've been sitting on this album forever and I'm so, so excited for it to be out there and do its thing and make its way into the hearts and minds of the people.
The people!
Yeah. I'm excited for it, for it to be out there. I feel relief and excitement, basically.
When did you write this album? I know you released the Patricia EP earlier this year about your mom who passed.
So actually I wrote and made all the music from the EP and the recorded at the same time.
Really?
Yeah, over the pandemic. You know, we all had to take a back seat to the world stopping and we had to figure out what we were going to do and it just ended up being a very productive time for me. I wrote a ton of new music that felt better served if it was split into two different releases. So there was stuff more leaning on the past, on my mother who passed away eleven years ago, and my Colombian identity as a mixed-race person. I was kind of having all these epiphanies over the pandemic about my identity and what it means to be a mixed race and the difference between being white or being white passing and yeah, it just made me really think about my upbringing and my past and my parents. And then I had all this stuff kind of looking towards the future with trying to become a parent myself. All that material kind of sorted itself into this new album, Second Life.
That's beautiful. I absolutely love the album- literally, tears streaming down my face hearing the first listen on SoundCloud!
Oh, wow.
I also love that with both your music and social media, you are so open. When you and Mel were going through one of the most difficult times of your lives, was writing music your kind of go-to way to process and grieve? Did it feel different sharing a vulnerable experience when it included Mel and what you went through as a couple as opposed to a more personal experience like the passing of your mom?
Yeah. As you said, I'm a very open book. And I'm sure it does maybe feel easy to get to know me on social media because I am just a very open person on those platforms. And as a songwriter and artist, if you take all those things together, you get a pretty clear picture of who I am. And I always use whatever happens in my life to inspire my songwriting and my art. The bigger the impact on my life, the more it will be channeled through my art, because that is how I feel very grateful that I have the ability to channel these really hard things that life throws at you through music and through art. I definitely feel grateful for that. But this was a new kind of a new frontier for me, where it's truly a new level of despair and pain and just a new level of hardship that I had to go through with my wife.
This time around, writing about that, it felt really necessary to have lots of conversations with her and get her blessing for me not to tell her story, but to share our story and my side of it, my perspective, which is the only perspective I can share. We talked so much more about these songs and this material than any other material before. Usually, I go off into a studio and work on my own stuff and I show Mel at the end of the day and Mel's like, "oh, cool!" But this time around, it felt like I needed to get her involved and just make sure I was honoring her and our story and what we went through. So that was definitely a lot different, but really amazing too, because in a way, it brought us closer and it brought her into the fold, more into the making of the album. And then we ended up making some music videos together, co-directing them together. That's been so fun. We did like the Five Years video together and 'Rainbow Baby' video together. And I just made one for 'The Heist.' I was in The Hague, Netherlands for a festival, Jaws of Love's first festival. That was awesome. Yeah, it was me, Mark Nieto, who goes by Combat, and then Danny Reich, who co- produced and engineered and mixed the whole record. Mel found, through her production prowess, this Ferris wheel that we based the whole music video around. So she kind of was there in spirit helping guide the camera in a way. This album, all this new music, this new phase of Jaws of Love has definitely felt like I had Danny in one corner and then I also had Mel in another, championing me and helping me make this stuff happen.
Apart from this album being an entirely, kind of new level of personal, does it feel different to be writing these kinds of things than to be riding collaboratively with everyone else in Local Natives? Do you feel like this is just more you? Or have these songs been kind of like sitting while all of these other Local Native things are unfolding over the years?
That's kind of how the first record was. Half of that record were songs that I tried to make work for Local Natives that didn't work out. And then the other half were these little ideas that I had collected over the years that I formed into the songs. But that record was made in little breaks of time here or there. Typically for Local Natives albums, it takes a long time, and it's a lot of work because it's five people really working hard to come together to find a unique vision and find a unique voice altogether. The first Jaws of Love record was more on the outskirts of something.
That makes sense! I know the first record kind of felt like I was listening in on songs that were taken out of a voice memo archive- still very put together and whole, but so personal.
Yes, I love that album and I'm super proud of it, but it wasn't the way that I would prefer to make an album. It was kind of an experiment to see if I could make an album because I'd never done anything by myself before. The experience was amazing and I felt really emboldened and really excited that this could be a reality for me, to have this outlet and to be able to make albums by myself outside of Local Natives and be able to not be solely defined as the output that I have in local Natives, which I'm very proud of.
But it is a distillation of five different people to make something new. You just have to approach songs with them in a very open way, like "this is the idea I have, but I know it's going to change and go in a million different directions" and you have to be at peace with that. You have to be okay with that, knowing that whatever it turns into is going to be something that is great and that you're excited about, but it's going to be through this machine, it's going to be through this different winding river that it goes through. But then for Jaws of Love, I get to really dive deep into my own vision for something and do all the same work that I do with Local Natives, but just by myself, which feels very freeing and very gratifying.
It feels like I can really put my own stamp on things. With this new record, with this new batch of songs, I got to finally spend the time and attention and give it all the love and care that I wanted to because we got all this time afforded to us, for better or for worse, because of what happened, because of COVID. With Danny's help, this new stuff and this new record is, I think, the record I've always wanted to make. I'm just so proud of it.
I love that. With Local Natives music, obviously, there are so many different inputs that have to be considered. When you were writing Second Life, did the tracks come to you in a more completed or finished form? Or were the songs constantly evolving and having major changes from the first time you got the song out to the final version?
Yeah, I mean, it's such a huge mix of things. And have been making records for many, many years now, I've learned to keep space open for things to change. Once you've done it for a long time, you can recognize, "oh, this is a great thing, and should hold on to this thing." Or you can recognize that this thing needs help. This thing needs to change. In A, B or C ways, everything was different. I wrote a ton of stuff in 2020 and did a bunch of experimenting in my studio, a lot of which, like, came into songs like 'Five Years' or 'Angelica'. Those were the earliest ones, '100 Years' as well. But I had all these other songs kind of written, just me and my piano or guitar. I went out to Lockhart, Texas, where Danny's studio was. He since moved here to LA which is awesome because I'm here, we have to be close. He had this studio called "Good Danny's". It's still there in Lockhart, and he still runs it. Lockhart is 30 minutes south of Austin. It's a sleepy little barbecue town and he has a house there. The whole house is just like a full studio. Every room. There's like a synth room and a vocal vibraphone room. There's like a drum room and a big control room in the middle with a bunch of pianos. And then there's a room that you can sleep in. I slept there for like a week straight. And we came up with basically the bed of the record in a week. And I don't know if you can relate, but when you start talking with someone or you're working with someone and you just feel like you're clicking and you're just locked up and you're like, "oh my God! We were supposed to meet our whole lives, like, what's going on?" And that's what it felt when we started working together. So after that week, we had so much amazing material to build off of. That was like March 2021 and then we started just building over the year and got the final version of all these songs mixed late last year. And then I did a couple of little tweaks over the summer. But yeah, they all kind of changed in different ways. With 'Rainbow Baby,' I had just the lyrics and piano and we built that song in a day and that basically didn't change.
Wow.
So that came together really fast. And then something like “Staple Gun,” I had a chord progression and like a beat on my drum machine app on my phone. And it was funny. Danny had just gotten the vaccine because they had just come out. This is like March 2021. So he went to get the vaccine and then he came back and he started having a fever and being sick, but he was working on stuff and he was just like sick and then throwing things through these crazy outboard gear stereo things that were like circling synths and stuff. And he was just like descending into madness and I was just there. We're just like messing with the sounds and stuff. And I'm just kind of watching this guy slowly lose his mind. I think it really benefited the song. I'm so glad he got the vaccine that day. I love him. Yeah, but everything was just slowly worked on Sculpted, adding like, this guy Daniel Hart, who did all this violin work on 1000 Years and Staple Gun. And then I tried to get some other singers to sing on stuff, and then I got Amitola to sing with me on “Guarded Prisoner.” She's a new friend who is an amazingly talented vocalist here in La. She's working on her own stuff right now and I'm so stoked I got to get her to sing with me. And then one of my best friends from high school just started putting out music over the last few years. I produced one of his songs that came out beginning of 2021 or something, but his name is Adam Olivieri and he just harmonizes with me on Tarot cards. It's like the middle of the record, just kind of like I said, with local native stuff, we give it the time and care and attention to really organically grow in its own time into the record it's supposed to be. And I finally got to do that with the Jaws of Love record and it feels incredible.
With all of the collaborating that you did, do you feel like you love the album more because you got to work with people who helped make your vision come to life? Or does it feel kind of weird doing such a personal thing with other people included when you have the capability of producing a record by yourself?
Yeah, I mean, the longer I do this, the more I realize how beneficial collaboration is. I obviously know this from Local natives, but there are so many talented people in the world and yes, you can totally go it alone, but there has been so many contributions to this record that have elevated it so much. I think there's no point in trying to do everything yourself when you can have all these amazingly talented people touch the album in ways you never could have expected and it just widens the scope and it just adds, like, so many new colors that you can't do yourself. I get what you're saying with how personal the songs are, and like we've been talking about, I'm kind of an open book and I'm very open with anyone I talk to or anyone I work with. And so it feels like a comfortable environment that doesn't feel too, like, stepping on anybody's toes or something. And thankfully, I'm not working with any assholes and everyone's cool. I have a no asshole policy.
I absolutely love that! What's next with Jaws of Love? How did your residency go? Do you have plans to tour? Or are you letting these things kind of come to you and you'll feel it out with baby coming?
Yeah, the residency was amazing. That was such a fun experience. I feel connected to Los Angeles in doing so. It feels so good. So we have this baby coming in January and then Local Natives is going to start doing a ton of stuff next year. And for Jaws of Love, I just want to get this album out there and see how the world receives it and just take a beat and see what's possible. I would love to tour the record and tour the country, but the timing just needs to be right and I feel like I definitely want to now, having a son. Fingers crossed that everything goes well. Hopefully in early 2023. I just want to do things all in service of being like, a good parent.
You have good dad vibes, for sure!
Okay, cool. Like, cool dad vibes or dorky dad vibes?
I was actually explaining to someone that we had this interview coming up and I was like, "I love him, but I'm not nervous because he gives me, like, fun uncle/brother-in-law vibes."
Right? Yeah, I see that. Yes, a fun uncle-dad for sure.
I think that you can see all of that through how passionate you were about this project and how you translated your experience into a work of art.
Right, thank you. Yeah, I would love to tour this thing. I just want to go out and really make sure people can come out and that the demand is there. It feels right to do it. We'll see. I don't know. I just want to be open and whatever happens, it is going to be the right thing.
Yeah, that's a good mindset for everything. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me and for sharing your joy and your sadness and your life with us through your music. And congratulations again on the release of the album! I hope you have an amazing rest of the day and that everyone just showers you with love.
Thank you so much, Liz.