Nomenclature is the manner in which names are assigned. We collect names and titles and then we reveal the story behind that name.

Usually the names that stick, you don’t really have to think of, they just come. I usually find the meaning afterwards, which is the case for Native Speaker.

I was lying in my bed and I remember hearing the words sing themselves in my head. I wrote it down in the journal I keep next to my bed and circled it a couple of times in pink crayon. I didn’t revisit that scribble until we had decided we wanted to change our band name from The Neighbourhood Council. I suggested Native Speaker and we all thought that it sounded more like an album. Again the name was stored away in some forgotten place. A few months later I was riding the metro. At that time I was developing a very deep love for another, a love that I didn’t know what to do with or how to describe. I tried writing as quickly as I could before my next stop. Before I got off the train and after lines of love confessions I wrote, ‘you are my Native Speaker, it’s fine.’ To me at that moment Native Speaker meant the person with whom I felt could best understand me, who could ‘speak’ the same language as me. It references ones ‘Native’ tongue, their ‘Native’ language, replacing language with the feeling you have when you love someone very deeply.

It just seemed to make sense to call the album Native Speaker, for the language that allows the four of us to thoroughly understand one another is music.

- Raphaelle Strandell-Preston (guitarist/lead vocals) of Braids

Read A Song & A Memory: Raphaelle Strandell-Preston