The Naked and Famous' Alisa Xayalith on Creating with the Acoustic Guitar

Through three albums and a decade together as a band, New Zealand-bred, Los Angeles-based outfit the Naked and Famous have become known for adrenaline-inducing songs that astutely straddle the line between rock and synth-pop.

Over the years, their hits have become ubiquitous anthems, from “Punching in a Dream” and “Young Blood” off 2010’s Passive Me, Aggressive You to the 2016 Simple Forms gem “Higher.”

Now, as the Naked and Famous prepares their upcoming yet-untitled “LP4,” they are offering fans the chance to see and hear them in a completely different manner with A Still Heart, a stripped-down collection of previous favorites.

Already, TNAF has released new versions of “Higher” and “Punching in a Dream,” with more to come in early 2018, coinciding with a slew of tour dates.

The project started when singer/keyboardist Alisa Xayalith and guitarist Thom Powers got back to L.A. after a lengthy tour in support of Simple Forms and set about recording some of the group’s classics.

“We started playing a few songs acoustically for the first time (in 2016)” Xayalith said. “It was an amazing feeling to explore the songs in this way. We weren’t capable or confident enough to perform like this when we began the band, but I think after all this time we finally feel comfortable.”

While Xayalith will be performing the A Still Heart tracks alongside her bandmates on the road in 2018, she recently offered a taste of what’s to come with an acoustic solo version of “Last Forever,” shot exclusively by Fender in her L.A. rehearsal space.

In addition, Xayalith took some time to discuss her songwriting process and how the guitar fits into it. Read the interview below.

“When I was 13 years old, that's the first time I picked up an acoustic guitar.”

“It was this Dreadnought. The body was fat, too big for me. It was almost like the equivalent of when you learn to ride a bike. Kids often end up learning to ride on bikes that are too big for them. I remember learning just chords and sitting there for hours determined to play chords without pausing. I remember the callouses and how like red throbbing my fingertips were. There's no way to avoid that pain of learning how to play an acoustic guitar. It's like a rite of passage. You just have to build up the callouses, build up the skills.”

“When I pick up the guitar, sometimes I can just peck for ages and I go into this trance-like state and hours go by. I love that feeling.”

“Nothing else in this world kind of gives me that feeling. The guitar is a great way for me to work through things. You know, if in doubt, play it out. It's a form of therapy. It's a form of creative catharsis. It's a form of just creating something out of nothing, and the guitar is there to help me do that.”

“The guitar is something that helps me really get to know the piece of music I'm creating.”

“If a song gets brought to me, if it's like a little loop made on a laptop with a couple of chords, I'll listen to it and then I'll translate that into chords on a guitar. That really helps me get inside the notes and the melodies I want to write. It's a very, very important part of my process because it helps me get to know what I'm writing for. It's the most immediate instrument that I can have in my hands and just hum and strum away.”

“Using the guitar, it's almost like a litmus test to see if the song stands on its own.”

“You often forget where a song started. There's this one song on our first record called, ‘Punching a Dream,’ and I remember writing the chorus on the guitar and it was way more folky. If you listen to the recording, I'm like yelling from the rafters. I sound like Cindy Lauper, and it's just completely different. Production's incredible like that because you can really transform a song into anything you want it to be so long as long as the bones of the song are strong on their own.”

“Only recently have I started playing guitar live, and I am realizing just how empowering that is as a woman on stage playing guitar … just feeling untouchable in a way.”

“I haven't always been the most confident player, so when I write something and when I write chord progression, I'm going to write a song and then hand it over and see someone else play it so much better than I could. It makes me feel pretty proud that, ‘Oh, that came from me.’”

For more information on the Naked and Famous, including a list of tour dates, visit their official website.