He Is We

Rachel Taylor crafts luminous, finely textured indie pop as He Is We, frequently marked by emotional elevation and themes rooted in faith. She initially launched the project as a duo alongside guitarist Trevor Kelly, achieving notable early success with their 2010 debut album My Forever. Following a 2012 follow-up release, Kelly exited, prompting Taylor to pursue work both independently and under the She Is We name. The pair later reconvened for several EPs in the late 2010s, yet by the arrival of the 2022 album Treehouse, He Is We had reverted to a solo vehicle for Taylor, who issued the single “I Wouldn't Mind” two years afterward.

Taylor and Kelly established the band after forming a friendship during their shared employment at a music equipment store in Tacoma, Washington, in the late 2000s. They cultivated an audience through social networking platforms, generating sufficient national attention by late 2009 to draw interest from multiple labels. After self-releasing a demo collection in February 2010, He Is We signed with Universal Motown; their first official full-length, My Forever, appeared that November, and the duo promoted it on a fall tour alongside the Rocket Summer. The album reached number six on the Billboard Heatseekers albums chart, leading the band to release two EPs in 2011—Acoustic/Live and Skip to the Good Part—to sustain momentum. Taylor received a diagnosis of ankylosing spondylitis in 2012 and could not tour; that August, Trevor Kelly formally departed, leaving Taylor, newly back onstage, as the group’s only member.

In 2014 Taylor ventured out solo with the EP Come Alive, followed in 2015 by the single “Boomerang” under the She Is We moniker and the full-length War the next year. She and Kelly rejoined under the He Is We banner for concerts in 2016, issuing the collection Fall Out of Line in 2017 that gathered earlier demos and reissued tracks. Two additional EPs arrived rapidly—He Is We: Chapter One in 2017 and Hold My Heart in 2018—with Kelly’s role largely confined to studio contributions. Entering the 2020s the project remained essentially Taylor’s alone, culminating in the official second album Treehouse in 2022. The reflective acoustic single “I Wouldn't Mind” surfaced in early 2024.