The alt-rock band X Ambassadors rocks the 9:30 Club in D.C. on Tuesday, June 4. WTOP caught up with lead singer and co-founder Sam Harris to get hyped.
“We’ve played the 9:30 Club so many times, I’ve eaten so many of those delicious cupcakes, I can’t wait to come back and have some more,” Harris told WTOP. “We’re definitely sprinkling the songs in, but we’re playing a healthy amount of new stuff in the show. I’d say we’re probably doing about seven new songs every night, but the set is like almost two hours every night, so it’s got a healthy amount of the old favorites in there.”
Born in Seattle, Washington, in 1988, he mostly grew up in Ithaca, New York, where he fell in love with music alongside his brother, Casey Harris, who learned to play the keyboard despite being born blind.
“Casey started playing piano when he was 7,” Sam Harris said. “Around the same time, I started playing saxophone, but I was mostly just playing it in school. I wasn’t taking it as seriously as Casey’s piano lessons. I started singing as a kid, our mom was a singer, she was a jazz cabaret lounge singer for many years, so when we were little we used to sing a lot in the house. Every once in a while, she’d bring us on stage for one of her shows as a cute little gimmick.”
The brothers formed their first band in high school before moving to Brooklyn. Casey worked as a piano tuner on the Upper West Side, while Sam met drummer Adam Levin at The New School to form X Ambassadors.
“We had a gig coming up and we didn’t have a name,” Sam Harris said. “We were in our rehearsal space … looking at objects: Can we name our band Carpet? Can we name our band Light Bulb? Adam uses Coated Ambassador drum heads on his drum kit and said, ‘What about Ambassadors?'”
He said he then started using Photoshop and adding letters and words to “Ambassadors,” and randomly typed X Ambassadors and it stuck.
After signing with Interscope Records in 2013, the band’s first full-length album, “VHS,” (2015) went platinum with the hit song “Unsteady,” which was featured on the soundtrack of the romantic movie “Me Before You” that came out the next year.
“‘Unsteady’ at first was a hook,” Sam Harris said. “I had heard that Zedd was looking for new songs for his record and I was like, ‘Maybe I can write an EDM song,’ so I sat down and wrote this hook and it felt really, really special and I was like, ‘I think maybe I’ll keep this in my back pocket for now.'”
The album also had “Renegades,” which has since combined with “Unsteady” for 1.3 billion streams on Spotify.
“I kind of got tricked into writing ‘Renegades’,” Sam Harris said, referring to the fact his producer asked him to write a song called Renegades and that he mentioned an opportunity for a commercial with Jeep.
“I was like, ‘I wonder what car they’re trying to promote,’ so I go online and it’s a Jeep Renegade! It was the funniest thing: I wrote this very heartfelt song and it was a jingle for a car company,” Sam Harris said.
The band’s second album, “ORION,” (2019) included music videos for “Hold You Down,” which showed footage of the brothers as kids, and “Boom,” which flashed the song title in Braille.
“The way that we operate, with my brother being visually impaired, I always felt like that set us apart. We just operate differently as a band, we’re much closer and more tight-knit,” Sam Harris said. “My brother’s been blind his whole life and it’s something we both grew up with — obviously in different ways. I grew up with such an acute emotional baggage of: there is something that I have that is so fundamental for most of us that my brother doesn’t and it forces him to navigate the world in a completely different way and I should never take this thing I have for granted.”
Their third album, “The Beautiful Liar,” (2021) was a concept album inspired by the radio dramas that the brothers listened to growing up as kids to create “theater of the mind” for Casey.
“My brother has had such a huge impact on my life, and I can safely say, mine on his too. We really are so inseparable at this point, for better or worse,” Sam Harris said. “I think that’s the case with a lot of siblings, one of whom has a disability. That’s part of the beauty and the source of tension in our relationship and in our life, but I think it’s really made this musical journey and this band what it is. It’s our dynamic.”
Their newest album is called “Townie,” which just dropped in April, hence this “Townie” Tour.
“We’re playing songs like ‘No Strings,’ ‘Smoke on the Highway,’ ‘Sunoco,’ ‘Half-Life’ and ‘Follow the Sound of My Voice,’ songs that really paint a picture of what the album feels like,” Sam Harris said. “It’s been really awesome to get the reaction from the fans and see how these songs are resonating with people in a really tangible way, not just numbers on a screen or comments.”
Listen to our full conversation on the podcast below:
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