When it comes to having a first single become a runaway hit, X Ambassadors know all too well the ups and downs that can come with it. When they released “Renegades” in 2015, the band was instantly thrust into the spotlight, as the single gained worldwide acclaim – and streams. With over 760 million on Spotify alone, it has earned platinum status in multiple countries, nowhere more so than right here in Canada where it has gone 7-times platinum.
After 9 years, and multiple appearances at festivals in the city, the Ithaca, New York band will finally make their very first indoor show, headlining Bronson Centre as part of their cross-Canada tour for their new album Townie.
We caught up with the guys this week to chat about their success, new album, and prolific discography.
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APT613: First off, this is going to be your first headlining show in Ottawa that’s not part of a festival. It’s about time for you guys from Ithaca to come up and do an actual headliner show.
X Ambassadors: Yeah, I think so. Most recently we did the festival with Hozier, which was amazing.
In terms of trying to categorize your music, it’s one of the hardest things to do. Just today, on Spotify, you’re showing up on a rock playlist, a country playlist, a folk playlist. But I thought the best one was a playlist called ‘Just Good Music’.
Oh, that’s great. I love that. We’ve always prided ourselves on never feeling like we had to fit into any type of box, or conform to any one particular sound. I think it’s been a blessing and a curse in a lot of ways that we’ve been able to move so fluidly between genres for our whole career.
Blessing in that it’s just fun and it’s what we love to do. It’s never boring. And I think a curse in that sometimes it’s made it harder, because the world in general likes things to be categorized. We’ve never really quite been able to fit into any one particular place. So that’s made certain things challenging for us.
Having had your breakout singles be so huge, it had to have been daunting to decide ‘yeah, we’re gonna go and do all sorts of different things’ rather than match your big hits.
It was, and I think there was also a sense of being lost at sea a little bit after that. What we eventually came back to is just “why do we do this?” Because we love it and because it’s fun and it’s fun for us to go into the studio together and write something, not having any plan for it.
Then all of a sudden, we have this shoegazy song here that we wrote. And then this song is a full blown pop country song. Then this one over here feels like this weird lo-fi R&B thing. It’s always exciting. I just know how exciting it feels when I listen back to something and think “Oh, this kind of sounds like this artist that I love – I can’t believe that we made that!”. Being able to embrace the awe and wonder of being curious I think is what’s kept us going and what got us out of that daunting phase of following this up because it could have gone many different ways, and I like where we’ve ended up.
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Your new album Townie is very focused, and plays on the themes of nostalgia going back to your small home town, but at the same time, wanting to get out. What brought you guys back to that mindset now that it’s been almost 15 years that you’ve been a band?
I think on a practical level, the way that we are able to create that feeling was by actually bringing us all back to upstate New York. Casey and I (Sam) are back. Adam’s basically from upstate New York. He’s from L.A., but he’s been to Ithaca a million times. And Russ is from Long Island. So, we finished up this record and wrote a couple new songs in the studio in the Catskills and that really helped set the tone. I do think as far as getting that sense of going back home in our mind, I think it’s the same thing with what happened for a lot of people.
With the pandemic, it just forced me to reevaluate my life. What my priorities were, what was really important, and that was family and where you come from and your home. Those are your rocks. That’s what makes you who you are. Something about the pandemic just forced that to the top of mind, for me especially. I was also feeling a little adrift, just in general, in my life, and the pandemic, and we were ending a 10 year run with a label, and the music industry is so different now. And we’re all in our mid 30s now, so there’s just a lot of gears shifting.
And in order to center myself, I think I really needed to make this record. I wanted to figure things out, and go back to the beginning. It’s like everything became so chaotic that I wanted to start from the beginning real quick and see where we go from there. It was really helpful and cathartic.
As you said, the music industry has changed a lot. I can only imagine what kind of headaches you were giving your label with the amount of collabs and EPs and singles.
The lucky thing is on this last run, we were our own label. So we didn’t really have to do too much convincing. It was more so ‘we’re going to do this and it’s coming out’. So luckily we’re very fortunate to be in that position now. A lot of people aren’t and we weren’t for many years. So it feels good to be in that position again.
X Ambassadors will be playing at the Bronson Centre April 18, 2024, with Noah Gunderson. Tickets available here. Doors open at 7pm.
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