X Ambassadors has been having a wild year. After opening for acts like Imagine Dragons and Panic! at the Disco and releasing two EPs on Interscope Records, the band played during USC's Springfest show last Saturday and is headed on their own headlining tour.

After the band's set, I sat down with frontman Sam Harris to talk about the new record, the songwriting process and how exactly does one make it in the rollercoaster world of popular music recording.

Against the background of fellow Springfest performer Sir Sly, Harris talked the opening band struggle, how hip-hop influences the band and what it's like to go into music as a family business.

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You guys are originally from New York; how are you enjoying this weather?

Love it. We're trying to move out here as soon as we have a free moment to do anything. We've been on and off the road for the past two years; in this last year, it's really picked up so we're never home anyway. When we get a moment to settle down, we're coming out here. The label's out here too.

Two days before today's set, you guys played a pretty wild show at the Bootleg Theater. What were your thoughts on the show?

It's crazy! This is our first headlining run, and we've been selling out the shows! And it's just mind-blowing. We have spent so much time on the road, opening for other bands, and putting ourselves out there and exposing our music to new people. We get a lot of kids coming up to us afterwards and saying, "Aw man, we'd never heard of you guys before tonight." 

To now have our own shows, where we play in front of people who know all the words, they're singing all the words, who come up to us afterwards and are like, "We are true, true fans," and to not have that be an anomaly, like a fan being at an Imagine Dragons show or a Panic! at the Disco show… it's really incredible, and we're still in the baby stages, but it feels like something's happening, and it's really cool, and we're really excited about it. 

And we love our fans too! These kids are just the coolest, and I had this other band walk up to us afterwards, one of the bands that opened for us, and this guy said, "Your fans are such nice people!" I was like, "Yeah dude!" 

What's it like opening for someone else versus headlining your own tour?

It's not easy. You really have to go out there and play as hard as you can to win people over. A lot of the time, you're gonna do your best and the people are just not gonna pay attention. The fact of the matter is, when you're there to see the headliner, the opening bands, if you don't know them, are kind of like… if something catches your ear, great. But a lot of kids these days, and kids my age, our attention spans aren't really the greatest. It's hard, it's really a challenge, but we're up for it - we love a challenge, and we play our asses off every night.

It's funny 'cause, some shows… I remember this one show we did with Imagine Dragons in San Diego, and we just played so hard, and I think at one point in the show, we heard a couple boos, and I was like, "Aw man, this is the worst! This sucks!" And then we got off the stage and went to the merch table, and there were swarms of kids there to see us. We sold the most amount of merch that night, and the kids were like, "We love you guys!" So you can't ever really gauge, and you just kind of have to leave those expectations at the door, and just go on stage, do your job, and leave and be satisfied that you did your job, if you did it well.

You guys are all very engaged performers, especially your brother. What's it like working with family?

So my brother (Casey) is 27, and I'm 25… we're like Irish twins? With everything, it has its good moments and bad moments. I couldn't see myself working with a different group of people than I'm working with right now. My brother's family, and that's great, it gives us a real drive and incentive. We're working for each other, for the good of our family.

Also, Noah [Feldshuh], our guitar player, I've known since I was in kindergarten, so he's practically family too. And Adam [Levin], our drummer, I've known since the first day of college, so that's probably seven years now. It's great, we're very tightly knit, but sometimes tensions get high and we have no filters because we know each other so well, so people say really awful shit to each other. But then it's cool, because we know each other so well, because we all love each other and care about each other. You deal with it, and move on.

You play the saxophone, and also drums. How do you actively work this non-traditional instrumentation into your music?

We honestly don't even think about it really. Sometimes I'll think, I wanna do a song where I can do some cool saxophone stuff in it, but for the most part, we just try to make something that's new and interesting. A lot of what we draw from is hip-hop, and with hip-hop, a big thing about the genre is how beats are made. It's a genre mesh thing, where you take a drumbeat from a jazz song, and layer on top of that some klezmer music samples, and layered on top of that is some guitar, so you've got some rock in there. And then you can add some brass, which adds some R&B elements in it. All those put together creates something new and exciting, and that's what we try to do.

Did you play classical at all? Jazz?

I played a little bit of classical, mainly jazz. I was much better back then than I am now. I put down the saxophone for like ten years, and then I picked it back up when we started recording these EPs. I wanted to hear those horns, I wanted to get a whole brass section but it was too expensive, so I was like "Well, I know how to play saxophone, I'll just layer it," and that's where the layering, looping thing, comes into play, and it's become a signature part of our sound now. I don't think anybody else is doing that out there.

Do you plan on expanding the instrumentation of the band?

Oh yeah. As soon as we've got the money… we gotta work within what we can afford at this point. But our gear and our sound have continued to grow more and more the longer we've been a band. A year and a half ago, we didn't have half of the stuff we have on stage. I wasn't playing saxophone, I was playing bass on a couple songs, and I was playing floor tom on a couple songs, so it's ever-changing and ever-evolving. I think I want that to continue for the rest of our career. I think that's what's gonna keep things fresh for us, and for our listeners.

Tell me about Interscope -- how's it been like working with Dan [Reynolds, of Imagine Dragons] and producer Alex da Kid?

Dan is so busy with Imagine Dragons. He was there at the beginning of everything with "Love Songs, Drug Songs," and brought us to the attention of Alex da Kid and Interscope, and then Alex and I met and we vibed really well together. I think he's a genius, and we love working with him as a band and it all naturally fell into place.

I work mainly with Alex, and it's great because we get to see Dan and the rest of the dudes from Imagine Dragons when we go on the road with them. And they're so awesome for having us on the road with them. They already have a reputation of being the nicest guys in the world, and I will fully support that because they are the greatest, and they deserve every bit of success that they're having.

With Alex though, he's such a force and he's so driven. He'll call me at five in the morning, his time, which is like 8 a.m. my time, and he'll be like, "Yo, I've been up for six hours making beats, I'm gonna send you some stuff right now," and I'll be like, "Alright, okay, cool," and he's always on me to be writing and writing all the time. He'll hear stuff that I don't even hear myself, and I consider myself to be a pretty nitpicky perfectionist. He's really got an incredible ear. I think we're making some really cool music together, that's very forward-thinking.

You guys have a very good drum, bass, baseline. Do you consciously build your sound like that?

Again, we come from hip-hop and R&B backgrounds, and that's it, right there. It's drums, drums and bass and the groove. So it's all about finding that groove for us. Some bands like to start with chord progressions or melodies or whatever. We start, usually, with the beat, and then work over that. 

Sometimes it doesn't work like that. Sometimes I have a chord progression in my mind, and the song grows around that, and you find a beat that fits. 

When it comes to songwriting, what kinds of personal experiences do you draw from?

Everything! This new EP ["The Reason"] though, is specifically about… we know a lot of people we went to college with, who wanted to pursue artistic careers. We're now in our mid-20s, we've been out of school for a little bit, and some of us are starting to realize that things are not necessarily turning out the way that we wanted them to. 

Dreams that some of my friends have had since they were kids now have to be put behind, and they have to move on, and what's the next thing? It's a really scary thing, so I wanted to write something that addressed that, and also addressed the fact that it's not so scary. It can be just as exciting figuring out what's next as working on a dream that you've had for years and years. 

I think that's something people need to hear. I need to hear that! I'm in a business where shit is just so unpredictable. Shit could be over for us in an /snaps/ instant, an instant! And all this work that we've put into it could just be laid to waste. That's scary, that's scary as hell, and I wanted to write something about that, that addressed my own fears, and in doing so, would help assuage those fears, and make it easier for myself and for everybody else who's out there pursuing their dreams. Keep going! Keep at it! 

But the record says, if everything doesn't work out, it's okay. The majority of people out there have had to switch paths multiple times. Life is unpredictable - you might think you're born to do something, and you realize that you're born to do something else, and you're even better at that. I know dudes who wanted to be musicians and ended up being better fathers and better family men than musicians. 

I wanna write about stuff that people are experiencing, that my friends are experiencing, that I'm experiencing, that haven't been talked about necessarily, but that are universal. We want to make songs that everyone can relate to, bottom line. 

How did you steel yourself for a career in the arts?

The unfortunate thing is, we don't know how to do anything else. This is all we have, that has been what's driven us. This is my life, this is our lives - we've devoted ourselves to being in a band. 

Noah and I started playing in a band in middle school, in seventh grade. Casey ended up joining the band in eighth or ninth grade, and we've been doing this ever since. We grew up in a small town, playing local open mic nights and cafes and with dreams of coming down to New York and starting a band. And we've started to do that! We've been doing that. So it's exciting, but it's also like, what else are we gonna do? 

And again, that's why we want to write this. Now we're at a point where we're on a major label and things are going really well, and we're all kind of like, "Well shit, what if it stops? What if the momentum stops?" That's why we decided to write about this stuff.

Your parents both come from musical backgrounds - how have they interacted with you and your brother when it comes to pursuing a musical career?

Oh, they've been great. They've been so supportive of us from the get-go. Any time we can't pay rent, we go sleep at mom and dad's house. Or any time we can't eat for the week, they'll give us money for groceries. 

But in other regards, they've been very supportive of us. My mom was a musician for many, many years - she was a folk singer, a cabaret singer, a jazz singer, just local club scenes in Atlanta and in L.A. She never wanted to do something as big as what we're doing, but she supports us. And my dad is an avid music fan and he's always been supportive of us, my step-mom as well. Adam and Noah's parents have been the same, they're all really supportive of us. I'm sure they're all biting their nails because they don't want us to end up poor and broke and destitute somewhere, but hopefully that won't happen!

You have a tattoo on your left arm - do you want to share the story behind that?

Casey and I have the same tattoo. It's just a design I came up with - I'm not in the Illuminati or anything. It is a triangle with an eye in it, but the open eye is me, the closed eye is my brother. My brother's been blind since he was born, so that's played a really big role in how I have developed into a man, a human being, and it's played a huge role in how we've become a band and my songwriting and everything, so I wanted to have a reminder of that, even though I didn't need a reminder of it. I wanted a tattoo, basically! 

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Download X Ambassadors' "The Reason" EP on iTunes here. Follow the band on Twitter and Facebook.

Read more of NT's interviews here.

Originally published here.

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