X AMBASSADORS
Continued from page 20
role. With his childhood guitarist buddy
Noah Feldshuh, he enrolled in Greenwich
Village liberal New School; Initially, he
toyed with becoming an actor, but songwriting gradually took over, and again,
his experience in the movie industry
prodded him forward. His father had
carefully chosen classic films to show him
as a teen, starting with The Maltese Falcon,
The Treasure of Sierra Madre, and One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “He really schooled
me, and that exposed me to a lot of storytelling,” he says. “So that’s something that
I’ve always been drawn to – telling stories
and inhabiting other characters and stuff.
So I try to do that myself, and I love songwriters like Bruce Springsteen – I’ve
recently been obsessing over his Nebraska
and Born in the U.S.A.”
Then, the tale turns almost fabular.
Once Harris and Feldshuh formed their
group – initially known as Ambassadors –
they eventually added an X, plus his sibling Casey, who had overcome the hardship of being blind since birth. With
drummer Adam Levin on board, they selfreleased an Ambassadors EP in 2009, and
began gaining a following in the
Northeast. Then they were discovered by
Imagine Dragons anchor Dan Reynolds,
one day in Norfolk, VA when he was racing by taxi to the hospital to procure flufighting antibiotics. The cab driver had
local radio station connections, and when
Reynolds asked him what he’d been listening to, he played him the band’s early
track “Unconsolable.” Reynolds promptly
informed his label honcho, producer Alex
Da Kid, who signed X Ambassadors and
wound up co-writing most of VHS with
them.
And Harris is stunned to have such a
prestigious, prescient mentor. “Alex is
involved in pretty much everything we
do, and he’s a great foil for me,” notes
Harris. “He’s helped me a lot, and he also
has a really tough work ethic, and I think
I needed that in the point in my career
when I met him. My songwriting was
good, but it wasn’t very controlled – I
would write only when I had flashes of
inspiration, but Alex taught me to just
write constantly. And even if it’s bad,
you’ve got to get all those bad ideas out
before you get something good – you
can’t just sit around and wait for the good
ideas to come, because they’re not always
going to come.”
And Harris makes no bones about
“Renegades” – that was another part of
his leaving-Ithaca plan, he swears: He
always wanted to have a huge hit single.
It reminds him of a lesson he learned back
in high school, courtesy of his first girlfriend. She would play him intriguing
new bands, but refuse to divulge the
artists’ names when he inquired. “She
would say, ‘I’m not going to tell you,
because if I tell you who it is, you’ll tell
somebody else, and then they won’t be
my band anymore’,” he concludes. “And
that whole precious thing? It stuck with
me forever, and now I don’t want anyone
to ever say that about my band and my
music. It’s meant to be shared and
enjoyed by everyone."
Appearing 1/13 at United Center.
january
2016
illinoisentertainer.com
47