Ten years ago, in the back of a 15-passenger van, Ithaca-based band X Ambassadors recorded their debut album, “VHS.” Those listening closely might catch the rattle of the wheels on asphalt or the hum of the engine beneath frontman Sam Harris’s falsetto.
Harris remembers the process as a mad dash, fueled by the sudden success of their breakout single “Renegades” in March 2015, which took off after landing in a Jeep commercial. But the band’s rise wasn’t exactly overnight. Before “VHS,” they had released several EPs and offered up tracks like “Jungle” and “Unsteady” to the radio gods—though none initially stuck. Fans were connecting with the songs at shows, but the band still hadn’t proven it could be a hit.
“The radio department didn’t hear hits,” Harris said. “So, they decided not to go to radio with anything. At the start of 2015, we essentially thought that we might be dropped. Or maybe never put a record out. And then, ‘Renegades’ happened.”
Released three months later, “VHS” went platinum in the United States and propelled the band to international tours and stadium stages. “Unsteady” was nominated for Top Rock Song at the 2017 Billboard Music Awards, while “Jungle” was remixed by Jay-Z.
What do the radio gods know, anyway?
To mark the 10th anniversary, the band — Harris, keyboardist Casey Harris and drummer Adam Levin — has reimagined and rerecorded the album. They’re hitting the road for a North American tour that will bring them home to the State Theatre of Ithaca for back-to-back shows on Sept. 19 and 20.
When the band’s manager pointed out the milestone, Harris’s reaction wasn’t typical.
“Oh, great,” he said, “I don’t like anniversaries, they always freak me out.”
For a band that’s kept moving forward, looking back can be disorienting — even though, as Harris puts it, it’s part of the job.
“I have to constantly engage with my younger self every night on stage,” he said. “The music that we made back then was great, but I also want people to look at what we’re doing now and who we are now. It’s hard to live between those two worlds.”
That sense of time passing isn’t lost on Harris, who turns 37 in September.
“The older I get, the more fascinated I am with time. It feels like it all happened in the blink of an eye, and yet I’ve lived 10 lifetimes,” he said.
Those lifetimes have taken the band from their roots in Ithaca — just a few artsy kids writing big, heart-on-sleeve songs — to sold-out arenas and collaborations with Imagine Dragons, K.Flay, Machine Gun Kelly and others. And while the band now calls Los Angeles home, upstate New York still anchors their identity. When Harris moved west, his first act was to tattoo Cayuga Lake on his forearm, a visible reminder of where he comes from.
“I think that it’s important to stay humble,” Harris said. “It’s important to me to always come at the world with a beginner’s mindset, and this is where I began, in the Finger Lakes. That’s my origin story.”
Ithaca is the band’s unabashed hometown, but Harris still considers himself a little bit of a Rochesterian — or, at least, Rochester-adjacent. His grandfather worked at Kodak, his mother grew up in the city and he still has cousins there. (Rochester isn’t a stop on this tour, but the band did play The Armory during the original “VHS” tour a decade ago.)
“Townie,” the band’s fourth album, was a departure from the electronic sound of their previous two records. Harris brought new emotional depth to his songwriting, inspired by the death of his high school music teacher, Todd Peterson. The songs explore childhood, memories, and the friends they’ve lost along the way.
Sold-out shows at the State Theater in 2024 reminded Harris that the bond between the band and their hometown runs both ways. The 1,600-seat venue feels like a second home. Not many bands of their caliber make a stop between Toronto and New York City — but X Ambassadors do, without fail.
It was during that tour that Harris felt the enduring pull of “VHS,” too.
“While we were touring ‘Townie,’ I can’t tell you how many people came up to me and were like, ‘I just gotta say, “VHS” saved my life, or saved my marriage, or gave me the idea to start my own band,’ or whatever,” he said. “These powerful stories that we would be told in passing, resonated so deeply with me.”
It’s a full-circle moment — proof that the songs born in the back of a van a decade ago left their mark not just on charts, but on lives. Now, as the band prepares to bring “VHS” home again, it feels less like an anniversary and more like a reunion — with the songs, the fans and the selves they used to be. xambassadors.com
Jon Heath is a contributor to CITY.
This article appears in Dec 1-31, 2024.
