Interview: X Ambassadors release ‘Everything Sounds Like A Love Song’
The beginning of the new decade has seen X Ambassadors bustling, taking on one ambitious endeavour on top of another. Recently completing their debut run of shows in Australia, the three-piece are gearing up to release an EP of archived songs from their cancelled album, Joyful. We quickly chat with drummer Adam about visiting Australia as a touring musician for the first time, and their latest single Everything Sounds Like A Love Song.
Welcome to Australia, thank you for being here!
Thank you! We’re having a great time. Not much time off yesterday, but I’ve gotten to go around and eat all the food. I didn’t realise how good the food is, and how good the coffee is. We’re loving it… I came here about 10 years ago as a kid, and got to spend four or five days here, and I loved it then, and I love it now. It’s great.
It must be so different now to visit as a touring musician.
Yeah! It’s very different. I do remember liking it a lot and 10 years ago I climbed the Harbour Bridge, and I’m extremely terrified of heights… It turns it out was not scary at all. When [I] was here [as a kid], we went to Byron Bay… I’m excited to go to Brisbane because I’ve never been.
How have the shows been?
It’s crazy that we go across to the other side of the world, and there are people there that know every word and are super into it. You never know what to expect, because we’ve literally never been here, or done any kind of promotion here. It’s really cool, and we want to keep coming back and build off of [this] to try to come back much more often than never. We definitely want to do that.
Orion is such a recent body of work as well, so it must feel even more heart-warming and validating for you guys to hear those lyrics sung back to you.
It is insane. There are a lot of things about touring that are really hard. You [also] kind of forget; when we’re not doing a show for two weeks, I forget that it means anything… We’re so thankful for it all and it makes us want to work harder.
Is forgetting that you mean something to people also something that happens in between releasing music?
Yeah! We’ve recently done this thing where you can text with fans. We have a phone number, and we log in through an app, and it’s been a really good way to connect and remind us that people want more. No matter what, if we play a show to 3000 people and we headlined it, after two weeks, we’re like, ‘oh no one is going to come’. It’s a classic paranoid musician thing. I know pretty much every musician does it.
Have you been playing ‘Everything Sounds Like A Love Song’ live, or is it still under wraps?
We wrote that song in 2016 or 2017. We released a song called Joyfula couple of years ago, and we were building an album [around that]. We had an entire album we were going to release called Joyful. It had a bunch of songs on it, but then we decided to [do Orion], and keep a couple of the songs like Historyand Confidence. We scrapped it, and then kind of came back to some of the songs and said, ‘man, these really do belong together’.
We chose a few of them and are making an EP out of them. We’re [also] working on the next full-length album, and it’s pretty much done actually. We’re really close to done, I would say about 80%. We wanted to take our time with getting everything together and we have some special things planned. We wanted to release something of the stuff that didn’t make sense on Orion and put out this whole EP for the fans.
The irony of the song and the tongue-in-cheek aspect of the lyricism and song title is something you guys haven’t explored this heavily before.
Can you talk about constructing the track, and the decision behind having it feel comic on the surface, making the listening experience deeper?
Sam wrote the chorus in around a day. Sometimes you don’t really know what the song is about until afterwards. It’s beautiful because it’s a break-up love song. It’s like ‘I love you, but I can’t do this anymore, and now everything sounds amazing that you’re gone’. It’s totally ironic, and I think that’s what is so great about it. I first heard his vocal and it gave me chills. It’s very deep and allows you to dig in if you really think about it.
The strings with Sam’s voice also unleash that conflict between romance and emptiness.
Was creating a ballad-type song always the basis of this track, and did it extend onto Joyful before you scrapped it?
We reworked this song a lot. The recording process was very cool. We recorded it all as one take, which is how you did it in the old-school way. Basically, you can’t edit anything. It was us in a room, playing the song live and tracking everything at the same time. We got a string and horn section, and a choir and really went all out with it. We had a couple of versions for Joyful, and one was just piano driven, but this is by far the best one. The strings and Sam’s voice give it a classic sound, but it still sounds modern. That’s the balance we were trying to [create].
What do you want people to take from your upcoming EP based on Everything Sounds Like A Love Song?
The new EP has Everything Sounds Like A Love Song and there are two other songs on there that were meant for the Joyful record. We were playing Joyful live before release, so people have heard one of the other songs on the EP. I don’t want to give anything away! There are three songs, and one has been played live a lot, and the other people haven’t really heard, ever. We worked with an amazing producer named Rodney Jerkins, who did Say My Name and The Boy Is Mine.
He’s the most talented producer I’ve ever met. It was really cool. The other songs are similarly organic, and it’s not like modern drums with 808’s. It’s live drums which we don’t hear on the radio anymore… I’m in my hotel loading and building the sounds for the live show on the computer. I plug keyboards into it so you can play and I’ve [been working] to include those other songs. It’s a pain in the ass, but it’s exciting because after that, you’re ready to put it out… It’s a lot of fun… There’s a lot that goes into everything, but it’s what we love!