Townie, the highly anticipated new album from X Ambassadors—brothers Sam Nelson Harris and Casey Harris along with Adam Levin—is out today on Virgin Music. Stream/purchase HERE and watch/share a visualizer for new song, “Smoke on the Highway”.
In celebration of the release, the band took the stage on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” earlier this week to perform “No Strings” from the LP.
Townie marks a compelling new chapter for X Ambassadors as they return to their upstate New York roots and paint an intricate portrait of their hometown’s most mundane aspects and the community that molded them. Leading up to the release, the band shared album tracks “Follow The Sound of My Voice,” “Your Town,” “Half-Life,” and “No Strings,” the latter of which is currently #25 on AAA Radio.
Reflecting on the album, Sam shares: “Townie is a home-coming album. Casey and I are from a small college-town in central New York called Ithaca. Ithaca is home to three universities: an Ivy Leaguer, a liberal arts conservatory, and a state community college. The students make up more than 50% of the population, and the town largely exists for and because of them. They’d call us ‘townies’— the people on the periphery who existed mostly as just background actors in the movies of their college experiences.
I am a Townie. I will always be a Townie. To deny that is to deny everything that I am. And yes, my town was small, but the people I grew up with never let me think that the world wasn’t big and exciting and out there for the taking. In my town I was loved, I was encouraged, I was accepted, I was challenged, I was knocked down and picked back up again a million times. It might not have been the cultural Mecca I dreamed about, but we had a pretty sick independent movie theater and more than one good coffee shop. The Red Hot Chili Peppers never came to play our State Theater, but that meant less competition for the all-ages shows we’d put on at the Wownet Internet Cafe. The guys at the music store knew my mom, so they let me spend hours in there ‘testing out’ guitars and pedals and recording equipment like I was actually ever going to have the money to buy anything. No one ever made me feel like an idiot for having dreams, or that those dreams couldn’t come true—just that they’d still be there for me, that MY TOWN would be there for me, in case they didn’t.
I’m so lucky to have grown up where and how I did. Full stop. From the moment I gleefully left town at 18, I think that idea took root in me somewhere; and so, it feels very appropriate that, 18 years later, we’d be putting out an album that’s a love letter to Ithaca and to Upstate New York.
This is Townie. For my town and Casey’s, for Adam’s and Russ’, and for you and yours. For the Townies in all of us”.
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