VHS Nostalgia: An Interview with Sam Harris of X Ambassadors By Abram Scharf
The following is an edited interview transcribed from a conversation with Chris Harris of X Ambassadors over a gritty phone connection. You can catch X Ambassadors at Big Guava this Friday.
SubAp!: The title of your upcoming record is “VHS”, which leads me to believe that it is a nostalgic record in some ways. Is that true, or otherwise what inspired it?
Sam Harris: Yeah, it totally is. Y’know, its the first full length that we’re putting out so it has to be a representation of us- who we are- and tell that story. I was trying to figure out a way to do that, and [I was thinking about how] we all grew up listening to hip hop records. What I loved about hip hop records when I was a kid was the skits- the interludes- that were on the record. And I was like “Well, let’s try to do that with a rock record!” So I went through all this footage that I had from home movies of me and Casey growing up. Casey and I are brothers, and Noah and I have known each other since we were like, five, and we started our first band in the seventh grade. We met Adam at our first week at college, so we all go back a ways and have a real history as friends— as brothers. I wanted to capture that, so I pulled these audio clips from all these home movies. Old VHS tapes and Hi8 tapes.
Also, we grew up watching a lot of movies in my family because my dad worked in the film industry as a unit publicist. He would always travel and we would sometimes go visit him on set. He was gone a lot, but when he was back home we would always have movie nights, and that was like a ritual. We would watch old, plastic movies on VHS, and I remember what those old tapes felt like… having them all stacked in a cupboard… some in the drawers in our house. And it’s only something that mid twenty somethings like us really understand the reference to. We were doing a Facebook Q&A and someone actually asked us “What is VHS? What does it stand for?”, and not like they knew about VHS tapes. It was pretty funny.
SubAp!: I love the idea idea of putting skits in a rock album- some of my favorite tracks on The College Dropout were the skits.
SH: Yeah man! And I remember I really wanted to do it, and I was out late one night hanging out with Manny Marroquin, the guy who mixed our record. He actually mixed The College Dropout too. He was telling me about how when he was mixing the College Dropout with Kanye he would give Kanye rides to the studio because Kanye didn’t have a car in L.A. He would drive him back home at night, and he could remember Kanye talking to him about wanting to make it a concept album. He told me that he liked to think that he encouraged Kanye to do that. It made it very personal for us. The whole record goes from when we were little kids all the way to the very end, when we are in a band, on the road for the first time.
SubAp!: Something about having skits on the record makes it sound more cohesive in a way. Like it exists as a whole entity rather than just a bunch of songs thrown together. But you guys have a lot of songs on the radio that play fine alone, so I wanted to ask what you think the importance of a full album is in 2015.
SH: Well, I mean, you saw on Kendrick Lamar’s record how a body of work like that can mean so much. I grew up listening to the full record- and there is still a side of me [that likes] the age of vinyl. Vinyl’s making a comeback, and that’s because there is always going to be a pushback. It’s such a singles market right now, and its been like that for so long that eventually it will have to shift. I feel like that’s why people like vinyl and the whole ritual of sitting down and listening to a whole record all the way through. There is something grounding, something exciting about that. I do think that all these songs off this record can stand alone on their own. But I didn’t just want to put all the best songs together on a record, put it out and hope for the best. I wanted it to really have a through line, to have it be a story.
SubAp!: So would you call VHS a concept album?
SH: Absolutely. I wold call it a concept album.
SubAp!: Closing question here- are looking forward to the Florida [almost] summer weather?
SH: Absolutely. We are on our way to Asheville right now. It’s so hot. I love it.
You can catch X Ambassadors at the Grove Stage at Big Guava this Friday (5:00-5:30). Peep more info here.
