X Ambassadors Instagram – TOWNIE is out now.
Casey and I are from a small college-town in central New York called Ithaca. We grew up restless, both fighting to be seen and heard. A place like Ithaca sometimes felt like it wanted you to disappear.
Casey and I made music together in our basement and in our friend’s garages or sheds, and our teenage logic had us convinced that would be our ticket out. Somehow—in some crazy combination of ignorance, determination, and sheer luck—we we’ve found ourselves where we are today, very far away from our lives in Ithaca. But for some reason my mind keeps wandering back to this place that I so desperately sought to free myself from.
Here I am: 35 years old, and I still feel like that insecure teenager with a prematurely-receding hairline and the weight of the world on his shoulders, who’s still scared of being left behind. Writing this album was me asking myself “why?” Here’s what I came up with:
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 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 my dreams couldn’t come true— only that they’d welcome me home with open arms if they didn’t.
I’m so lucky to have grown up where and how I did, and so it feels like a very appropriate that, 18 years later, we’d be putting out an album that’s a love letter to Ithaca, to Upstate New York, and all the people in it.
This is TOWNIE. For our town and yours. For the Townies in all of us. | Posted on 05/Apr/2024 09:39:56
