Afternoons Archives

X Ambassadors Adam Levin says band was broke before “Renegades” took off

me-before-you-world-premiere-arrivals-2

”We were on tour, very broke. We were, like, four dudes eating ramen every night, taking turns putting gas in the car with our debit cards. I’m talking, like, seriously struggling, thinking we’re going to be dropped by our label. No one cares. Nothing’s happening. We had put out two EPs under Interscope and we’d had minor success with “Jungle,” but a big label like that wants to see sales and money, and it wasn’t happening and we didn’t know what we were doing. We had nothing planned for 2015. 2015 looked like it was going to have a lot of down time, which is terrible if you’re a band. Then in January, we were writing and working with [Grammy-award-winning producer] Alex da Kid, and we wrote “Renegades” and it got played in the Jeep commercial and everything just changed so fast. We were instantly on the road for the whole year.”... [Read Full Story]