For 11 weeks last year, from June through September, the X Ambassadors song “Renegades” topped the Alternative Songs charts, making it a bona fide Song of the Summer. The distinction was well justified by the song’s four-chord elegance, ascending refrain, and vibe of youthful immunity.

Watch the official video, though, and Ithacans will see that the song is, in a sense, about them. Interspersed with footage of athletes with disabilities ranging from blindness to paraplegia, the band members take a drive on familiar roads: by that picturesque red barn on Cascadilla Boulevard, by Ithaca Falls, then turning toward Fall Creek as it flows to the lake, and finally to the State Theatre.

The band, based in Brooklyn but in the process now of relocating to Los Angeles, has accumulated numerous major successes besides the hit “Renegades.” Two summers ago, its thumping, gritted-teeth anthem “Jungle,” performed with the British musician Jamie N Commons and remixed by the hip-hop kingmaker Jay Z, was featured in a promotional video for the World Cup.

Since the 2015 release of its first full-length album, VHS, the band has appeared on Jimmy Fallon, Late Night with Seth Meyers, and The Today Show. The lead singer, Sam Harris, who also plays guitar and saxophone, has a co-writing credit on Rihanna’s 2015 single “American Oxygen” and sang the national anthem this spring at Dodger Stadium. His older brother, keyboardist Casey Harris, was interviewed for Kate Murphy’s “Download” column in the Sunday New York Times.

Sam and Casey grew up in a house off Danby Road, about three miles from downtown, and Sam befriended the band’s eventual guitarist, Noah Feldshuh, at Belle Sherman Elementary School’s kindergarten orientation. Years later, while attending the New School in New York together, Sam and Noah met the band’s fourth member, drummer Adam Levin, who grew up in Los Angeles. At the time, Casey was studying at the School of Piano Technology for the Blind in Vancouver, Washington; he has Senior-Loken syndrome, a genetic condition that affects both his vision and his kidneys, and he would soon join the others in New York.

The band’s three Ithaca members well represent the city’s academic and nonacademic spheres. Sam and Casey’s parents moved the family to town from Seattle when the boys were 5 and 3 years old. Rob, their dad, was a film publicist who could work from anywhere, traveled often and internationally, and had wanted to relocate to a college town. The boys’ mother, Margaret Wakeley, suggested Ithaca, where her sister lived. Her roots in the area stretched back generations. In the 1860s her great-grandfather had bought a grand house on Cayuga Lake in Levanna, just north of Aurora.

When the family moved to Ithaca, Wakeley set aside her career as a musician, for which she had previously based herself in Atlanta and Los Angeles.

Feldshuh, the oldest of three siblings, grew up in Belle Sherman. His parents, David Feldshuh and Martha Frommelt, had arrived in the mid-1980s, with David successfully pursuing a dual career as a playwright and an emergency room doctor. For more than thirty years, he has been a professor of theater at Cornell, serving for most of that period as artistic director for the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. Feldshuh’s play Miss Evers’ Boys was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in drama and adapted in 1997 as an HBO film, which earned twelve Emmy nominations. Martha, a longtime champion of Ithaca arts and education, has volunteered for the Fine Arts Booster Group and the Ithaca Public Education Initiative, for which she has been a board member. Noah’s aunt is the acclaimed actress and playwright Tovah Feldshuh.

But it was at the Harris boys’ Danby Road home, set a few acres off the road down a long driveway, where the band was born when Sam and Noah were in seventh grade. The group performed only original material from the start. They made their public debut at the Boynton Middle School variety show. The band’s early lineup also included the bassist Allon Brann, the younger brother of Amir Brann, whose local group, Los Mariscos, had excited the young Feldshuh’s interest. Casey at first kept his distance from his younger brother Sam’s project, but he would invariably come downstairs when they were jamming and “lay down a little keyboard.”

The Danby Road house was an idyllic space for young musicians, according to Casey. For one thing, he explained, “the whole basement got turned into a recording-slash-personal-slash-generally-playing instruments-and-making-noise-area…It wasn’t a fully submerged basement, so there were windows onto the yard, and we had the drum kit and the amps around little windows. It was a really inspirational place to write and record music. You’d have the sunshine coming in in the evenings.” For another thing, “if it wasn’t too late, our parents would let us be as loud as we wanted.”

Whereas Sam was outgoing, gregarious, “a performer since he could talk,” as Wakeley recalled, “Casey was just into how things worked, and he would get into computers and learn how to build them.” Because of this, Casey added, “I spent a lot of time at home on the weekends.” Noah, too, displayed an interest in technology, pursuing a middle-school internship at Ithaca Guitar Works, during which he learned about guitar repair from Chris Broadwell and his staff.

Sam and Noah attended Boynton Middle School and Ithaca High School, whereas Casey chose the route of the Alternative Community School (now the Lehman Alternative Community School; LACS). But even ACS, he joked, must not have been alternative enough. He dropped out at 17 and got his GED but co-taught music classes with his beloved teacher Dara Anissi, who introduced him to “Middle Eastern and Indian and East Asian musicians” and other genres he had never before encountered.

Casey also credits another Ithacan with guiding him musically: his piano teacher, Molly MacMillan, with whom he studied from age 9 to about 16. According to MacMillan, “Casey learned music primarily by ear, and his ability to grasp the whole of the piece while learning each part was an amazing gift, and really made working with him a unique experience. He would learn pieces very deeply, and he worked from recordings of pieces more than most of my other students.” She also recalled Casey’s efforts to master an entire Steely Dan album, with its complex harmonic progressions.

Once settled in Ithaca, Margaret began performing at venues ranging from the Unitarian Church to the Hangar Theater, but now she had moved from singer-songwriter material to cabaret shows.

Casey himself “lived a very musically secluded life. I wasn’t aware of the music scene in town until really my friends dragged me out to my first Grassroots Festival, and that’s where I got exposed to a lot of the Ithaca and surrounding-area acts. And especially I remember John Brown’s Body being really impressive ... and Donna the Buffalo was great.”

For their parts, Sam and Noah—even while dreaming of the bright lights and gravitating to hard-rocking acts like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Stooges—gained formative musical experiences in town, playing at Castaways (now The Dock), the Lost Dog (now Lot 10), the Ithaca Festival, and the Haunt. The group also recorded its first CD in town, even earning an accolade from the Ithaca Times’s own Jim Catalano.

As the band’s “Moms’ Club”—a clique that also includes Adam Levin’s non-Ithacan matriarch—describes it, the small-town restlessness evident in VHS might be overstated, an expression, Frommelt speculated, of “growing up, needing to leave and explore yourself.” Frommelt further cast Ithaca as a deeply, even uniquely, supportive community for young artists, a place that “obviously celebrates education and arts education.” She added that “not only were friends and relatives lugging the band members’ heavy amps around town, but they were also coming to their shows, cheering them on all throughout their development.” And she directed particular gratitude to the public school teachers who, at every step, supported the band mates’ adventures and unorthodoxy.

X Ambassadors, with previous names including the Fuzz Brothers and the Ambassadors, got its first break in early 2012, when its ballad “Litost”—referring to a Czech term for a particular type of unhappiness once explored by Milan Kundera—was chosen for an episode of the WB television drama One Tree Hill. The song was thereafter picked up by the Hampton Roads, Virginia, radio station 96X, where it eventually became a listener favorite. Dan Reynolds, who fronts Imagine Dragons, a group similarly built on driving rhythms, emotionally unstinting vocals, and a penchant for genre mixing, heard another X Ambassadors song, “Unconsolable,” from the group’s 2013 EP, Love Songs Drug Songs, and persuaded his label, Interscope Records, to sign them.   

Sometime before X Ambassadors’ 2015 breakout, a music professional reportedly told the band, “You guys belong in arenas. You’re an arena rock band, you just don’t know it yet.” With VHS, the members’ days of playing to occasionally empty halls, of the brothers crashing in Brooklyn apartments, were over. Along with “Renegades,” the record features the lament “Unsteady,” the bluesy, slow-grooving “Low Life” (with Jamie N Commons), faster, edgier percussive tracks, as well as “interludes” echoing the hip-hop albums on which the band members were reared. In the first interlude, “Y2K Time Capsule,” recorded in 1999, Rob Harris asks his sons where they imagine themselves 15 years into the future, and they answer, “Very far away.” But home is omnipresent on the album.

As Casey recounted, “One of my favorite places [to go every time I come back to Ithaca] is the South Hill Recreation Trail. You can walk there from my mom’s house downtown,” where she moved after separating from her husband about a decade ago, “in less than half an hour, and you can walk for hours if you take certain turns. It’s blissful, especially having lived in New York City for almost 10 years.” Casey also shows a rather Ithacan awareness of the environmental costs associated with touring. “It pains me,” he said. “I’m always looking for ways to make it greener.” Casey has a special connection with his mother; about six years ago, she donated her kidney to him during a health scare.

On May 14, X Ambassadors played a “Benefit My State” homecoming concert at the State Theatre, with guitarist Russ Flynn performing in place of Feldshuh. The openers were Robert DeLong and the local act Jimkata. The sold-out show drew a multigenerational crowd, not excluding packs of 10-year-old boys giddily closing in on the Junior Mints at the concession stand. Before X Ambassadors came onstage, promoter Dan Smalls, speaking on behalf of Mayor Svante Myrick, who was in Chicago, read an official proclamation designating May 14, 2016, X Ambassadors Day. For the show’s encore, Sam brought out his mom to perform a poignant duet of “Georgia on My Mind,” with Casey accompanying on keyboard.

As for the benefit part, Smalls noted before the show that “with raffles and donations, the State hopes to raise over $25,000.” This is out of $200,000-plus that the theater must raise annually, alongside earned income, to stay successful.

For the band members, who had partnered with StubHub for another benefit the day before at Brooklyn’s Frederick Douglass Academy, the return home was deeply gratifying. “It’s the first show we’ve played in Ithaca since we’ve been on the charts,” said Casey beforehand. “I’m stoked.” Sam seconded this sentiment many times throughout the show.

Wakeley mostly understates her role in her sons’ ascent, although she does acknowledge that she encouraged them to “pursue their passions” and that she was always comfortable onstage, as is Sam in particular. She also notes that the boys’ dad was “a great schmoozer. As a publicist...he’d have to be up there talking with all the big stars and finding just the right moments to approach them.” Likewise, she said, Sam “is really good at talking to people” and drawing them out.

But her reflection on the new record’s “interludes” reveals perhaps more than she intended: “It’s interesting, because the boys talk about their album, VHS, being influenced by hip-hop, with a theme. Well, that’s what all my cabarets are. They’re themes. And then I weave in the songs with stories in between. So, I thought, I must have been hip to hip-hop, without knowing it.”

Or this: she was a catalyst—as was her former husband; as were Noah’s artistically prolific parents—for Ithaca to produce what is almost certainly its first number-one song on any chart.

A song, and an album, that delivered an arena-rock band back into the arms of its coffeehouse town. •