SHAED: Finding Inspiration Through Nature, Reflecting On Humble Beginnings, And The Explosion Of Trampoline

Today on Auxoro, I speak with SHAED (@shaedband) a pop-trio based out of Washington D.C. that exploded onto the scene after the release of their single Trampoline and follow up version of Trampoline (with ZAYN).

SHAED’s single Trampoline recently hit #4 at Top 40 as the single passed half a billion streams across digital platforms. The single was taken from the band’s debut EP Melt, and made waves after being featured in Apple’s Macbook Air ad campaign.

Although to some the band’s success might seem overnight, Chelsea, Max, and Spencer of SHAED have been putting in work on stage long before their streams clocked in the millions. Chelsea Lee holds down the vocals while twin brothers Spencer and Max Ernst tackle instrumental and production duties. In this conversation, you’ll hear about the beginning stages of the band, low points of self-doubt, harnessing nature as inspiration, Max coming out to his brother Spencer, the marriage between Spencer and Chelsea, and more.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation:

Inspirations outside of music - (3:27)

Our song Trampoline was inspired by nature. Even the house we live in is surrounded by woods. Our biggest inspiration comes from nature and traveling. Even on tour, when we have a day off we try to find somewhere out in the mountains that we can go to for inspirations.” (8:00)

Sapiens, Agricultural Revolution (7:30)

Nature and its effect on the creative process - hiking trip (15:20)

We’ve had an incredible headline rub and we’ve learned what works and what doesn’t. It’s small things like if this part of the song works or maybe we could explore getting the crowd more involved, whether that’s call and response or getting them to put their hands in the air. It’s stuff like that that we’re starting to figure out going into festival season. (18:40)

If you’re not nervous before the show, then you’re probably not playing the types of shows you want to be playing. (22:00)

Chelsea losing her voice before a show (24:00)

Pushing through the comfort zone on stage (30:00)

Living Together and having a balance of three people in a group (36:00)

When Spencer and I started writing music that we were really believing in and didn’t feel all this outside pressure, that helped me be able to come out to my brother. He was the first person I told. (43:35)

Navigating the music industry as a married couple (50:45)

All three members of the band living together (53:30)

Chelsea cooking and The Instant Pot - (58:00)

People see that Trampoline was on a commercial and they think that it’s so overnight. We’ve been working at this for a long time, even before SHAED. We’ve done the shows where we play 3-4 hours of covers for nobody, but if we didn’t do those we wouldn’t be here now. (68:00)

The New Year’s Eve party at a “Cougar Bar” and getting told to stop playing - 68:00

Chelsea’s entrance to the band and cover gigs (59:58)

Weirdest jobs that the band has had to work (72:30)

Going forward, we are just trying to write as much as possible. Even after the success of Trampoline, we are still writing to write, not to recreate. (77:00)

The way we wrote Trampoline was by writing every day. We had a process of getting into the studio. Chelsea would make an awesome breakfast, we made the song in our studio and wrote the lyrics outside. No one really thought it was going to do what it did. If anything, the success has given us more confidence to be more experimental, more creative, and do more things out of the box. (78:10)

The pressure to follow up Trampoline (79:00)

QuickFire Questions and conclusion (82:00)

SHAED: Finding Inspiration Through Nature, Reflecting On Humble Beginnings, And The Explosion Of Trampoline

Here are a few highlights from the conversation:

Some things mentioned in the conversation:

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