Who knew when the Northern Virginia-based band SHAED started recording a song in a suburban Maryland living room on home-studio gear that the song would do what it did? And what the song “Trampoline” did was truly remarkable.
“We’re not trying to brag,” says Max Ernst as he holds up a stylized heart-shaped trophy. “But we just got these in the mail.”
It’s from broadcast Goliath iHeartRadio, the largest radio company in the U.S. “It says,” he reads, “‘SHAED “Trampoline,” 1 Billion Total iHeart Audience Spins.’ So it’s been played just on the radio 1 billion times.”
“Over 1 billion,” gently adds Spencer, his twin brother and bandmate.
Swell that number with the downloads from countless other digital music platforms—Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and more—and that 1 billion becomes more than 2 billion and counting. It was the No. 1 most-played song on alternative radio in 2019. In 2020, it was still in the top five.
The ethereal video for “Trampoline” has been viewed on YouTube nearly 60 million times. The remix has been seen another 2.5 million times. A second version featuring ex-One Direction pop star Zayn Malik boosted the song anew.
The song reached countless curious ears when it appeared on a long-running TV commercial for the Apple MacBook Air, which lit up the song-identifying app Shazam around the world as millions of listeners asked, “What was that song?” When it was included last March on an episode of ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy, it made it to No. 1 on the Hollywood Reporter’s Top TV Songs list, with 22 million on-demand streams in one month. The song is also on the best-selling EA Sports’ NBA 2K21 basketball video game.
In the middle of the trio is vocalist and co-songwriter Chelsea Lee, a McLean native now living in Falls Church, in a home paid for, we can surmise, by the accumulated fractions of pennies that have amassed from all those digital downloads. Lee never imagined Elton John would be giving her a shout-out not once but twice on his global podcast Rocket Hour, or that Britney Spears would post an Instagram of her dancing to one of her songs.
In the past three years, SHAED has shared festival stages with Coldplay, the Black Keys, the Killers, the 1975, Mumford and Sons, Cage the Elephant and Billie Eilish, to name a few. Movie mainstay Margot Robbie hired them for a private performance at the famed Chateau Marmont in Hollywood.
Their appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live garnered a rave review in the U.K.’s Daily Mail. They’ve also been featured on The Late Late Show with James Corden, Good Morning America, Late Night with Seth Meyers and other national broadcasts. They’ve been written about in Rolling Stone, Billboard, Vogue, the New York Times and countless other publications.
And oh, look, is that Chelsea Lee duetting with pop icon Sting on a New York City rooftop? That’s freaking Sting!
We’ll get back to Sting, but first, before it’s assumed SHAED is simply the latest overnight sensation in the fast-churning pop music world, let’s go back in time, to when Lee was 13 (she’s 29 now). Her father, Scott Lee, took her to meet award-winning singer-songwriter and vocal coach Mary Ann Redmond. After the first lesson, Redmond confided to Scott: “I don’t know what you guys want to do with this, and I’ve never said this to anybody before, but this girl’s got the goods. She can make it.”
Thusly encouraged, and driven by a passion for music in high school—she attended Langley High in McLean—Lee ticked all the boxes required to ascend the ladder of musical success. But it was a stepladder.
Appearances at local venues, an EP sampler of songs and an early intuition about the power of social media to share music led to a gig at Rockwood Music Hall in New York City, where she caught the ear of owner Ken Rockwood, who tipped Atlantic Records executives to the beyond-her-years 18-year-old singer he had just heard. That garnered an invitation to perform a private daytime showcase concert at Atlantic’s midtown New York skyscraper for Atlantic chairman and CEO Craig Kallman and artist and repertoire vice president Pete Ganbarg. The suits. The bean counters. The executives who say “yes” or, more often, “no.”
There were fewer than 10 people in the sun-filled Atlantic conference room. “It felt like a firing squad,” her manager at the time, Daniel Brindley, said in 2011. “I could never have done that at any age.”
“It’s funny because someone who is older might have understood their future was in the balance,” Rockwood said at the time, “but I don’t think that was in her head at all, and thank God it wasn’t.”
Lee killed it. The suits were impressed. A contract was signed. And then they needed her to be someone she wasn’t: a pop diva, with a hit song.
Despite everyone’s best intentions—Lee was game for anything the label asked her to do—the relationship sputtered to a finish after the release of a well-received EP, 18 and Alive. That new freedom enabled Lee to join the Ernst brothers’ duo, the Walking Sticks; she met them in 2007 when they were the opening act—then known as pop-punk Trust Fall—at Washington’s 9:30 Club.
Over time, the three songwriters mutually discovered a new musical ambience that was more natural, more organic, and suited Lee’s voice. They started writing songs in that direction and came up with what is now the distinctive SHAED sound. They also formed a family: Lee and Spencer began dating in 2010 and were married in Lee’s grandmother’s house in Arlington in 2018.
When most, if not all, musicians from the Washington, DC, region hit it big, they relocate to Los Angeles or New York, where the machinery of entertainment—agents, studios, side musicians, distributors—is easier to access. Why then, in the wake of global recognition, is SHAED sticking around here?
For one, Lee says, “Family is a big thing for us—all of our families are here, and we see them as often as we can, and our friends are here, and we’re basically self-sufficient” when it comes to recording.
“And we want to put DC [music] on the map,” Spencer adds. “There are such incredible venues here, and we want to stick around and kind of help build the scene more and provide more representation for DC for its music.”
Three years after changing the name of the band to SHAED and perfecting their alternative-pop sound, another milestone was accomplished: SHAED headlined a sold-out show at the 1,200-seat 9:30 Club, the place where it all began. And love was in the air.
“It was the culmination of our Trampoline tour, when the song was exploding on radio,” Spencer says. “We’d always dreamed of headlining the 9:30 Club, and now it was sold out. And we said, ‘Hey, can we give it up for Max; it’s his 10-year anniversary of coming out [as gay],’ and there was this eruption from the crowd. That was just an incredible moment for all three of us.”
After the show, they were besieged by fans who told the Ernsts they had been following them since their folk-rock days; others reminded Lee they had her EP from when she was a teenager.
“And that’s why we’re staying in Northern Virginia and the DC area,” Lee says. “It’s been so supportive for all three of us over the years.”
While SHAED is hitting high notes now, there have been some low ones. The band honed its skills with four-hour sets of cover songs, playing hits by the likes of the B-52s, at venues as small as Great Falls’ Old Brogue Irish Pub. “That was paying our dues,” Max says. “It was brutal.”
“We’ve been at rock bottom,” Spencer admits. “There have been many ebbs and flows financially, and when you get down to that point, you really have to go deep and just believe in your craft and trust your brother and your wife … It’s definitely been difficult, but I think it’s a blessing that all three of us are in this together. That’s gotten us through some really difficult times.”
“I remember just feeling defeated sometimes over the years,” adds Max. “We’ve all been pursuing this dream since we were in early high school and hit all the pitfalls—record deals that would fall through, not having something take off and kind of grinding it out as performers. The hardest thing was just sticking with it. But even when things were really touchy, we never gave up; we always fought it together.”
“I think the hardest thing has been finding myself,” Lee says. “It’s been kind of a really big journey for me … going from a solo artist and being very afraid, and not really finding my voice. I wasn’t confident, but now I feel much more like myself. When you come out on the other end and you finally feel stable and happy—and these guys are the best thing ever.”
The out-of-the-blue duet with Sting on the song “2 in a Million” came about thanks to SHAED’s record label, Photo Finish Records of New York. Unlike the behemoth label Atlantic, independent 15-year-old Photo Finish has six employees.
“We just added our seventh,” corrects Photo Finish vice president of marketing Gerardo Cueva. He’s also SHAED’s manager.
The label had been working with the managers of best-selling DJ and producer Steve Aoki, who had expressed an interest in working with the band. After a few misfires, “They got back to us and said, ‘OK, we’ve got one,’” Cueva says. ‘It’s a duet with Sting.’ I sent that to Chelsea, and it was the most instant ‘yes, please’ ever.”
“‘We don’t even need to hear the song,’” Lee recalls saying. “‘We’re doing it.’”
The accompanying video includes a sequence shot atop a building in Harlem. Sting and Lee look happy as they spin together to Aoki’s steadily building ballad. “He was such a nice person,” Lee says of the Police founder. “And it’s really cool to meet people who inspire you and find out they’re actually incredible humans, humble and easy to work with.”
“He said he was a fan of ‘Trampoline,’” Max says. “He said he appreciated a good whistling motif. That was a nice compliment.”
While Sting was unavailable for comment, his website includes a statement about teaming up with SHAED and Aoki: “To me, the greatest element in music is surprise, so I’m always open to collaborate with other artists as you never quite know where it’s going to take you. This sounded like an interesting opportunity, and I’m excited for people to hear the new track.”
Cueva says the label’s philosophy is to develop an audience by “getting the artist on the road, not chasing hits and [working] with them for long-term periods. It’s a process, not a flash-in-the-pan style of development.”
New SHAED songs have been dropping into the ether monthly, pushed out to radio and routinely added to daily rotations by a network of regional marketing specialists; those songs will be collected into an album format—SHAED’s first—and released on April 16. “‘Trampoline’ will be on it,” Cueva says.
As for live shows, 2020 was a disappointment, for obvious reasons. “We had so many things lined up,” Cueva says, enumerating COVID-canceled shows. “Festivals in Switzerland [and] Austria, and Australia’s biggest festival. A headlining tour of Japan, a full European tour. To headline in countries you’ve never even been to, that’s special.”
On the other hand, the members of SHAED agree that the coronavirus lockdown has given them time to compose and record new music in the tidy home studio in the basement of their striking midcentury Falls Church house.
“We can record wherever,” Lee says. “We can record upstairs in the living room or in the basement or at Max’s [Washington, DC, row house], wherever we want to do our thing.”
Those home recordings are not demos for polishing later; they’re the finished versions. “We haven’t been into a proper studio in a very long time,” Max says.
“Recording technology has come so far,” adds Spencer. “You can do so much on a low budget.”
In fact, the band is working with a 13-piece orchestra in North Macedonia. “We’ve been Skyping with this orchestra and getting real strings on this entire album,” Spencer says. “It’s been a big process for the record, but we all love how these strings sound on these songs with Chelsea’s voice.”
This story originally ran in our March issue. For more stories like this, subscribe to our monthly magazine.