SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ EE E11
music
BY TRAVIS DESHONGChelsea Lee’s voice, gravelly on
the edges, bends like a beam of
light, piercing through hazy bass
thumps.
“My mom used to tell people I
smoked two packs a day,” Lee
recalled with a grin. “She’d be
saying that when I was 4.”
As the lead singer of Shaed, the
D.C.-based alternative-pop trio,
Lee’s voice is finding new people
in new spaces. It has hypnotized
crowds at Lollapalooza, on “Jim-
my Kimmel Live,” at the Apple
event in 2018 unveiling the new
MacBook Air.
At the moment her voice was
filling a more modest space: the
kitchen of the band’s home in
Silver Spring, Md.
“The garden was fun when it
was thriving,” Lee said on a hot
September morning, wistfully
surveying the vestiges of pepper
plants in a plot in their yard.
She’s standing by a side door of
the band’s single-story brick
house, where they make music.
The three band mates are also
housemates: Lee; her husband,
Spencer Ernst; and Spencer’s
twin brother, Max Ernst. The
house is full of family photos
interspersed with knickknacks
salvaged from thrift stores and
estate sales: a silver Buddha, book
stands, a Confucius lamp sculpt-
ed from green-hued glass. All of
which makes the house feel lived-
in (“grandma-style,” is how Lee
describes it).
In the yard, Spencer thumbs
wilted pepper leaves and inspects
the few fully grown vegetables
that have survived. Spring and
fall are tour-heavy. Summer is
festival season. Not much time
left o ver to dedicate to the garden.
The band’s i ncreasing absences
are a side effect of their success.
Shaed’s breakout 2018 song,
“Trampoline,” has racked up over
95 million Spotify streams and an
impressive slate of remix collabo-
rations, including one with Zayn
Malik. New festival invites
poured in. They made the jump
from tour opener to headliner. It’s
the kind of boost that could make
a band feel like stardom is within
reach.
On the other hand, there’s the
garden. More buzz means more
gigs, more travel and less time
around the friends and family
that keep them grounded and
comfortable. Shaed is cultivating
a rock-and-roll dream that has
less to do with jet-setting super-
stardom and more to do with
balance. They want to be stable
but not static. They want to grow
but keep their roots.
How do you keep a dream like
that alive?T
heir routine runs like clock-
work. Lee cooks breakfast,
and then they go into the
studio. Hours pass as progres-
sions get sampled, lyrics get
scrawled and the mic gets passed
around. They take a break to
recalibrate, listening to other mu-
sic during as they eat: Frank Sina-
tra, Jaden Smith, jazz dinner play-
lists on Spotify.
Shaed’s sound is a medley of
influences: a little guitar pop, a
touch of lo-fi, glimpses of shoe-
gaze, some R&B swagger and
hints of a 1980s pep. It’s the
culmination of a decade’s worth
of experimentation, much of it
done together.
Spencer and Max’s mother was
a musician and songwriter who
taught them how to harmonize.
Max says there’s h ome movie foot-
age of her blowing their minds by
playing Heart’s “Barracuda.” Lee
says that her parents had beauti-
ful voices, too, but that they didn’tsing. She met the Ernst brothers
at a show at Washington’s 9:30
Club in high school. Spencer and
Max, then playing as a duo called
Trust Fall, were opening for Fair-
fax, Va., band Emmet Swimming.
A week later, they were all busk-
ing together at the Ty sons Galle-
ria mall.
Independently, they had sights
on the teenage version of the
rock-and-roll dream. Both Lee
and the Ernsts signed deals at 18
— her with Atlantic, them with
Cherry Lane Publishing. “A t the
time, it was incredible,” Spencer
says. “A t that age, everyone wants
to get signed.”
The luster didn’t last long. The
Ernsts felt external pressure on
their art, and their enthusiasm
for songwriting plummeted. Lee’s
record took too much time to
drop, and she didn’t l ike the hired
guns the studio had brought in to
play with her. She felt boxed in
creatively and didn’t k now how toarticulate what she did and didn’t
like. One thing she definitely
didn’t l ike was the feeling that the
record company had its own
plans for who she should be.
“I didn’t have enough experi-
ence and confidence to home in
on what I wanted to do,” Lee says,
“so I got thrown into a situation
where I was billed as this pop
singer-songwriter I wasn’t.”
The Ernsts managed to escape
their publishing deal after Cherry
Lane was acquired by a bigger
company. They advised Lee on
how she could untangle herself at
Atlantic. Before long she joined
the brothers’ new band, the Walk-
ing Sticks, which had a folkier
vibe with shades of contemporary
pop (in an online profile at the
time, they listed Adele, Haim and
Ta me Impala as influences).
The band’s sound grew lusher,
moodier. In 2016, they leaned all
the way into dream pop and re-
named the band Shaed, after a
cloak in a fantasy novel they all
read.
It was a fit.T
he band’s cluttered practice
space sits just off the kitch-
en in their Silver Spring
home. That is where they wrote
“Trampoline,” the song that
launched Shaed into view for
many of its fans outside Washing-
ton.
They were messing around
with their Roland Juno-106 syn-
thesizer and found a chord pro-
gression that had a spark to it.
They penned the lyrics in a day.
I’ve been havin’ dreams /
Jumpin’ on a trampoline...
The opening line was inspired
by old home movies from the
Ernst family trove. “Spencer and I
were at a great-uncle’s house,
must’ve been 2 years old,” says
Max. “He had a trampoline. The
tape was messed up from years of
wear and tear. Some parts were in
color; others weren’t. Sections
had this grainy texture. It looked
like a dream.”
Last fall, the sound of Lee’s
ethereal voice, singing those
words, were piped through the
sound system on a stage in Brook-
lyn as Apple CEO Tim Cook un-
veiled the commercial for next
MacBook Air. The commercial
later aired on TV and streamed
online. It was Shaed’s worldwide
debut.
SEE SHAED ON E12For Shaed,
the music
dream is all
about family
D.C. pop band works to
balance new fame with
maintaining its roots
TONI L. SANDYS/THE WASHINGTON POSTChelsea Lee performs
with Shaed in the
District this month.
The trio includes
Lee’s husband,
Spencer Ernst, and
his twin brother, Max
Ernst. Amid national
success, Shaed’s
members continue to
live together in Silver
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