All in Music Features

Next Article

Music Features

Interview: Michael Angelakos of Passion Pit

The band is only one direction out of many directions that you might want to take. Is that limited in the sense that Passion Pit is going to be on this trajectory and you have a sense of what the boundaries are for it?
I know what it’s capable of doing and I know what it’s not capable of doing, which means I’m in a comfortable position as a songwriter, because if you’re having any kind of identity crisis when you’re working on a project, you’re in a lot of trouble. I think we’re at a point where I think I know where I want to take it next and I’m fairly pleased with that, which is again a huge step for me and even anyone else in the band. I don’t think it’s necessarily a means to an end. I don’t think of any project like that because, I have so many writing projects coming up for other artists and producing and writing for other artists and everything is just kind of its own entity, and I allow them to take up their own space in my life and Passion Pit is taking up a lot more space than anything else right now. But I’m certainly reaping the benefits from it as a songwriter. There are 56 kids in PS22 choir singing my song on YouTube to MTV so the songs are resonating. It means that the formula’s working so I’m going to continue to like play with it. Bruce Springsteen has a specific formula and he beats it to death and that’s Bruce Springsteen. Right now this project is about beating to death a specific successful way of working, and that’s fine. I’m letting it go for now and if we all get tired of it at some point, we’ll move on, but right now it’s a good thing.

So, you guys put out an EP and then what happened, how’d you get there to the next steps?
Neon Gold is a project run by [Derek Davies] the step-brother of Syd Butler of French Kiss and he put out - we were his first release - he put out a 7-inch of “Sleepyhead” and “Better Things.” He wrote the blog Good Weather For Airstrikes, that was his blog. I don’t know anything about blogs, I don’t mess with the internet in that sense, but I know a lot of people were paying attention to what he was doing. So they kind of scouted us at a show in New Haven opening up for Girl Talk, which the night before I said I wasn’t doing because I was just too tired and I wanted to do homework – we really weren’t taking it seriously at all. And then he showed it to Syd and Paul at Frenchkss and they were like immediately enamored and wanted to work with us and it was the most amazing experience. I was following Les Savvy Fav all throughout high school and Paul had worked at Capitol and to this day they remain very stable mentors. They’re not going anywhere. And the thing was, once we signed to Frenchkiss, it was Brooklyn Vegan, it was all these scary, scary, really scary blogs like they have to love you or you’re going to get torn apart and we get torn apart because we’re this new hype band. And essentially blogs took hold of it because one of the biggest bloggers in the United States released us on 7-inch and that’s it. And people just aggregated. It just kept moving and moving and moving through the internet, until all of a sudden we realize we’re getting thousands of plays a day and we have no idea why and so we get money from Frenchkiss to record the next album and I went to NY and worked with some friends on some demos and I wasn’t happy with the writing and then all of a sudden we’re talking to Columbia and XL and these humongous labels