Michael Angelakos and Passion Pit bring 'Kindred' to Camden
Curled up on a couch backstage before a show at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, in March, Michael Angelakos could hardly appear to be more relaxed.
Curled up on a couch backstage before a show at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, in March, Michael Angelakos could hardly appear to be more relaxed.
Relaxation wasn't quite the case, however.
"I've never actually been more stressed - and happier," said the singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist leader of Passion Pit, gearing up for a tour in support of its third album, Kindred, on Columbia Records.
"I don't know why," Angelakos said. "I think that's the way I like it, when I'm doing what I love, which is essentially making things all the time, which is what I'm hired to do and what I love to do. And also problem-solving, fixing things, getting things accomplished. I have a really great feeling every day, even when things are going terribly wrong."
The band will play the sold-out Radio 104.5 Birthday Show at the Susquehanna Bank Center in Camden on Sunday. It's part of an impressive bill that will include Of Monsters And Men, Death Cab for Cutie, Hozier, and several other pop acts.
Angelakos' happiness is closely monitored by fans, and Passion Pit has lots of them. "Take a Walk," from the 2012 album Gossamer, became ubiquitous on Taco Bell Doritos Loco ads and Major League Baseball broadcasts. When Gossamer was released, the singer disclosed that he had been found to have bipolar disorder when he was 17. That condition, he said, along with bouts of heavy drinking, had led to many concert cancellations and his hospitalization during the tour for the band's breakout 2009 album, Manners. In 2013, he received the Beatrice Stern Media Award at the Erasing the Stigma Leadership Awards, for his efforts at increasing media awareness of mental illness.
What's it like to tour behind his complex, hyper-energetic synth-pop songs, which tend to have a core sadness beneath their shiny, happy exteriors? "It's stressful," he says. "But look, I'm 27 years old. This could be the last record I put out and tour on. So if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it right, and make it as positive and exciting as possible. I want this to be everything I've always wanted it to, and I think I can pull it off. I want this to be great. There's a ton of work to be done, and that excites me even more."
At SXSW, Angelakos was preparing for a show that night at the Converse-sponsored alt-SXSW venue the Fader Fort, for a heavily branded show that was also streamed live on the Internet by Dell, another of the festival's corporate sponsors.
"I've dealt with corporate alignment," says Angelakos, who was born in New Jersey but grew up in the Boston area. (He now lives in New York, but proudly wears a Celtics cap and says, "Passion Pit is a Boston band.") "Taco Bell, Major League Baseball, Tropicana." (The last featured Gossamer's "Carried Away" in Farmstand commercials.) "The point is, it's the new radio. If you're a band and you're playing music, unless you're completely DIY and you're playing a basement, it's likely that there's another company - whether it be Amex or Red Bull - that will be behind it. Because everybody needs the money to put on shows. They don't want to spend it themselves."
With the success of Gossamer, Angelakos says, he can be "a little choosier." He admits that "I don't eat Taco Bell," but he says he was thoroughly impressed by the fast-food chain's commitment to music in its Feed the Beat campaign. "They actually care about the bands, and they put a lot of money into it. So that was cool."
There are corporate interests Angelakos says he wouldn't align Passion Pit with - "Let's not do anything with BP," he quips - but calls it "otherwise unavoidable. You can't do SXSW or any festival without it. The whole thing runs on it."
Kindred opens with "Lifted Up (1985)," a song that celebrates the birth year of his wife, Kristy Mucci, also the subject of this couplet from Gossamer's "On My Way": "Just believe in me, Christina / All these demons, I can beat 'em."
If the new album doesn't deliver quite the impact of Gossamer, that's partly because it comes from a less desperate place.
"This album is about trying to actually repair things and make things better," Angelakos says. There's a maturity apparent "that comes from getting older but also getting healthier."
When Passion Pit was formed in the mid-'00s, Angelakos was studying film and film criticism at Emerson College in Boston, where he met the other band members, all of whom were attending the Berklee College of Music.
"I've always seen Passion Pit as a musical theater project," Angelakos says. "It's this vehicle that I can use to explore these facets of my life that I really feel uncomfortable exploring, even with therapists. It's a whole other level of confession. It's brutally honest, but at the same time has a level of theatricality to it.
"There's no artifice, but the artifice is the synthetic world that I sonically build around it. These crazy huge choruses make it so much easier to be like, 'I'm failing you, but I'm trying really hard not to.' "
Angelakos named the album Kindred because "I never had the heart or the guts to call people family. I couldn't rely on other people. What I'm trying to do now is trust other people and open myself up to other people, which is a really hard thing for me.
"And I've just found that I've been surrounded by family the entire time, and I never really saw it that way," he reflects. "Sometimes just slight shifts in the way you look at things can alter so much. I just really began to be able to accept love. . . . I'm married, I have wonderful friends and people who care about me, and I have a great life. I'm at a weird time in my life where I think I'm going to be able to have longer periods of being happy. And that would be nice."
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