On the "Michael Angelakos is Passion Pit" Residencies: 14 Shows, 2.5-3 Hours Each Show, 4 Months of Grueling Growing Pains
On "being yourself," messing up in front of people and not giving a shit, decimating your ego, sweating, injury, and the hellish online bullshit that shows us all how we treat people with disabilities
note: as i often do, i posted this without proofreading, and i got an earful from someone and for good reason, so please excuse me as I continually edit this. let’s just say I do it all by hand, i don’t use any of this autocorrect/predictive stuff because, in my opinion, looking back on things, i used to write way better before i relied on any of that stuff…but i’m sure a lot of smarter people who know me would probably disagree—thanks for understanding
This piece emphasizes the last four shows in Boston and does not talk much about the Deluxx Fluxx shows—I will swing back and get to those soon.
In June of last year following my second time playing Just Like Heaven festival in Pasadena, and upon realizing that I really had to get my act together and figure out what I was doing with my life in order to make sure I would avoid any further financial catastrophes, I made a few choices. The first was to fire my managers because we just didn’t work well together. I used to have this thing where I would just allow stuff that clearly wasn’t working to continue because I feel like everyone will hate me if I say “hey, this isn’t working.” This is not uncommon with musicians especially, because the first thing you’d hear when an artist parted ways with a manager or any “music industry professional” would be “oh, that person’s crazy.” I noticed this especially with all female artists, particularly in the 2010’s—there was always some excuse; just didn’t have the tunes, impossible to work with, said no to everything. The whole nine.
But I was in Buffalo with no exact exit date, figuring out some personal familial matters that were helping me tap into one of my favorite parts of my mind which is the one that can solve problems. As helpless as I can get with my own career, as it sometimes feels, helping other people is usually a lot easier for me. But with my therapist, with my dad, with a few of my friends, I realized I could talk through it differently now because I was surrounded by people and also had gained a certain level of respect I had never really enjoyed up to that point. People spoke to me differently, took me seriously. It was like suddenly having taken off a uni-bomber vest I never put on but everyone else seemed to think I had on (a concept I am used to).
Completely improvised version of “Alone (On Ice!)” with Dimitrius Pass on SPD
The first thing I was told was to figure out an alternative to the live band as it was (Chris Hartz, Ray Suen, Guilz Pizzulo, Aaron Folb, etc) just because those guys are real-deal, super hard-working players that are out all of the time or have other things going on. Because they were out with Childish Gambino, and because the overhead when I tour with them is so substantial that their numbers better reflect the kind of income Donald sees from touring, having been out of the game for so long without a new album simply capped my ability to grow, and lacking the funding to start something new again without taking the dumbest possible deals and without really good partners who fully got or helped me see out any vision of mine, touring felt impossible. There is also that co-dependence thing, where if, for instance, Sal Panza or Bryan Scheckel or certain sound engineers couldn’t come on the road with me, I thought I’d basically die—they all knew I felt this way too. That’s a hard position to put people in when people aren’t like stockholders in your business, no matter how close you are to them, personally or professionally.
Dimitrius and I playing for the first time ever, really, going into completely improvised versions of “Aye Aye, Roddy” and then “Come See Through Me (to You),” the former being unreleased but the latter’s iPhone demo included on Nine Times Your Torch Songs (Side A, 2025)
One of the first people I called—and who gave me the initial advice actually—was Mark Kates, MGMT’s manager and a great guy I have known on and off for many years. In 2019, when we played Just Like Heaven for the first time, I was coming out of a dark stasis that had me completely freaked out about my future. I was doing a tenth-anniversary run of Manners, celebrating like a geriatric legacy artist, wheeling himself out on the stage saying “here are the only songs anyone’s going to care about anyway” (in my mind), but always, in the end, blown away by how fun and invigorating the experiences ended up being from that tour on (two tours, total, of actual enjoyment while touring).
But at that 2019 JLH festival, Mark came up to me after our performance and practically screamed in front of all of these people, “that was one of the best fucking shows I have seen in a long time!” Just one statement like that from a dude like Mark Kates is a statement that can life me up and get me through anything—that tour would go down as one of the best PP tours ever. But Mark couldn’t take me on due to the complexity of my operation—trust me, there’s a lot more there than just Passion Pit music—and what it would basically demand of my partners, but through those weeks of talking he imparted a ton of wisdom and also made me feel sane. One thing he told me was to play solo shows and just watch what happens when I do. Okay, first of all, Mark knew this was impossible for me to comprehend. Maybe. I was like stumbling over my words, I couldn’t even fathom what a solo show meant let alone developing another form of the same old thing-of-a-band simply to adapt to scheduling when the official guys (at that time) couldn’t make it happen. I lost out on around ~300k worth of show offers that came in while talking with him. And, trust me, we need the money.
No, you can’t do it alone. No one’s going to like anything you do alone. You’re boring and people want X, Y, and Z, and expect a certain level of intensity and fun, and you’re going to need to spend a lot of money and rebuild everything because you’re not good enough and you’re never going to want to get good enough fast enough because you’re not interested enough in it.
So I got a band together with my old friends once my friend Cadi Storm asked if I would maybe play her spot in NYC called Silver Linings. It wasn’t a typical venue, I didn’t have a clear direction, I just wanted to do something for my friend and also get in a show or two so I could feel out what I needed to do. Needless to say, it was part disaster, part best-thing-that-could-have-happened to me, and the disastrous part was really nominal, only in that it was such a deviation from my typical playbook which is everything completely planned out, locked in, no surprises, money is good, etc, which is fantastic and the most boring, less creatively-inspiring thing in the world. It was madness, and it was…actually, really, just me being myself.
When people listen to your music or get familiar with your persona—knowing very little about you, really, and if what they know about you is mediated via the press, even less than they think, no matter how brutally honest you may tend to be—they think you are the dude who has to sit down and be in interview mode, or barely wants to speak between songs at a typical PP show because he’s fucking exhausted and doesn’t feel like making a fool of himself and rambling because he’s always done and will likely continue to do that. Factor in any mental health stuff, which is SUCH an evolving, complex issue for even people who don’t meet diagnostic criteria, in this day and age? Bitch, please…I vastly underestimated the arrogance and need to feel superior to others that many in the mental health communities (that are terminally online, not IRL as much, really) tend to possess as runoff qualities of a suffering faction of our society. To be honest, I remember always projecting outwards and thinking I understood others, except I was right a lot if not most of the time, but I never did it so publicly and so without care or feigning to think of how, for instance, if the person I were speaking about would be affected in any way by my words—as in react to or subsequently be subjected to discriminatory decision-making, lost career opportunities based on information that is based on my opinion, not fact, etc—the last thing any person who knows anything about this kind of stuff would do is act the way some of my fans did. Now, I don’t care if I lose them because I’ve held on to my story which is the REAL STORY.
And, no, I will not just let it go, because I am in a good position and it has nothing to do with taking things personally. It’s when you attack the people who are doing more to protect me in my current situation than any overpaid professional I have ever worked with—and that’s a lot of people and a lot of money—ever has, when I am in the best place I have ever been in personally and subsequently professionally, I am not going to let you have your way. That’s a precedent no real mental health advocate, by election or not (at this point, certainly not by election—I do in fact regret it), would EVER set given my current position and where I am at mentally and in age.
I could go on and on about how doing things mostly myself, hiring people who are new to the game (some worked out, some haven’t), avoiding the typical managerial position, not eating my words and just signing some dumb agreements that’ll make me kick myself a thousand times over in a few years when we look at all of these recent signings and thing “how did we let it get this out of control” in terms of industrial practices and human suffering. I could rant and rave about how tired and stressed I’d be after moving my gear, setting up my gear, playing a show for three hours, getting one night off to not move gear, playing a show the next day after adjusting the gear, then moving the gear again, which fucked up my hands and arms at times where I was playing injured. I could bitch and moan but that’s what I loved about it. I just wanted to start over. I just wanted to very clearly illustrate that I’m bored with where it’s been, I obviously am ambitious and want it to go someplace amazing, but where would I be without my fans? Now what if my fans could come and just see me jam and try stuff out? If I were even remotely a fan of an artist, I would enjoy it even if it was sub-par. In fact, my whole thing is the sub-par stuff (to other people) is by far my favorite kind of stuff.
My thinking was, with my booking agents Kirk and Steve over at WME, was to just reset things and start over. Suck until I’m good. Go out there and find my confidence in the likely winds of dissent. And I did.
I even happened to find a new person I want to be playing with in Dimitrius Pass, who played spd for a few songs one night then came back out with a full set the last night of the Boston residency. Here are some videos from that.
This was one of the weirdest, most incredibly useful experiences I have ever had as an artist. Everything is managed so carefully with people like me; it’s always are you sure you are well enough (which, trust me, I’d be going out there saying it was cool and it wasn’t, and I do not lie about that anymore, so my booking agent has a real reason to ask that question), and let’s get this lined up to maximize x, y, and z. But when I pitched this idea to Kirk at the offices in mid-late February, playing for 45 minutes on my knees in his office all these new songs on my Martin 00-18, that hour long meeting turning into nearly a three hour meeting—we were finally on the same page, and we still are. Continually locking in as we go along, actually—many, many thanks to Kirk, Steve, and everyone over at William Morris for fucking going to bat for me and really picking up the very chaotic Michael madness, the known unknowns stuff, that I hastily put down left and right when inspiration strikes.
Many thanks to Caitlyn (as always), Dimitrius, and my main boy, Adam Burns—as well as James Crawford, Aiden Devlin, the staff and crew at Brighton Music Hall, and of course, Mark Kates for helping to make the Boston shows happen in the first place. It was, after all, when we started talking again after JLH Festival in 2024, the original topic: how to get me back to Boston. Can’t wait to go back.
And thank you to everyone for coming out and letting me be me—your support and patience was not and has never been lost on me.
I've been enjoying the heck out of the demos and unreleased music you post. It's definitely fun to see the different paths your music takes. I can only imagine how frightening and exhilarating being out there on your own for these shows must have been for you 😊
You’re welcome 🎭