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Passion Pit: Tiny Desk Concert

Passion Pit's Michael Angelakos is a fussy sonic craftsman: A keyboardist and singer who started out working solo on his laptop, he now makes fizzily catchy electro-pop that orbits around monster hooks. He's not, in other words, the first musician you'd associate with a stripped-down performance behind NPR Music's Tiny Desk, where Technicolor production tends to give way to unfiltered voices and bare instrumental essentials. But Angelakos, a gifted songwriter who's been publicly forthcoming and articulate about his battles with bipolar disorder and substance abuse, is no intellectual or musical lightweight.

Angelakos clearly saw an opportunity in bare-bones arrangements of his best-known songs — his 2008 breakthrough single "Sleepyhead" and two hits from this year's Gossamer, "Take a Walk" and "Carried Away" — that he couldn't explore with a full band. With only his own falsetto, an electric piano, and simple guitar lines from Passion Pit's Ian Hultquist, Angelakos gets to direct listeners toward his words, which blossom under scrutiny. "Take a Walk," for example, turns up in a zillion commercials thanks to that monster hook, but it's also a rich, thoughtful sketch of an immigrant family's experiences, expectations, dreams and disappointments. In this performance, the hooks do persist, but words rule the day.

Set List

  • "Take A Walk"
  • "Sleepyhead"
  • "Carried Away"
  • Credits

    Producer: Bob Boilen; Editor: Denise DeBelius; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Videographers: Denise DeBelius, Christopher Parks; photo by Ryan Smith/NPR


    Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

    Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)