Passion Pit gets personal with cleaner-sounding "Kindred"

Michael Angelakos wanted to be a musician for as long as he can remember. The Passion Pit singer says he can actually pinpoint a specific moment when he declared it, too.

"When I was five years old, I remember looking up at my parents and saying, 'I'm going to be a rock star.' And my parents are like, 'You are an insane person. We are terrified of your entire upbringing.'"

Still, Angelakos says, his parents "always knew" he wanted to make music and that he'd find a way to do it. "It would piss them off for a minute and then they would be really excited for me,'" he says.

It's safe to say that today his mom and dad are excited about his career.

Angelakos formed Passion Pit while attending Boston's Emerson College back in 2007. Two years later the New Jersey native released his debut, "Manners," which garnered a lot of praise from critics. "Gossamer" followed in 2009, and earlier this year came the third Passion Pit album, "Kindred."

Angelakos says his goal with "Kindred" was to strip down the music.

"I wanted to make a much cleaner-sounding record while still utilizing the same sound sources. It's really messy analog sounds. I don't really use a lot of digital, some of the programming is, but that's really about it. So I wanted to keep it raw, but cleaner -- like the '90s pop stuff, in terms of recording aesthetic. Then that informed the songwriting to be as simple as possible, at least for me ... I wanted to keep the choruses shorter and sweeter," he said.

Angelakos applied that "cleaner" concept to his lyrics, revealing that "with 'Kindred,' I wanted to see how simple I could make the lyrics even while the actual lyrics were about really messy situations."

Angelakos says he tends to write about his personal life, though he doesn't necessarily mean to.

"I don't go into a song and go, 'OK now I'm going to write a song about this.' I don't understand people like that ... I automatically will write something and it will spray out to a screen or paper and then I realize what I'm writing about and then you start sculpting into something that's palatable."

To an extent, Angelakos says he feels as though he succeeded with his goal to create a cleaner sound. But he quickly added, "There are still things I think I could have done better, but you learn." After all, as Angelakos points out, "You're always your biggest critic."

Writing music is almost therapeutic for Angelakos, who says it's sometimes easier to express how he feels in a song rather than open up to someone face-to-face.

"In terms of my personal life ... it's weird. I don't think it's like an extrovert type thing. I just don't know how else to deal with how I feel and everything. Like I have all these feelings that are completely inexplicable and really hard to explain. Then I have these feelings that are normal human feelings about relationships ... I'm trying all the time to connect with people and I have no idea how to talk to people about things. I kind of let the music portion of my life handle that for better or worse because sometimes I'm stuck in that world where I write songs about it, so I don't have to talk about it. Because that's actually happened."

Pouring his feelings into his music, though, seems to be connecting with fans. Angelakos says fans are gravitating towards the new material in concert. He's noticed crowds singing songs off of "Kindred" even louder than some of older tracks (aside from fan favorites like "Sleepyhead" and "Take a Walk," at least).

"The songs that I didn't think too much about are always the ones that connect with people the most," he noted.

Angelakos played a mix of new and older songs at Lipton's Be More Tea Festival in North Charleston, South Carolina, last weekend, and will do the same while on the road this fall.

And after that? Perhaps a new album? Angelakos is almost always writing (he recently penned four songs in four days during a break from touring).

"I'm always thinking of what to do next even while I'm doing whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing," Angelakos said.