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NPR Music: Tiny Desk Concerts
Tiny Desk Concerts from NPR's All Songs Considered features your favorite musicians performing at Bob Boilen's desk in the NPR Music office. This is the AUDIO only archive.Are you a fancy A/V nerd and need video? Visit our new Tiny Desk Concert video channel. Eye-popping video and all of the music you've come to expect.

Passion Pit: Tiny Desk Concert

By Stephen Thompson
Published October 29, 2012 at 12:00 PM MDT

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.

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    Tiny Desk Concerts
    Stephen Thompson
    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.)
    See stories by Stephen Thompson
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