How many shows had you played when you played last year at the WFNX show?
But how many shows did we play? I want to say, less than 30, less than 25.
Do you think that it was advantageous to you for where you’re at now, to have gotten it out of the way so early on, to do something like that?
That’s the labelistic way of approaching it. No, you know what it’s done? In interviews, they say, “So what was it like touring with Presidents of the USA and Death Cab for Cutie?” “It was fucking awesome! It was so amazing! We had a great time, they took care of us, and we really felt like we were cared about!” It’s just done nothing but create really stupid Wikipedia entries that are edited a little bit later. All it did was confuse things. WFNX is behind us and we love them, so, yes, at the end of the day, yes, it was awesome.
And now you’re playing the show this year, which is also partly our show.
It’s really exciting because we’re going to be debuting our new way of playing in Boston really soon. It’s really exciting. There was a point in our career, not so distant from where we are now, that we just hated playing shows because it was so painful. Finally we’re looking forward to these things and that’s such a new thing, like, the past few weeks. So the idea of coming back to Boston and all that, which is really risky because you have to go in front of a bunch of people who don’t know who you are, and you have to be prove yourself. I feel like we’ve proving ourselves. I think we’re going to be proving ourselves for another year and a half. It’s all about endurance, and playing this kind of show is really hard, but the challenge is like, we now appreciate the challenge because we feel like we’re working for something– that’s our way of working. We’re really excited
Who was the group who sampled you guys, the rap group?
Chiddy Bang. It’s awesome because hip-hop is such a funny genre to me and when a hip hop artist samples you, you know you’ve hit a melody that works. And it’s so flattering. Chiddy Bang isn’t really well-known, but amazing.
Whenever we see Passion Pit remixes, is that you?
No, it’s actually all Nate. I don’t do it, you know, it’s done by everyone else in the band, you know, sometimes Ayad does them. Ayad just did the Phoenix remix. We’ve been working with [Phoenix] a lot, we really look up to them, whenever we see them, we hang out, and they’re just really amazing guys.
I just don’t like remixes. I like a song to be a song and keep it as a song because I love songs. So when I hear a remix and you draw it out for eight minutes, it has to be amazing for me to like it. I just don’t like that kind of stuff. But everyone else in the band does, and people who listen to our music usually do. Nate, he’s Shuttle. He’s done a lot of White Label stuff. He’s doing really well, actually, and he does Shuttle remixes but then he does remixes under Passion Pit. I really like the fact that he doesn’t want to mix them. He didn’t want anyone to know that he was Shuttle, he wanted to be like a Burial thing. I was like, how about you just stop, because you’re so good at it and you’re working for something and you’re doing something so amazingly well, you should be proud.
You seem very open-minded to the idea of crossing over. Do you think your open-mindedness is going to help you through all this?
I think my greatest asset is that I am willing to consider this a test of endurance. There are so many people who want us to fail, because they expect there to be backlash. When Vampire Weekend really hit it, there were just so many people who talked about the backlash. They kind of instilled this caution: “is a band really worth it?”. I think that what’s keeping us alive is the fact that, any other time in my life I would have quit because of that stuff. I don’t like when people go online and say “I was in a class with him and he said the stupidest shit.” “I sold him coke three years ago” – which is ridiculous because I’ve never done [coke]. Just so many mean things that are directed towards me. Because my threshold is so low, I would have just quit. But I think what we have here is, we’re a really sensitive band, I don’t think a lot of these other bands – I don’t think MGMT would ever care about that kind of stuff. I know that we believe that we’re supposed to be doing something, we just have to break through what seems to be impermeable. It’s such a difficult journey and we know it, and we’ve been told that it is, and we’ve been told that we have to just get used to the fact that – for instance, there’s someone on Facebook with a Michael Angelakos fan page that is responding to people with the most inane things and making me look like a conceited asshole. There’s already that kind of stuff happening. It’s awful. I think now we know: there’s something happening that we’re doing that’s just good, and we have to keep that in mind because we’re going to hit a backlash pretty soon, pretty hardcore. I think we’re willing to put up with it. Other bands will go back to sticking with the indie world, be comfortable with touring 200-300 capacity venues, because they know that and they can always do that. It’s instant gratification, it’ll always work for them. Like Bill Callahan, these guys will do the same thing over and over because they don’t care about that stuff. But we can overcome it.
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