Until I read Pitchfork's coverage of the album, I didn't realize that Passion Pit was basically just one dude, Michael Angelakos. Back when Manners came out, I thought it was beautiful too -- both albums seem somehow insane, or familiar with insanity. But in Angelakos' music, insanity isn't this alienating or alien quality; it feels familiar. When he's singing in his crazy strung-out, on-the-edge voice, you begin to recognize that tenor, and recognize that state of being. And I'm starting to think that maybe the experience of insanity (or of brinking on insanity) is a universal experience -- when I listen to his songs, coming from some place so chaotic and wild and illogical, I'm like, "Yeah, I know that place." Maybe insanity, the un-plumbable dark, is familiar to a lot of people. I mean, so many beautiful things resemble insanity: love, creativity, revolution. Even if you don't struggle with a mental illness or know someone who does, there's a high chance you've seen elements of the insane in the everyday undark parts of life.
Angelakos has actually dealt a lot with mental health issues -- he's been bipolar and suicidal, and can't tour very much due to unpredictable breakdowns. He seems like a brilliant and genuine person in the article, but the person who struck me as the star of the story (although she only got a few mentions) was his girlfriend of three years, who stayed with him through his bouts with insanity. It must be so devastating to be worn and torn by someone you love intensely, someone who is dealing with demons and darknesses and mental abysses that you recognize but can't remedy. To love someone through their many variations of themselves -- variations that, at times, might make them a stranger to you.
Insanity is kind of this contagious thing, I think. You can't love someone on the edge without going to the edge yourself, without looking down into the dark and seeing what they're seeing, without knowing the terror of that spiraling, bottomless wilderness. Without becoming kind of insane yourself.
In the interview with Angelakos, he says he doesn't know how to make sense of love, which is why he writes a lot about it: "On a literal level, love does not make sense, but that's what makes it love." I can't help thinking that love is another iteration of insanity -- I believe that now, more than I ever did. Love, and not just romantic love, is insane because it's not logical, and it will inevitably hurt you, and it's economically not-viable (the returns rarely equal the investment), and it will take you to disturbing convoluted secret places in yourself and in the other person, places that never saw the daylight before and might never again.
That's the main reason I love Gossamer -- the way it handles insanity, or love, or both.
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