Fitz & the Tantrums gear up for a Big Night of fun
It’s officially a rockin’ year for Fitz & the Tantrums, since the California soul band began 2023 by appearing on the TV institution “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.” For the band it proved especially memorable, since they had to pre-tape their appearance at three in the morning.
“It’s fun to be on such an iconic show, but they told us it would be at 3 a.m. and I said, ‘Are you kidding me?’” frontman Michael Fitzpatrick said this week. “We literally played in Anaheim that night, then drove an hour and a half to tape it at Disneyland, in that diner parking lot. But it turned out to be awesome, and fortunately they had a crowd there ready to lose their minds.” The band plays at a more friendly hour at Big Night Live tonight.
The Tantrums’ biggest hits have been rousing, anthemic songs like “Handclap” and the recent single “Sway.” But as Fitzpatrick points out, those songs can be the toughest to come up with. “I wish those fun, anthemic, onelisten songs came easy but you’ve got to bleed for them. When we were writing that third album that had ‘Handclap’ on it, we’d had two successful records and were feeling a lot of pressure. For six months I was writing a song every day and coming up with a big fat lemon. I’d be in bed in tears, telling my wife ‘I just can’t write a good song’. After six months I walked into the studio one day with my friend, (cowriter) Sam Hollander. And I said, ‘Just give me a kick and a snare, and the crummiest saxophone sample you can find.’ After seven minutes I knew we had the song. I kept that first vocal because I could never recapture the energy — the underlying emotion that you’re hearing there is relief.”
Though the group’s love for vintage Motown was evident from the start, Fitzpatrick says their true roots are in the ‘80s new wave he grew up loving. “After the first album all I was hearing was, ‘Retro soul throwback!’ I thought they were being kind of dismissive about what we were doing. So I made sure we included the new wave influence on the second album — and then we heard, ‘Now they’re jumping on the ‘80s bandwagon!’ But those are my real touchstones; I can tell you I bought the first
Tears for Fears album when it was still an import. We had a radio station in LA that was playing all that new wave, and that was my real influence — I didn’t like hair metal and I was too stylish to be a punk rocker.”
Speaking of style, he’s lately got an apparent thing for the color pink, hence the suit he wore on New Year’s Eve. “It’s my son’s favorite color, so that’s part of it. I also love the idea of owning a color that’s been so gender identified in the past — and pink was a masculine color 100 years ago, before we had the idea of blue and pink for babies. I like the energy it gives off, which seemed perfect for the vibe of ‘Sway’.”
Its been 12 years since Fitz & the Tantrums made their local debut at Brighton Music Hall. Fitzpatrick has some memories of that night in 2011: “I remember it for two reasons. The first is that Noelle (cosinger Noelle Scaggs) showed up with no voice, so there were tears backstage. People in the audience had to fill in her parts, and I remember thinking ‘Hey, at least people know our songs well enough to sing along’. The other reason is that there was supposed to be a big ‘Snowmageddon’ that night. We escaped by really tearing down the highway, but I can remember waking up with icicles in our bunks.”