Fitz and the Tantrums: Finding your creative voice in your 40's and why success feels different than you think

0:01When that actually comes true, not a modified, but your exact dream on steroids comes true, you get there and it's a very strange feeling because you don't feel any better. And finding my wife and starting a family saved my life.

0:23Aarron Walter:For many of us, if we haven't had creative success by our 40s, we feel like we may have missed the boat. But Michael Fitz Fitzpatrick of Fitz and the Tantrums didn't achieve pop star status until he was well into his 40s, and now that he's in his 50s, he feels like he's just getting started. Haven't heard of Fitz and the Tantrums? Yes, you have.

1:06In our conversation, Fitz reveals how the band prototypes their live performances and why constraint has been essential to their creative evolution. He talks to us about the parallels of songwriting and product design, the importance of reading the room, whether it's 50 or 50 ,000 people, and why the best performances, like the best designs, create space for the audience to become co-creators.

1:31Aarron Walter:Fitz also opens up about how even after achieving his creative dreams, there was an emptiness that he struggled with and where he found true happiness. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Willery. And I'm Aaron Walter. If you're hearing this, you're not currently on our premium subscriber feed. Design Better premium subscribers enjoy weekly episodes. That's four episodes per month rather than just two. And all of them are ad-free. Plus, you'll get an invitation to our monthly AMAs with the smartest folks in design and tech. And if you subscribe at the annual level, you'll also get our toolkit, a collection of our favorite design and productivity tools like Perplexity, Miro, Read AI, and more.

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2:49We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

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3:32And now, back to the show.

3:39Aarron Walter:Fitz of Fitz and the Tantrums, welcome to the Design Better Podcast. Thanks so much for having me, guys. We're really excited to have you, I have to say. So, I really like your music. Aaron did have to say when we got pitched, like, I wasn't sure if I was familiar with the name, but he's like, you know their music for sure. I was like, oh, yeah. Yes, you definitely know. It's in the team. They were like, I don't think I know. I'm like, you know. Yeah, you know. Oh, yeah, now, oh, yeah. Yes. Either you're a sports fan and you've heard hand clap 10 ,000. I mean, it literally gets played in a stadium every night at every sporting event.

4:13Or they're more of an indie music lover and we have another hit song called Out of My League that has since gone TikTok viral like three different times. The internet is a crazy place.

4:24Aarron Walter:Yes, you are everywhere. That's a great song too. Yeah, so for folks that don't know you, let's rewind a little bit because you have a kind of interesting backstory. You were born in France from what we know and grew up in LA. So maybe talk us a little bit about that and kind of your early years and leading into your music career. Yeah, my mom's French and I was born overseas and was fortunate enough to spend most of my summers overseas in France with my grandparents every summer. So for me, it was a really incredible thing just from the beginning of my life, always understand this duality of cultures, of different countries, of different landscapes.

5:04I never saw myself as completely American or completely French. I've always sort of been in this middle place where French people, you know, I mean, they're notorious for being snobby about their language. They'll be like, you are not French. I'm like, I speak pretty damn good French. Like, but what are you? Are you Canadian? You know, they're always trying to take me down a notch. But then I just ask them to speak English and they can't speak one word. So that usually finds them pretty quick. But yeah, I grew up in California. My dad ran universities and worked in the arts world for many years.

5:39So I was really fortunate to be exposed to some pretty avant-garde, cutting-edge art my whole entire life. And fortunate enough for me, too, the idea of being a musician or an artist wasn't that radical of an ask in my family. It was sort of like my parents had sort of created us to put us on that path, being so involved in the arts world our whole lives. and then I went to an arts high school, first public arts high school in all of L.A., which was a really amazing experience. I studied music there. And then growing up in L.A., I just thought, oh, I have to be in the movie business because it's L.A., it's Hollywood.

6:19So I left arts high school for singing and I went and studied filmmaking at California Institute of the Arts, CalArts. And actually it was there that I made my senior thesis that took six months to make$10 ,000 to scrounge to do this every favor in the book. But that was also right at the convergence of the first digital audio workstations, right? And so there was this one, Roland put out this one way back in the day called the VS880. And it still kind of looked like an eight track or a four track cassette recorder, but they had it in a little box with a tiny little LED screen. You had to scroll through menu and you could multi-track eight tracks.

7:00And that was my first experience with it. And I spent six months making that senior thesis. It cost me a fortune. Got this digital workstation, woke up in the morning and said, I want to make a song. And by the end of the day, this will really date me. I burned a CD and I'm driving in my car listening to this thing that didn't exist in the morning. By the end of the day, I had this song and I was like, oh, this suits my ADHD brain way more than the like six months together. year-long trajectory and I call my dad go guess what I know you just paid for four years of film school but I'm gonna throw in the towel and I'm gonna go back to music and then just grinded it out on music for 10-15 years couldn't get arrested in the music business and then sort of got so heartbroken and frustrated at a certain point I was like 29 or 30 at that point and I had finally found a manager i had this song that everybody thought was a hit set up like 10 private showcases at sir which is this like equipment warehouse place for musicians in hollywood 10 executives from record labels listening and they're like he's too old he's too old he's too old and i was 29 at the time mind you and that was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back i was devastated for the 10th time.

8:27I was like, it can't take another second rejection. I love music. So I just start calling these producer friends of mine every week. Can I come work for you? Can I? Oh, no, I'm busy. I'm making a record. Call me next week. I call this one producer every week for a year straight till finally the guy, I think just so that I would stop bugging him, let me come to a studio. But what he didn't realize was that I worked on Pro Tools, which is a recording platform but back then it was called sound designer too so i've been an avid pro tools guy since since inception i spent my 10 000 hours i know what i'm doing on that machine so i showed up at this producer's studio i'm like and he was like oh you you can stay and so i worked with him for a few years making records but i didn't love the idea of being locked in a room with no windows working on somebody else's thing.

9:23But he would once in a while get these calls like, hey, do you think you can make a cool song for this movie or this commercial? And I said, let me run with this. Let me start a company. And so the two of us started a company for music, for advertising, and for film. And I did that for like seven years. Crushed it. First time I actually made a penny off of music and actually became pretty successful at it. 2007 rolls around. I can't get this idea of being an artist off my back. I was like, you know what? I'm going to try and make one more project, one more batch of songs. I can't let this go. And that was right at 2007 when the real estate market bubble burst.

10:09Every advertiser just said, whoa, we're not going to make another ad. We're just going to recycle the ones for black. So the advertising business dried up. I had this savings account. I had this band that I just started. We played two shows, three shows, and we got offered tours with like Flogging Molly and Sharon Jones and the Dab Kings, Maroon 5, and all these amazing opportunities are coming our way. And for me, who had had 10, 12 years of absolute rejection in the music business, I understood that something was changing in the universe because you don't play two shows get offered to open up for Maroon 5.

10:49Just doesn't happen. So we're celebrating, but then we quickly ran to the calculator and I was like, well, we don't have a deal, record deal or anything. Okay, this is an amazing thing. They're paying us$1 ,000 a show. That's more money than I've ever been paid. But guess what? We're still going to be about$23 ,000 short if we try and pull off this tour. And I just said, screw it. I have this money I saved from being successful for the last few years making music for film and TV and stuff, I'm going to bet on myself. And I basically took a quarter of a million dollars, invested it in the band for the next two years, floating us as we kept getting all these amazing opportunities to the point where I ran out of money.

11:35Everybody in the band's about to foreclose on their house. And we're like, either something happens today or we're calling it quit. We were at South by Southwest. We got our first record deal, put out our first record, and then kind of have not stopped since then. And that's almost 17 years ago to the day. That's incredible. I mean, it's an incredible story. Incredible that you had the foresight and the faith in what you were doing to put your savings into the band. I think one thing you skipped over, though, is the chemistry that you and the band have. I mean, that's definitely something that's visible in the live performances, in your videos.

12:18Can you talk about when the band formed, that origin story there, and the chemistry that y 'all felt? Yeah, so I was writing those first songs. There wasn't even a Fitz and the Tantrums yet, but I knew I was kind of onto something. I called my college buddy, James King, who's our saxophonist in our band, because especially our first record was very Motown Stax influenced. So horn section, saxophone section, you know, and as we're working on those first songs, I said, these songs are all about love and heartbreak. We need to play these songs live. They're begging. And we need to have a female counterpart for the he said, she said of all these love stories encapsulated in these songs.

13:08As James said, do you have anybody in mind? He said, I just finished doing a tour with De La Soul. We had this amazing singer on the tour. Her name's Noelle Skaggs. You got to call her. And we called a couple other random friends that we knew, musicians, and we set up a rehearsal. And we went in the rehearsal room and we played one song where Noelle and I were just facing each other. and instantly our voices blended, which is not a given as singers. Naturally, our voices fit together and we just instinctively knew how to work around each other. And it sounded, I'm not joking you, it sounded like we had been playing together for 10 years.

13:49I mean, it sounded flawless. And I'll say that this really goes, you know, my band is not really comprised of like garage band musicians that learned in a garage. These guys are all guys that like have their Malcolm Gladwellian 10 ,000 hours. They work their butts off, micro-focused on their thing, hyper-focused. And what you get with that is six people get in a room and we can play a song almost flawlessly first time out. And that energy was just incredible. We played that one song and I walked out of the room and I called this little nightclub in L.A. called the Hotel Cafe, which is kind of famous, early known for breaking more like singer-songwriters.

14:33You know, it's like he's small stage, intimate, little lights on every table and acoustic guys. We could barely fit us on that stage. But that was the only place that I had a hookup. Called the guy, said, do you have any availabilities? He said, well, I got one next Friday. You can have it. 8.30. It's yours. I was like, okay. I walked back in the room. I said, guys, we got a gig next week. And they're like, excuse me? We played one song. You have four songs written. I said, well, we better get to work. And we played that show. And going back to that idea, I knew what years, decade plus of rejection felt like.

15:11Or doing a gig and having to beg my 50 friends and guilt trip them into showing up and doing this. And from the instant we played that first show, it was like I saw all of my harshest critics, all my other music, jaws on the floor, just blown away by whatever was happening. I think we were all even experiencing on stage. And, you know, everybody came up to me and said, this is your thing. This is your moment.

15:40Aarron Walter:A lot of the creative folks we talked to, they have gone through this period of struggle and hardship and come out through on the other side. David Sedaris is one example for many years, was sort of practiced writing in relative anonymity. But what was it for you? It sounds like you all were almost at the point where you're maybe going to give up or switch careers. But what helped you persist through those many years of struggling to get to where you are now in your career? I think a lot of times when you're an artist or a musician, I didn't ask to be a musician. I was born a musician. Like I drove my parents frigging crazy because I never shut up.

16:17I was singing from morning till night. I just have music in my bones. I've always got a beat going through my head. I don't know. It might be the ADHD. It might be something. But I always got a beat going. I always have a melody going in my head. And so for me, it's never even been a choice, really. It's almost like if I'm not doing it, I don't feel centered and balanced. I'm a creative person. And if I'm not expressing that creativity or unlocking that part of my brain on a frequent basis, I can feel myself start to get out of alignment. And it's only by doing it that I kind of recalibrate my spirit and my mind and my brain chemistry and all of it.

17:05So it's never been a choice, really. It's just something I knew I've always had to do to keep myself sane. And then every time I would try and walk away from it, I don't feel right. And then once I was able to actually make some money doing music for film and TV and stuff, it was cool. But it still was sort of like a modified version of my dream. Because at the end of the day, I still had to listen to a bunch of ad executives make some ridiculous comment about, yeah, the music's great. Can we have it split up? And another guy would be like, yeah, speed up, but slow down. Like literally these conference calls where these ad execs are giving contrary things or being like, yeah, but make it more yellow.

17:46I'd be like, oh, you got it. And it would be my job to kind of creatively interpret that. I mean, sometimes those comments were ridiculous, but also there was an art to figure out what does he mean by yellow? And I usually was able to figure it out or speed it up, slow it down. It's like they just wanted more tension and release. Maybe they didn't have the right words, but it was a lot of time like that, but it was never fully satisfying. Working on other people's records, honestly, I was kind of envious and jealous. You know, I was like, I'm sitting here pressing record for these guys. I was like, this is what I want to be doing.

18:24And so I just couldn't let it go. And then I was fortunate enough to have some great musicians finally find my voice as an artist and have the financial resources to be brave enough to put it all on the line to make it happen. You know, because the timeline is that band started when I was 38. We didn't get our first record deal till I was 40, 41. We didn't have our first hit song on the radio till I was 42. I didn't have my biggest song in my career until I was 44. And I can promise you, this business is ageist and exclusionary. There's very few people that are doing it at that age. It's basically like me and Willie Nelson might be the only two dudes that have ever made it in their 40s.

19:14And I'm not even joking. I'm about to turn 55 right now. We just released our sixth studio album. We got a song on the radio. and it's a crazy ride that I get to do this at this stage in my life. Yeah, that's very cool. You mentioned finding your voice, and I've heard you say that it was not an easy thing, that you had this love of music, you liked a lot of different types of music. I think you were into classical music as well as opera. Well, I had a dad that was an opera and classical freak, so he liked to listen to it at 11. but like opera. So you're going to make yourself a bowl of cereal with opera just blast.

19:57And it's like the most dramatic cereal pour you've ever had in your life. Tell us about like finding your voice, finding a place where you felt like, okay, this is who I am creatively. This is how I can channel the gifts that I'm born with in a way that I can identify with and people can understand. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, specifically as a singer, I've been a singer my whole life. And then I went to a high school for the arts. I was in the singing program there. And you're singing many different styles. And also musically, I was into 80s New Wave. I was into classic rock. I was into Zeppelin.

20:39I was into Motown and stuff. And when you're a singer growing up like that, it's like I can shapeshift really easy, you know. I can sing in jazzy style. I can sing in a rock style. And so I could kind of shapeshift like this. And then the question more became, well, you can do all these things. But which one really is authentic to you? And I think a lot of times I was not confident enough in my own ability and my own voice where I was sort of just chasing trends. I feel like a little like back in the day when Pearl Jam blew up, it was like, all right, can I sound like Eddie Vedder? Well, yeah, I can kind of make my voice sound, Jeremy.

21:22You know, I can do this whole bit. But it was just always imitation. And so that thing was like, well, what is authentically you? And part of that also was in concert with like, I had had a lot of different musical projects, but they were also kind of like chasing trends as well. And so in this moment, I was heartbroken. I had a no-talking policy with my ex-girlfriend at the time. And I get a phone call from her. I'm like, oh, I shouldn't answer that. I answer it. And she said, I know we're not supposed to be talking. But listen, my neighbor just put this vintage church organ out on the street.

22:00He's getting rid of it. They're going to throw it away. Do you want it? I was like, hell yes, I want it. Give the guy 50 bucks right now. I had to scramble to find piano movers that would move it in the next three hours. got this thing in my house and it was like this new toy with new vocabulary and sounds and I had always had this deep love of Motown it was kind of the music I grew up where my mom would let me put it on the radio driving to school and those songs are amazing for singing along there's background doo-wop parts and so that was a real love of mine always and I got this church organ And I just started playing this riff.

22:42And then I just let myself be a crooner. Let myself belt. Because that's, you know, I'm not a gruff. I'm a belter. I'm a formal singer. I can sing. I can sing with a lot of power. And I just let myself just sing in this way that was fully just authentically me. And it felt so right. And I just said, all right. I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to make an album that is very focused. Because I think some of my earlier projects, I would try and do all of my musical tastes and put them in one album or one project. But what ended up being was it was just like a hodgepodge and nobody could figure out what the hell I was even about.

23:28Because I was trying to be about too many things, right? And so I finally discovered my voice, the sweet spot. My voice sounded really good crooning like that and belting. And so I just said, I'm making a Motown inspired record. If it doesn't fit within this lane, I don't care how good the song is, it's out of here. And I was just hyper focused to keep the guardrails this way. And that was the thing that in finding my voice and having that ability to focus the spectrum of what the artistry of this record would be. And those two things converged, I think they really made it all combined to be able to say that, oh, this is my voice and this feels authentic.

24:15That's great. One thing that I found fascinating, we were doing some background research on you, is that you felt frustrated that you couldn't play the piano as well as you wanted. Something I can identify with because I would like to be able to play the piano. I ended up, you know, starting to take lessons playing guitar later in life. And you You started to take piano lessons in your 30s. I think a lot of people, the dialogue in their head is, I didn't start an instrument when I was a kid, therefore as an adult, it's too late. I don't really have the right or the opportunity to pick that up.

24:53And here's somebody, you are obsessed with music. You talked about your ADHD and that's probably a focusing factor for your creativity. And you said, I'm gonna learn to play piano. I'm gonna start taking lessons. Tell us about that, how that felt to take piano lessons as a musician, as an adult. Yeah, well, you know, I had studied piano as a kid, and then I had a pushover for a mom who never made me practice. And so, of course, when I resisted, she said, okay, and then I have a natural ability. I have the perfect hands for piano playing. I just naturally have it in me, but I didn't put in the work.

25:34So I always sort of just got to this one level. I can noodle. I have the three songs that I'm playing and stuff like that. But it didn't ever really translate to anything beyond. And then when I was really getting into writing music, I really wanted to be able to write the songs I was hearing in my head. And yet I didn't have the skill to find the chords. So I went back to studying piano, not to be like a shredding piano player or to even really play that much in a performance. You know, I'll let the 10 ,000 hour dudes do that. But in doing it, it recommitted me to the process, to being creative and gave me the access to more knowledge so that I could finally figure out some of these chords I was hearing in my head to finally realize the kind of songs I wanted to do.