On Halloween 2022, Angelo De Augustine was at home in Los Angeles when he suddenly collapsed. “I got all these strange sensations and knew something was very wrong,” says the 33-year old singer-songwriter. “Then I lost control of my body.” Luckily, he had family around who were able to rush him to hospital, where he was put through days of exhausting tests. “I was conscious most of the time unfortunately,” he says drily, “but I don’t remember a whole lot about it other than I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t see well and I couldn’t really move.” Despite countless explorations, doctors were unable to offer a concrete diagnosis, and eventually sent him home. “They said, ‘Come back if you go completely deaf or blind.’”
Reeling and semi-incapacitated, De Augustine had just one thought: to finish Toil and Trouble, the album he had been making for the preceding year. “Nobody was helping and I didn’t think I would survive the illness,” he admits. “I couldn’t do basic tasks like lift things, but I’d worked so hard I didn’t want to leave it incomplete. As far as I was concerned, I wanted to get it finished and then thought I was probably gonna die.”
The album was to be the latest addition to a catalogue generating more and more interest. After his 2014 debut Spirals of Silence, De Augustine signed to Sufjan Stevens’ label Asthmatic Kitty for 2017’s Swim Inside the Moon; the pair then made an acclaimed album together, 2021’s A Beginner’s Mind. In 2023, De Augustine’s song Time, from his 2019 album Tomb, which also features Stevens, was used in Zach Braff’s movie A Good Person. Time became De Augustine’s most popular song, with more than 31m streams, but he was far too ill to capitalise on its success. As he admits: “I’ve had to completely change my life.”
Toil and Trouble was ultimately released in 2023. “I probably pushed through way too much to make that album,” he says. “I couldn’t lift things.” In the three years since, De Augustine has undergone recovery and had to relearn to walk, talk, hear, play and sing. Those experiences have informed a new album, Angel in Plainclothes, filled with beautifully otherworldly reflections on life’s transience.
Several songs recall the wistful beauty of Nick Drake or early Paul Simon. The lovely Spirit of the Unknown reflects on the simple joys De Augustine feared he might lose for ever: “All my life’s a distant memory / Apples on the tree / The sun over the sea / Another melody.” Lead single Mirror Mirror finds him looking at his reflection but not seeing himself, which he explains is a metaphor for how he was feeling for much of the time. “Like a ghost,” he says quietly over a call from his studio, which he calls A Secret Place. “You see everyone living their lives and it’s like you don’t exist.”
Lately, he says, emerging research points towards what was wrong with him. “Obviously I’m no doctor, but there’s more science coming out about the role the central nervous system plays in all our functions,” he says. “Sometimes when somebody is under a great deal of chronic fear and stress for a very long time they can go past the allostatic load: the nervous system’s ability to self-regulate. The brain tries to protect itself, so it sends all these strange symptoms to your body. I felt like my whole body was shutting down.” As to what might have caused his chronic fear and stress, he suggests: “The music industry can be very stressful, just trying to exist. But I never felt I was not cut out for this. It’s all I know how to do.”
De Augustine’s parents were musical, although his drummer father left when he was five, leaving his mother Wendy Fraser – a professional vocalist who sang on the Dirty Dancing soundtrack’s She’s Like the Wind – to bring him up on her own. Initially, De Augustine was all set to become a professional soccer player before injuries ended his playing days. Then music took hold. “It gave me a way to express myself, which most people don’t have,” he says. “I didn’t get lessons or learn other people’s songs. I just started writing my own, which maybe makes them different.”
During his recovery he returned home to live with his mother “because I couldn’t even make dinner for myself”, he says. Since then, progress has been: “Stop. Start. Get a little better, get a little worse.” One early breakthrough was joining a local spa. “I realised that when I was in water, the symptoms went away,” he says, “which was the start of realising just how stressed I’d been.”
Also crucial was signing up to a daily programme of physical and mental exercises, prompting a “slow but upward trend. It taught me to retrain the parts of my brain where wires had become crossed. For a long time, playing guitar and singing felt wrong and weird, but then very slowly, it came back.” Once that happened he found he was able to write songs. The first, Empty Shell, opens the new album with the question: “Where do you run when your life’s on the line?
Whenever he felt well enough, De Augustine would start recording. Where he had generally made those previous albums on his own – playing and engineering everything – he wasn’t fit enough, so brought in outside help: Kevin Morby strings arranger Oliver Hill, harpist Leng Bian, Tomb producer Thomas Bartlett (AKA Doveman) on piano and his mother, who is credited as a percussionist.
LA musician/producer Jonathan Wilson provided drums and his mountainous studio in Topanga Canyon for The Cure – a song which De Augustine explains draws parallels between illness and addiction, “an outside force that can have a real hold on you” – and has since become a friend. “I was going there a lot during my rehabilitation,” says De Augustine. “I was trying to find places in nature that I could go to that weren’t far away.”
The album’s ethereal beauty has also been shaped by use of antique instrumentation: a bowed psaltery and aquarion, as well as a Marxophone (a fretless zither patented in 2012), a bass recorder, a train whistle, a 1960s German guitaret, a miniature accordion and even a 1990s synthesiser version of a Japanese koto harp. Looking for new sounds is something of a hobby. “I just found a civil war-era pump organ in a local store,” he says, with palpable enthusiasm. “You can carry it in a suitcase.”
Slowly but surely, he’s rebuilding his career. Last year, he played live for the first time in five years to see if he could manage it. “There were some difficult moments,” he admits now, “but getting through that just felt amazing. You wanna take these little steps. You don’t wanna go from zero to 100.” Still not fully healed, he currently feels like a cross between “something like my old self” and a different person, who no longer takes anything in life for granted.
“I’m just really trying to find myself again,” he says. “For so long, my only focus was trying to be a great songwriter and perhaps I paid the price for that. Now I’d rather not have tried so hard. I just want to live a good life.” When I suggest that Angel in Plainclothes is packed with great songs, he gently concedes, “Maybe when we’re not so fixated on an outcome, it can come to pass.”
• Angel in Plainclothes is released via Asthmatic Kitty on 24 April
