Not to bum you out or anything, but it was the week he began losing his hair in clumps and the pigment of his skin in patches -- in the midst of a nasty break-up -- that Mikel Jollett stopped writing stories and started writing songs. The same week his mother began battling cancer.
Naturally, he snapped. "I literally just lost my mind," he says, "and didn't care about anything. Except music." Jollett quit smoking cold turkey and started The Airborne Toxic Event. But despite its excruciating beginnings and grim title (The Airborne Toxic Event refers to a killer cloud in Don DeLillo's classic novel, White Noise), the Los Angeles band does not wallow in heavy emotions. In fact, their music -- think Snow Patrol meets The Walkmen at the symphony -- sounds triumphant. Heroic.
And so does the next chapter of their story. After winning ecstatic praise from Rolling Stone and the L.A. Times, The Airborne Toxic Event began a residency at SoCal hipster haven Spaceland. In a rare display of unsolicited media support, all of Los Angeles's major radio stations added the unsigned band's single, "Sometime Around Midnight" (incidentally, iTunes' #1 alt song of 2008) to their rotations, coinciding with The Airborne Toxic Event's string of concerts. Unsurprisingly, the band was signed in no time.
You can catch The Airborne Toxic Event live on tonight's episode of The Tonight Show With Jay Leno! But first, forget their wrenching backstory, and watch them on "The 5," where they reveal the real inspiration for all of their incredible success: Booty shorts. No joke.