Portugal. The Man
Portugal. The Man talks touring, releasing a crazy amount of albums and the overall laziness of other bands.
Portugal. The Man was formed in 2006 and has released three albums (the fourth being the Satanic Satanist, out July 21st). That is an album a year (don’t worry – I fact checked). This workman’s like approach may seem startling to everybody on the planet, well except for Portugal. The Man – who think all bands should work at this rate. You may not think they have time for interviews, but frontman John Baldwin Gourley took some time out to chat with us while on their tour overseas. They will be back in the states to play Lollapalooza.
HEAVEmedia: You guys are, at the moment, in London. At what point does it become, “Oh yeah we are touring overseas – no big deal.” When does it feel normal?
John Baldwin Gourley: I think that finally clicked with us this trip. It was pretty funny getting off the plane because we felt completely at home. Even here, this is our first time in London and in England. It’s fun. I think it really puts in perspective how small the world really is. You jump on a plane in New York and the next day you are playing a show in Germany. It’s pretty crazy to think of it that way.
HEAVEmedia: You were the 2008 AP Magazine singer of the year. I know you started playing guitar around eighth grade, but when did you start singing?
John Baldwin Gourley: I guess it was with Anatomy of the Ghost. That was the band I was in directly before Portugal. The Man. I literally had no intent in singing for a band and I was terribly, terribly, terribly shy. It was just never a position I wanted to put myself in, but I always had fun writing melodies and I guess I always had fun singing to myself. I think it’s something that just came around. I had to learn a lot about it on my own since we were constantly touring, but I think it helped to be doing it all the time.
HEAVEmedia: I remember seeing you guys with Thursday about two years ago and you were standing sideways on the stage. Was that part of the shyness?
John Baldwin Gourley: It was kind of a combination of things at the time. When we started out I had these glasses that my sister gave me. I had all of these hooded jackets – they were kind of security blankets. I think halfway through our first year of touring people would come up to the stage and start jamming with us – people we were touring with. They would get up on stage and play guitar with us. I would turn sideways so they could see me playing and see what was happening with the strings. I just realized it was a lot more fun and there was so much more communication on stage. It was just fun for us, and it made me feel a lot more at ease.
HEAVEmedia: I’d be scared shitless to play in front of a crowd.
John Baldwin Gourley: I’ve had some pretty big freak out moments when I’ve looked out in the audience.
HEAVEmedia: You put out music at a pretty rapid pace. How easy does the writing and song arrangements come to Portugal. The Man?
John Baldwin Gourley: You know that’s funny because we play music. If you can’t put out music then I think you should really think about what you are doing and why you are doing it. I think it works differently for other people as well. I guess it’s unfair to say that other people should work that way, but like I said – it’s what we do. Do you think a year’s worth of time or two years is necessary in between records? I feel that is such a huge amount of space to just forget yourself and forget everything you are doing. A lot of bands really fall apart in those huge breaks. They’ll put out a hit record and then it’s almost like they forget how to write. At the bottom of everything I guess I’m saying it’s not the pace that it seems to be. On the outside a record a year seems like a huge amount of work, but that’s just because most musicians are typically lazy.
HEAVEmedia: What are the pros and cons of releasing your album independently on your own imprint label Approaching AIRballoons?
John Baldwin Gourley: Equal Vision has been really really great to us in distributing the album, and we are still pretty far from being completely “on our own” in that sense. But, there are little things. We pay a lot of money up front for what we do, and it’s a lot more money out of our pockets in the end – and that is money we really don’t have. The good points are that you are just licensing your record. I mean, we own all our masters. In the end that is what you want more than anything. We want to control our own music and control where it goes.
HEAVEmedia: Everyone always makes comparisons to Led Zeppelin with your records – but the new album sounds like you channeled your inner Beatle. Where did this sound come from?
John Baldwin Gourley: It’s funny. We always get those Led Zeppelin references for lack of a better adage to throw in there. I mean it’s a compliment. They really changed shit up across the board and had some pretty crazy jams. They wrote some really tight pop sounds. They were a band that was playing in multiple genres. It’s funny you mention it, though, because it always goes back to The Beatles for us. I really don’t listen to Led Zeppelin. It was just something I never got into. I can see where the comparison comes from, but I listened to mostly The Beatles. I mean in the 60s they brought around prog rock and crushed rock n’ roll. They took what all noise bands and experimental bands at the time were doing in California and made it something completely new. They brought along something noise bands never did, and that was the idea of the song. I think The Beatles really perfected the idea of song structure.
HEAVEmedia: What’s your favorite Beatles song?
John Baldwin Gourley: Oh man, I love “Helter Skelter,” it’s one of my favorites, but it’s probably “Cry Baby Cry.” They have so many good songs. To pick out a favorite song is like, unfair to what The Beatles did.
HEAVEmedia: Favorite Beatles album?
John Baldwin Gourley: Abbey Road or The White Album. I wish I could say another album outside of those two, but those two are perfect and inspring records.
HEAVEmedia: Do you ever get nervous releasing albums? Worried that your audience won’t like it?
John Baldwin Gourley: Not necessarily. To be perfectly honest I’m sure every band does it. Even Animal Collective does when they go into the studio and write another fucked up record every six months. To say they don’t would be ridiculous. It’s something everybody thinks about. You can’t tour unless there will be people there, but I guess we did that before everything started happening for us. What it comes down to for us is just doing what we want. Nobody tells us what to do in the studio. In the end we are writing a record we want to make, and if people don’t like it then I guess they can wait around because we will be writing a record in another year and it will probably sound completely different.
HEAVEmedia: So you have no suits telling you what to do, and you’ve gained a huge fanbase on an almost do it yourself type attitude. How is that feeling?
John Baldwin Gourley: It’s very cool. I think anybody could put themselves in this position. The labels at the end understand that we are pop kids. We write pop songs. Whether there is a jam around it or a crazy structure to it doesn’t matter. We always think about melodies and always about writing catchy songs. If a studio picked up one of our albums and told us to go back and write a single, then we’d probably go tell them to fuck off because there is nothing we can redo. We did the best we could.
There are opinions of people we do respect, and if they have an opinion on it that makes sense we listen. Anybody can do it the way we did it, it’s just that most bands don’t want to do this stuff. Most bands, as much as they say they want to do it, they don’t want to design their t-shirts or album artwork. They don’t want to have to worry about what their posters look like outside of, “I look like a jackass in this picture.” That is the most you get from a typical band.
HEAVEmedia: You’ll be playing Lollapalooza in August and played Bonnaroo this year as well. How do you enjoy the festival circuit?
John Baldwin Gourley: It’s totally different in the sense that it’s really not about you. As nice as it is to think, “Holy shit. Portugal. The Man is playing in front of five thousand people.” It doesn’t really matter because people aren’t there for you; they are there to have a good time and to party. It’s really nice to be a part of that, though. We get to see bands that we’ve wanted to see and we miss because we are always on tour. We played a couple festivals in Germany and Lykke Li played right after us so it was nice to see. We’ve missed out on a lot of that by touring constantly.
HEAVEmedia: Well it’s really cold in Chicago right now, so I’m sure by August it will be really fucking hot. I had two coats on yesterday and it was July 2nd.
John Baldwin Gourley: Welcome to Alaska, man.
HEAVEmedia: Speaking of Alaska, what is the music scene like there?
John Baldwin Gourley: It’s really weird. It’s a scene that doesn’t get music on a daily or weekly basis outside of the bands from there. But they do just love music. There are a few places that remind me of that, though. Germany is one of those places. Every time we play Germany I can’t get over the fact that half of these people don’t know the music and probably just wondered in from the street just to hear what was going on. It’s because they truly love music. That is sort of what Alaska is about. I think one of the downsides of playing in Alaska or being from Alaska is that you get really influenced by what is happening in the connected 48 states, yet we are an entirely different culture musically. I don’t know how to say this without pissing anyone off, but it’s almost like taking a really dumb version of top 40 radio. The Internet has made it better, but you’ve got kids with guns running around being completely influenced by it. Its not just happening in Alaska, but it’s just a crazy place. It’s a really crazy place.
Posted by Wes Soltis on Jul 06, 2009 @ 12:00 am
