Tag Archives: Alaska

Every Place Has a Sound, Portugal. The Man Has Many

Not What You’d Expect

Long before Sarah Palin stepped into the national spotlight and gave the small town of Wasilla, Alaska a name, John Baldwin Gourley of Portugal. The Man called it home. “It’s such a sheltered place,” recalls the singer/guitarist/songwriter. “It’s so very much a part of the United States and so very different at the same time.”

Gourley admits that growing up in such a non-traditional environment has had a strong influence on the music he writes and the action he takes. “It took leaving the state and then coming back for me to say, ‘Fuck man, we just need to make a band that’s fun for us. We need to make music that we want to make.”‘

It’s safe to say that for the last few years Portugal. The Man has indeed made the music they want to. Their three albums (and multiple EPs) sound like they came from different bands, an obvious consequence of the group’s insatiable hunger to create something unique, to constantly tread new waters. Their latest effort, entitled Censored Colors, is 15 tracks of genre defying art-rock that has two well-defined movements and an “intermission” in between. It’s intended to imitate the experience of listening to the two sides of a vinyl record, something that Gourley prefers when listening to music. “Everybody has moved into the stage of MP3s and disposable bands and disposable music,” he admits. “It’s so much better to have something that you can listen to as two separate pieces. It’s more like having two albums to listen to.”

Currently in the middle of a two-month-long headlining tour, Gourley graciously took some time to talk with Submerge about the tour, Censored Colors and the recent election.

Where are you at this exact second?
We’re in Chicago. I just went into a shop to get out of the cold. It’s really fucking cold.

You’re probably somewhat used to that being an Alaskan boy and all.
[Laughs] You know, the thing that’s so funny that I always try to explain to everybody that nobody seems to get is it’s so much different, it’s such a different cold. The lower 48 is kind of a wet cold, more than the Alaskan frozen north. Dry cold is so much easier to deal with.

How has the headlining tour been treating you so far?
It’s been going really well. Earl Greyhound and Wintersleep are both really, really great bands. It was really good that it ended up being that way. You never really know when you go on tour. I mean, how many bands have we listened to over the years that we thought were really great and then you go to a show and it’s like, “Well fuck, not good!”

Tell me about your latest release, Censored Colors. It’s different from anything you’ve done in the past. Did it turn out the way you intended it to?
I don’t think a single record we have done has ever turned out the way we expected it to. It’s a good thing. We go through everything making a pretty conscious effort to make a different record each time; that’s important to us. But yeah, it came out the way it was supposed to. It was a record for family, and it was about respect and community and just about life, you know?

And you released it through your own label, right? It must feel nice to be free of a record labels constrictions and own your rights to everything. Will you continue to self-release stuff?
I suppose so. It kind of depends where everything goes. We never like to set any goals or expectations [laughs], we’re just going to do what we’re going to do. We’ll always make records and hopefully do at least one a year as long as the music is there.

Do you think it’s important to put out music that frequently?
I suppose it is. When you’re in a band, that’s what you do. You can’t expect to get better and progress if you’re putting out a record every two years. You can write an album based on a week of your life. You don’t need that space and that time. It’s just what we do. With everything we do, we always want to work hard at it. We’re already planning on going into the studio this December and January to do a new record. Our goal has always been to just make music and keep it moving. Hopefully we’ll get two records out next year, I would love to do that.

I want to switch gears for a second. You’re an outspoken political person with strong views; tell me how you feel about the results of the election?
I’m so proud. I feel like thing’s could go so well. He’s [President-Elect Barack Obama] really just got to take this and run with it. There’s no looking back. He definitely does need to bring the country together somewhat by just proving himself, he’s just got to get out there and do it. He’s got to just say, “Fuck it” to everything that’s going on right now and take it all in. He’s got a lot of work, you know? You can’t expect it to just happen overnight. It was definitely a huge step for the world.

Agreed. To wrap things up on a lighter note, you guys are constantly touring all over the world but do you think Portugal. The Man will ever actually play in Portugal?
[Laughs] Oh man, I imagine at some point. For some reason we haven’t had the opportunity. We definitely got to find some time to do that.

Portugal. The Man

Kevin Murphy Sheds Teen Angst and Calms Down with The Moondoggies

The Maturation Process

Isolation has its perks. Looking to avoid distractions and work on his music, singer/guitarist Kevin Murphy left Bellingham, Wash. and headed north to Ketchikan, Alaska. Holed up in an attic, the young songwriter—not even of legal drinking age at the time—began working on tunes with a four-track recorder. “I think I was just getting burnt out on Bellingham,” he recollects. Upon returning to Washington, his band, The Moondoggies, was born. The group became a fixture at Seattle’s Blue Moon Tavern, which Murphy describes as the kind of place that “back in the day they’d have chicken wire up and people would throw beer bottles at the band.”

The Blue Moon may have lacked frills, but there Murphy and the Moondoggies gained confidence in their material, a whiskey-tinged blend of folk, gospel and old-time rock ‘n’ roll punctuated by three-part harmonies and classic Rhodes organ flourishes. This fall, The Moondoggies will embark upon their first string of continuous tour dates around the Pacific Northwest and Northern California in support of their first album Don’t Be a Stranger. Murphy took time from his day job (he’s a baker) to answer a few of Submerge‘s questions.

Three members of the band had graduated from the same high school. Were you all friends back then?
Yeah, that’s how it all started. I played with the bassist in high school with a different band. The drummer and I hung out since sophomore year. He never played the drums, but he just kind of picked it up. We’d have late nights of messing around on our instruments. It was just us hanging around and stuff like that.

Caleb Quick is the one band member who went to a different school. How did you meet up with him?
He’s quite a few years older than I am. He’s 27. I met him through a friend of mine in Bellingham, which is a college town north of Seattle. We just kind of messed around.

Did him being older than you affect your chemistry at all when you started playing?
The stuff I was doing in high school was a lot louder, and when I moved to Bellingham I started doing my own thing. He’s a piano teacher and has been playing for years. I had some four-track stuff I’d show him, and he’d coax me into singing and playing, because I was really shy about showing it to people. He’d make me drink a 40 and get me to start singing louder. He’s the one who kind of coaxed it out of me.

Was that shyness difficult for you to get over?
Yeah. I had a lot of four-track stuff, and I just felt real dorky about showing him, but he liked it, so we just started building on top of that. I wanted to start doing something, but he was my way of going about doing it.

What affect did your time in Alaska have on your songwriting?
I definitely wasn’t distracted. There wasn’t a lot to do up there, and there weren’t a lot of people I related to so much, especially where I worked, which was just like tourist work. I turned an attic into this little space. It was one of those things where you didn’t have any time to try to distract yourself if you weren’t getting anything done. I remember crawling up there for hours and just playing and making a lot of tapes and stuff. It was very productive. Going from there to back down here, when I met up with Caleb again, I had a lot more stuff to throw his way.

What was Caleb’s initial reaction to the tapes you’d made in Ketchikan?
Well, he was playing with somebody else. I had to coax him back into playing with me again. Our bass player had gotten a Rhodes, and I remember that we were playing, and I had to come up with a way to get [Caleb] to come play with us, so I told him we had a Rhodes, and he showed up like a few hours later. I think the fact that I was playing with Bobby [Terreberry, bass] and Carl [Dahlen, drums] and showing Karl harmonies, and I think he [Caleb] was pleased to see that it had come a lot farther than our days in Bellingham.

Prior to that you were doing louder, more garage rock kind of stuff, correct?
Yeah, it was your typical high school frustration.

Was it difficult to get everyone to change style so radically?
I think it was a natural full circle, because that was the kind of stuff we grew up on. I think there was a point when we were playing that kind of music that we just didn’t feel like we needed to be that loud. My friend John was the singer of that, and that was more about going down into the basement and turning it up as loud as we could. When I started writing my own stuff, it was more like what I had grown up on, and more natural songs that I preferred. We were getting burned out, I think, on just blasting it.

I guess you only have so much aggression before you run out of breath from yelling so much.
It was definitely good music for the time, because that’s how you feel most of the time in high school, I suppose. But I grew up obsessed with Nirvana and the Beatles, so there’s a middle of the road. There’s a need to calm down.