Portugal. The Man

Written by Charles Trowbridge

Photos by Mathieu Lewis-Rolland

You can’t really write a better narrative than, “Beloved local band makes it big.”

It’s got the origin story, the roots built in, the meteoric rise and the trappings of stardom. Portugal. The Man experienced this firsthand when 2017’s global hit, “Feel It Still” catapulted them from “well-known” to “ubiquitous.”

Since the song took over the air, the group has ridden the wave that comes with being one of the most in-demand acts of the year. But, true to their roots, they’ve found themselves back in Portland, collaborating with longtime friends and fellow musicians from the community. The experience shot them to the Top-40 radio station playlists, creating a strong platform for social activism that has taken them across the country, advocating for indigenous rights and lending their voices to protest education budget cuts in Alaska, the home state of founders John Gourley and Zach Carothers.

Portugal. The Man graced the cover of ELEVEN back in the very early days, and as we neared our landmark 100th issue, we caught up with Zach, John and Jason Sechrist to chat about their wild ride since 2018, their love for the Portland community, and the tall task of topping a mega-hit.

ELEVEN: We're super excited to have you guys on the cover again. It’s been a few years. You were our third cover, so it's cool have you back around for the 99th issue! I wanted to kick off asking about what you’re working on right now?

Zach Carothers: Man, we want to put out some new music. We're trying to get our ducks in a row at home. We've had more time at home this year than we've ever really had before and it's kind of nice. We're kind of setting in, digging in a little deeper to the Portland scene.

Jason Sechrist: That's hard to say because you know that's kind of the secret ingredient, what we're going to wear, what we're going to push as a single, what angle we're going to do. But we're going to attack it in the same spirit that we always have. I was listening to a couple interviews this week and some podcasts, and it's pretty awesome that all these people are saying, "I put in the fucking work; I work Monday through Friday." No one could judge this. No one could judge this. You’ve kind of got to stick by your art and sell it, stick by your product and go with it. So, I would say that just fundamentally we'll feel strong when we come out with something.

John Gourley: Well, I guess we’ve been the studio quite a bit since pretty much the last record dropped. It’s just off and on, trying things out to see what feels right. Lately we've been in with Jeff Bhasker – he’s in a bunch of really rad records. He works with Kanye a bunch and it's just been fun. Being in the studio and collaborating is always cool, being there with somebody new. I'm a big fan of that. I know a lot of people get weird about producers overstepping or telling you which direction to take things. But I prefer it, you know? I prefer having somebody there to kind of check you on things and let you know when you’re going too far. He's a really good one. He's been in everything. We had Paul Williams in the studio with us and The Last Artful, Dodgr, Reuben from Unknown Mortal Orchestra has been in. We’re just trying a bunch of stuff.

11: That sounds like a name-dropping mix of Portland artists – is that by design?

JG: I think it just kinda happens – it's just people that we hang out with! We got really lucky with a song on the last album, clearly. But it's not like that – I love those songs. I love songs that everybody can listen to, that can cross genres and it's weird because it's like the one thing in the world that we can all agree on—besides air and water—is that these songs work. You see it when you watch campaigns, like you see super conservative people throw on Bruce Springsteen, or the Rolling Stones, or whoever it is. It's a really interesting thing that I've always been obsessed with: how do you write something that everybody listens to and that's just fun for them? And I think everybody has that right now, everyone has that ability. It's just about having a good time in the studio. I mean, that's my biggest goal with this new album, just have fun making it and bring along friends. If it's something rad, then go chase it and there's no pressure. It's just hanging out with friends.

ZC: It's just what we like, man. John and I are new. I mean, we're not really new, we've been here for a really long time, Jason grew up here. We just like to rep our town, we like to rep Alaska, we like to rep Portland, we like to rep where we're from, and honestly it's just that they've always had amazing artists. People like Ruban [Nielson], we've been fans of his forever. The bass player, John, he recorded the very first Portugal. The Man's demo, ever. Way back in the day. We've been connected with those guys for quite some time. We really love their bands and like Last Artful, Dodgr, Animé they're just super cool and some of the raddest shit coming out of Portland for sure.

11: It seems like in the last few years the Portland hip hop scene has grown up a little bit. There's Aminé and Last Artful Dodgr coming out, there's a few others too. Is that something you guys are interested in, crossing over into that? I know you got some stuff that you can mix in with hip hop pretty easily.

ZC: Yeah absolutely. And Portland has a cool version of that. It's definitely different than East Coast or West Coast, the whole Northwest is really very progressive and a very different kind of thing. We really like it, and it's new. That's what we like about hip hop in general; it's pushing the envelope further than rock and roll is lately. And, so, when it comes to music that's just one thing that we really like.

JS: And you know, the good news about those types of collaborations and that kind of situation, you still need drums and bass and vocals. You are probably going to put keys down and you might even fuck around with guitars. So, the elements are still there. It's all there man. We're just not taking that typical task.

ZC: It's all about doing something new.

11: You said you guys got lucky, so to speak, with “Feel It Still.” Have you noticed more opportunities popping up to be climate change advocates, and what has come along with that elevated platform you’ve got now?

ZC: I guess it is just that, it's that our audience has grown very wide with a hit. We never knew what a hit would do and that's pretty funny, how it changed. John likes to mention this a lot, we kind of went from having 100 songs to having one song. Definitely, cast the net pretty wide and it seems rad to us because we have been able to reach such a much wider audience to talk to with things we care about. We have a much bigger, much larger platform to get some more of our ideas out there.

JS: Yeah, it's definitely hard, whenever we reach out in Portland. Anyone from Portland will always say, “oh God, oh God, oh God!” But yea, it’s a lot of travel. It’s all good, and we're the same old fun guys and that's easy. We're just kind of applying that to the new experiences.

JG: We've actually had none of the serious issues that come along with that, which is really great. Our Instagram community has been pretty chill, and even our Reddit community is real chill. They've been raising money for Indigenous communities and doing some really cool stuff. People know who you are, and that helps a lot if you have an issue that you’re getting behind.

And we're not necessarily climate; it's Indigenous people. Growing up in Alaska – and I grew up in a mushroom community – you’re around people like the Reddingtons, and the founders’ families. You're around Native Alaskans. You know, my nephews are Athabaskan, and it's something that, as we started touring down here, we realized that you just don't really see.

We were wondering, where are the Native Americans? Where are the people we hear so much about? They're not visible. Back home, if you go out to the villages, if you go out to Shismaref, you see every kid out on their on their cell phone. Like they all have iPads, they all have cell phones, they have Internet. It's visibility first and foremost, and acknowledging the people who are here first and taught us how to farm it, and how to fish, and how to hunt. I can only imagine growing up and being on a cell phone, watching music videos, watching everything happen in pop culture, the front page of Reddit and never seeing your culture represented. That's, that's the main reason why we got involved with on the Indigenous front. It covers a lot of issues, and honestly I think Indigenous knowledge is the way forward.

When you talk about like planting trees, everybody wants to plant a trillion trees or a billion trees, whatever it is. Every couple of months we're talking about planting trees when we should be rewilding areas. And who knows how to do that best?

It’s that Indigenous knowledge growth that will push a lot of these things forward, and I think that they are the future consultants: tell us how to use this plan the right way, the efficient way to use it and how to bring the deer back. That's a good thing. When you drive down these highways and you see the tree farms, that's the first thing you notice—there are no animals. There's nothing feeding. It's just rows and rows. And as beautiful as that looks, you just start to see that as you go down each row: there's no deer, there's no rabbit, there's no birds. There's nothing there.

11: There's that area over in Eastern Oregon that has a bunch of tree farms, and it's eerie, honestly. I don’t know how many miles, but like you said, it's wild. But it's also not, really. It's not even a real wooded area or anything. So, you kind of losing anything that the farms might be bringing to the table.

JG: Yeah. It’s a weird thing. We always pushed this idea, plant a million trees, or a hundred million trees over the next month, and it does something, I suppose, but it doesn't bring back the wildlife. It doesn't bring back everything. That's just a quick, feel-good story.

I guess to answer your question about our raised platform that we got with that song, it pretty much made it possible for us to reach out to a lot of people, to finally start doing land acknowledgments and doing the things we had talked about. We've talked about this for a decade, basically since the band started. We talked about, like, “How do we do this?” The first time we went to Australia, we met some Aboriginal people, the people who were here first and whose land it is. It was so hard to connect until Maclay Heriot, our photographer, told us about this thing called “Welcome to Country,” when we were down in Australia, and it is exactly what it sounds like.

You can go to a website, you can bring in an Aboriginal leader and we met Uncle Alan Madden in Sydney, and Auntie Maroochy Barambah in Melbourne, and they came out. It is, in the most basic sense, welcome to my land, welcome to country. It's, “Here's your safe passage, this is our blessing.” It was a really beautiful thing. Just the fact that they had a website set up – we don't have anything like that in the states. Something that lets you start reaching out and connecting with people. That's what that song meant to us. It put us in a place where you can actually reach out and talk to people and just reach a broader audience.

11: Let’s talk about Alaska. I know you guys went up there recently to lend your voice to some of the protesting taking place around the big budget cuts. There are a lot of transplants that come from Alaska down to Portland because of how supportive and expansive the artistic community is. Can you draw a line for us between why you still have that sense of ownership or protectiveness for Alaska, and some of the things you value about the Portland art community?

ZC: It's all about never forgetting where you came from, representing and helping out. We knew we had to leave; we wanted to go out, we wanted to see the world and we love Portland. There's a million problems but there's one that we feel very, very close to us, and that's exactly where we're from. The things that are being cut in those budgets are the things that we stand behind and we stand with. It was pretty much a no brainer to go up and help with that one.

JG: My whole thing is education, which is weird coming from a high school drop out, right? I understand the importance of it better from traveling. Travel, for us, was where we learned everything.

As far as the art community goes, these artists—you need people that know how to make these crazy ideas work. The artists are where those crazy ideas come from. They go hand in hand. All these eccentric weirdos that come up with this idea for a car or for a light bulb. Like, how do I grab that lightning and put it in this bottle? That's a really specific mind that does that.

I grew up building houses, and one of my favorite things to see was walking into a house once it's framed up and once everything's in, right before everything's sectioned off and right before you put up the drywall and seal it all in. I love to see how everything works and see all those angles, where the attic is going to be closed in. We would travel around is as kids—my family’s from upstate New York—and we'd go to New York City and travel the East Coast a bit. Seeing great architecture is so great for young minds. It just gave you an idea of what things could be.

11: Do you bring that same mentality to the actual creation of your music when you are going through the creative initial process? Getting back in the studio again and bringing in new artists and the collaborative aspect of it, do you bring that same mentality that you just talked about, the outside thinkers and people that have the ability to create new ways of thinking?

JG: That was the whole goal when we started this. First of all, we never expected to sign to Atlantic Records. We never thought we'd be on a major label, we never thought we’d have a song like “Feel It Still.” We just set out to play music and then move on to the next city because it was cool, it was fun and it was new and exciting. We just wanted to see new places, and I wanted to learn as much as I could about songwriting. We sat down and said, “Okay, we're going to make a different album each time we go in, and we're going to make an album a year just to see the progress and see where we're at.” We wanted to document where we were going. The albums would be stories of where we've been and how we grew up, just made in a different way each time.

11: So, as you are working on this new music, it seems like there's probably more doors open to you. How do you guys intend to kind of keep a handle on the beast? The last album, you had the hit, and it was a great album. But how do you deal with that being kind of a main entry point to your music now, even though you’ve got this expansive back catalog?

JG: Well, that's what music is. When you think about modern music, who do you think are the biggest artist? I mean, it's like Ariana Grande and Ed Sheeran and people like that. It’s YG and Young Thug and Future—it's all these artists, and music today is way more progressive now than I think it’s ever been. I really believe that. Nirvana was doing something that kind of existed, it was just a little bit more fun and had more of an edge to it. Hip hop is something completely different.

It showed that mid-thirties [laughs] mid-to-late thirties, folks from Alaska, can wait four years to put out an album, and still have a number one hit at top radio. That is bananas. Like, going into to Nick Radio, and Radio Disney, and Ryan Seacrest— all those situations doing interviews, and you realize how manufactured all the stuff is. To really understand pop music, you have to know that when they walk into those interviews… like, we wouldn't be doing this interview right now.

ZC: We learned pretty quickly that we just need to be ourselves because there's definitely a lack of that in the pop world. We had a lot of fun when we first started going into pop stations and feeling in that world which we were very new to. It was fun but they had a good time with us because we weren't scripted. You know, a lot of pop stars will go in and they have to get all the questions beforehand. There's script for everything and we don't really give a shit about those things. So, once we come, we can chill in there, and you’re hungover we'll talk about being hungover. I think it was a breath of fresh air for them because they treated us very well. And we got to have fun with it. It's always a new experience and when it comes down to anything like that the most fun thing about the success we've had with that song, is just the new experiences we've had. We just got to go and do some different places.

JG: Everything that happened was really interesting. “Feel It Still” and everything we've done, it’s all built around honesty. Paul Williams has this really great speech that he gives about songwriting, and it's writing your truth. You have to write your truth. Ariana Grande, she is a busy kid through and through. You can give her a line and she can sing it like it's hers all day long, and it means so much coming from her. Whereas somebody else… indie bands can't do that. We're not actors. We didn’t grow up doing that. It has to be true to who you are.

So, I thought it was interesting seeing what people had to say about “Feel It Still”. I saw a lot of the things that were said in the beginning. Like, “it sounds like they're swinging for the fences and falling short.” That was like one of the first reviews I read. It may have been out of Portland, but it was this thing that’s funnier in hindsight because it worked. The thing is, you always have to be true to who you are. And I think that song happened because I'm just obsessed with the song. I'm obsessed with “Ain't No Sunshine.” I'm obsessed with “Mr. Postman.” That's why that melody is in that song. It doesn't mean that it is that song, that's not what it is. It's something totally new.

It's taking the light bulb and making the internet, taking the light bulb and making a car. All of these coexist. They all work together. This takes us back to the discussion about Alaska and education. That's what music should be. It's all necessary to who you are. Talking about these collaborations and people coming in, I just want people to come in and just try things. I mean, we have this opportunity to work with really great people. I'd rather see my friends in there trying to do things, than pop songwriters, because I think honesty is what it is, and I think everybody has it. At the end of the day, I’m like, “hey, if it doesn't make the record, it doesn't make the record. That’s how this band works. That's how we've always worked.” I've always worked like that, and I don’t give a shit if you throw away an album with Dangermouse, or an album with Mike D., if it gets us to Woodstock and “Feel It Still.” That's fully who this band is. If it's not true to who we are, it won't happen. And, obviously, I do think like we have to like chase that song and try and beat it, and I want to beat it. How impossible would that be for us to beat that song? It was so massive – it is so massive!

We have this stupid fucking plaque at our house that we can't bring herself to hang up because it's so ridiculous! It's just this list of countries that it went platinum and diamond and gold and in. It was worldwide, and so it's something that you can't really chase, but I would like to. I would like to go in and just see if these dipshit kids from Alaska can write another song like that. But, how do you do that? How do you compete with trap beats and hip hop? Because hip hop is, I think, peak art and peak punk and folk – it is everything that music is meant to be. It's storytelling, it's repetition and loops. The perfect hook doesn't need to be relative to what the song is about, verses can be about different things from section to section, rhythm's change. It's exact opposite of what you would expect if you're listening to Motown and trying to nail that verse/melody perfectly, each time it comes around. You'll see that when you get into songwriting like, oh, you have that many syllables, you're like adding too many words. But I do see it on “Feel It Still.” That song works because verse one and two it does that thing. Third verse is a variation on the verse melody on a different chord progression. And that is like classic Motown structuring as a middle eight. It's not, like, “here, sell me a bridge.” It's the middle eight: “Is it coming/is it coming” – chorus!

That's it. That's all it is. But to think it’s that simple would be missing the point of what songwriting is and what pop music is about. You're missing the point that that song works because it's the demo vocal. That's straight up the demo vocal on one of the biggest songs of that year! It's in a lounge of the studio on a drum mic. It’s just the closest microphone there. And that's how stupid songwriting it is. It's unpredictable, and that's the most beautiful thing in the world. It's the fact that there's no algorithm, like, yeah, you can try to beat it, and, yeah, you could try to pay for it. You could do all those things, but it doesn't mean anything if it's not honest. A computer can't do that. A computer can nail a melody and can nail all these things that we can all use. We all grew up around the kids in the punk bands, in the indie bands, in the alternative bands and metal bands that all said pop is easy. And like I could write a song like that. It’s, like, no you can't – it's really fucking hard! That song happened because I was trying so hard to write it, and then I stepped out of the studio and thought, “fuck man, I just want to play the bass.” I played that bass line and somebody heard it. My buddy Asa hard me playing the bass line said, “hey, let me record that.” And that happened because I wasn't trying to do it. The worst thing in the world for songwriting is t overanalyze, and that’s all I fucking do all day long! »