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Warped Tour Interview by Ben Klebba |
John Gourley crafts magical fantastic earth rock together with the band Portugal. The Man and they have a new record called “Censored Colors” coming out soon. The whole thing was a crash course creative whirlwind produced in two and a half weeks in Seattle with a little help from their friends. Lush keyboards and R&B distilled guitar lines coalesce with layers of John’s downright amazing voice. Raised with love and respect in the massive wilderness not far from Anchorage, AK, John has a solid outlook on life and creativity as life.
Wide-Eyed: So you grew up in Alaska?
John Gourley: Yeah.
WE: What was it like?
JG: It’s funny. When you grow up any place you really don’t notice the difference in anything. I really didn’t know the difference until I left and moved to Portland and with touring and everything. But it’s an amazing place. I was lucky to grow up the way I did. My dad raced the Iditarod (side note — the Iditarod Trail Dog Sled Race is the world’s foremost dog sled race over 1150 miles), just crazy things throughout my childhood… so I got to go and see crazy empty tundra in the middle on the winter, stay out in cabins in the middle of nowhere… I did a bunch of really cool things. Alaska is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been.
WE: I’ve never been there. I moved to Portland from Chicago about a year ago and I really want to go. You were just outside of Anchorage, right?
JG: Yeah, where I grew up and went to high school is a town called Wasilla and it’s about 40 miles north of Anchorage.
WE: Is it light there for months and then dark for months or does that not happen that far south?
JG: Yeah — it still does. The further north you go, the sun goes into a straight rotation — just crazy circles in the sky. Where we were, it’s pretty much light all day and then it gets dark for about 3 hours roughly at midnight or so and then it gets light again. It never gets fully dark. And then in the winters, you only get like four hours of daylight. Five hours maybe.
WE: Do people lose their shit?
JG: Yeah. On the heavier side of things, the suicide rate there is insane.
WE: Is there a music scene there?
JG: Yeah, there is. There’s a lot of metal and there’s a lot of bluegrass, {laughter} and a lot of nothing else in between. There’s been some pretty good bands up there lately. We played with a band called The Riot last time we went up to Alaska. They were really good and I heard they actually moved to Portland. As well as The Builders And The Butchers are from Alaska.
WE: I’ve noticed that there is an Alaskan transplant population here.
JG: That’s the thing. The whole Alaskan music scene moves out to Seattle or Portland the second they’re able to. {laughter} Whatever’s up there is just maintained by the people that live there. It’s just a lot of metal and a lot of bluegrass. There’s really not clubs up there.
WE: Was it hard to find good music growing up? Was there college radio? How were you informed musically coming up?
JG: Um… I wasn’t really. In high school when I first started playing with Zach (Carothers — bassist/vocals), I was terribly, terribly shy growing up. I would never even think about playing music. I was just so far away from wanting to do anything in front of anybody. I guess growing up I always listened to oldies radio, just things like that — Motown, whatever my parents listened to basically is what I listened to. I went into high school and Zach had a band that would do Rage Against The Machine covers and Cannibal Corpse covers. It was always really fun to see. He and I started playing together, just him showing me Rage Against The Machine riffs on bass. That’s what we did every day. I’d go over to his house and he’d show me how to play a new Rage bass line. That was how I basically got into it. You know, I think it was getting away from all that I had been brought up on — I mean I had been listening to the same music over and over again for 14 years or whatever. So just hearing all that stuff that was on the radio like Marilyn Manson and Rage Against The Machine {laughter} was just so crazy to me. You know, Nirvana, all these bands that had just — at the time they were making music that sounded like stuff we could actually do. So, yeah, we just started playing.
WE: So when does Censored Colors come out?
JG: You know I’m not sure. I have no idea when the record comes out. We’re kind of talking to some people right now, now that the record’s ready to come out, doing a partnership type deal to help push the record along. We did this whole record without a label at all. We planned on just releasing it ourselves and I guess technically we still are. But once we got the record done, we decided we’d just throw it out there for fun and just send it to the labels we’d like to go to. And we got a really good response and I think it ended up working out in everyone’s favor. The labels we talk to we can trust to make an album we want to make and hopefully get away with that.
WE: I heard you put this thing together really fast — in 2 weeks or something with only 2 songs ready. How did the album come together?
JG: Yeah, we’re always prepared when we go to the studio (sarcasm). What happened was we had pretty much toured all of last year from the release of Church Mouth up until December. When we got back to Portland we decided we would just go up to Seattle and work on some new music, make some EPs or whatever. And when we were up there, our friends Phil Peterson and Kirk Huffman wanted us to come and record some songs for an EP or a split. And we went in, and I had kinda been working on a few ideas for Censored Colors and we just had demos for 2 songs, with no intent of doing the record. So we left the studio, went back to Alaska — I think Zach and I were up there for 10 days — and during that 10 days we just called everybody — our manager, the rest of the guys, and were just like “Shit, let’s go into the studio. We have two and a half weeks before tour. Let’s just record the album.”
WE: Wow.
JG: And I think it worked out for the best. Being able to just run in like that. That’s the way we’ve done everything up until now. I think it makes an album a little more fluent — if it’s all just kind of written in the same space. It’s just two and a half weeks is a crazy crunch time to do it. We were having to write a song a night. It was all pretty spontaneous. There was a lot of jamming on it.
WE: That’s pretty daunting. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff going on within the album — there’s the doo-woppy piano thing of “All Mine”, loads of vocal harmonies, cello work, there’s some bizarre falsetto on the song “Created” — which is a great song.
JG: Thank you.
WE: Is that you singing on “Created”? (side note — it sounds distinctly like a woman)
JG: {laughter} I was listening to it after and thought “Damn, I sound like a chick.”
WE: Yeah. That’s you?!
JG: {Laughter} Yeah, I don’t know how that happened. Where did that come from? I think the idea with that song — we had had a lot of fingerpicking parts on the previous album — It’s something I’ve always been into doing, and we didn’t have a song like that. I think that song was written in maybe 30 minutes. {laughter} Maybe.
We went in and just did it. I think it came out different than I had originally started writing it anyway. We totally wanted to do that old Supremes style melody line to it and with old school soul lyrics. And that was a song I had written about my brother and his kid — he had just recently had a kid.
WE: You seem to be a big fan of layering your vocals. I can hear Beach Boys elements and classic soul sounds — when do you know when to stop? When is too much too much? Or do you love layers?
JG: {laughter} I don’t know. In the past we just stop playing and we’re like “OK that sounds good. That’s what we were going for.” There’s always an idea when we sit down. I’ll lay down the guitar track and as everybody’s laying down the bass and the drums and keyboards, I’ll be thinking about the vocals that will go on it and how it’s gonna sound and everything. There’s always an idea going into it. It’s just whatever sounds best. And we worked with really, really great people on the record — I don’t know if you’ve seen the list of people that play on it, but it was just kind of our friends came in and we let everybody do whatever they wanted, and whatever worked worked, and for the most part everything did work. The cello player though, Phil Peterson, he’s just insane. He sat down and jammed on the songs — nothing was written or anything. He just went for it.
WE: There’s some really nice stuff. The cello at the end of “Our Times” is just crushing.
JG: He’s just such an amazing player. There’s just very few people who can pick up and play like that, and somehow we got all those people to come into the studio.
WE: So what are you listening to lately?
JG: Um… I pretty much always listen to the Beatles and Wu-Tang {laughter}. That’s pretty much the constant. I always go back to those two. We’ve been listening to a lot of Van Morrison lately. I honestly am just slowly picking up everything that I heard on the radio growing up. All that oldies radio stuff. I never knew any of it. It was just like music I have connections with growing up. Lots of Sam Cooke. Sam Cooke is just amazing. And Aretha Franklin. Of course.
WE: Aretha’s good. Soul is just good music.
JG: Yeah.
WE: You’ve got some great lyrics that could stand on their own as poetry really. Are you into any poets?
JG: No. Honestly I just kinda let it go.
WE: How do you go about writing your lyrics? Do you have notebooks full of stuff at the ready, is it after the fact, or during, or how?
JG: It’s all done during the vocals and our producers have always hated it. {laughter} I would go in and be singing and just stop singing and just be listening. They can hear that I’m typing on the computer or writing down lyrics and they’re always just so bummed that I’m sitting there writing lyrics on the spot. But it just comes so much easier that way. Every time I sit down and write something, I’m just editing and rewriting and you kinda just gotta let it flow. And, fuck, writing is so much fun, it’s so amazing to see the different word combinations and the visuals that they create. It’s just a really fun thing to do.
WE: Are there any authors you’re into?
JG: I really like Kurt Vonnegut a lot. But I don’t even really read all that much. I’m drawing, painting, and writing all the time. I’m just kind of burnt at the end of the day. We’re constantly on tour and constantly working on new things. We pretty much have time to do that only.
WE: There’s a wonderful sorrowful optimism in your songs, or at least on “Censored Colors” — you touch on spirituality a little bit here and there and there’s some nice nature references — What do you think affected the way that you write?
JG: Well, I think with this album especially, it was an album that I was writing for my family and just about the way I was raised. My dad and my mom… my whole family is all about love and respect and I guess growing up we moved around a lot. My dad built hotels for Princess Tours — who I guess outside of Alaska I don’t think they really have hotels, they just do the cruise ships — but they would build these hotels in the middle of nowhere in Alaska for their tours. Princess would want my dad to hire all these out of state young kids, and my dad was totally about if we’re going to a small Alaska town we’re definitely going into the community and hiring within that community and helping them out as well. He was all about those things growing up. He builds houses and he’s built houses for free, for trade for work with people, things like that just to help out. He’s really about helping out wherever he can. Yeah. It was more a record written for that.
