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Three decades (to the day!) after its June 22, 1993 release, Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville feels as essential and modern as ever — a vivid portrait of an artist at the height of her power, fearless and raw, and a crucial entry in feminist rock history. So it’s little surprise that when Phair announced she’d be celebrating its 30th anniversary with a tour playing the album in its entirety, a certain segment of the world seemed to collectively lose its mind.
“I heard from just about everyone I know,” Phair readily admits. “I think pretty much every single person I know was like ‘Heyyyy, can I get tickets?’ or ‘I’m gonna be there!!’ It’s kinda nice — better than a birthday.”
Phair has made return trips to Guyville before: in 2018, Matador Records reissued it and released Girly-Sound to Guyville, a deluxe box set including the remastered original album and the first official restored audio of Phair’s self-released 1991 Girly-Sound tapes. But she hasn’t always been quite so keen to revisit her debut album-era self. For one thing, she had a whole career since then — a wonderfully rich one including five albums (her most recent full-length, the well-received Soberish, came in 2021) and an acclaimed memoir, Horror Stories — even if Guyville set a perhaps unfair standard critics and fans alike seemed to often hold her to, even as she evolved as an artist.
Today, the 56-year old singer-songwriter says she’s able to look at Guyville with both affection and awe, and she’s thrilled to take it on the road for what she expects will be the last time. Before setting out for the North American tour (it runs Nov. 7 – Dec. 3, with Blondshell opening select dates) Phair spoke to Billboard about the show she hopes to create for fans, and why preparing for it has involved spending a lot of time with old pictures of herself.
You’ve done major remembrances of Guyville before, so how did the idea for this tour evolve? Did your reunion with producer Brad Wood on Soberish have anything to do with it?
I think it did. A lot of things coalesced with me when we did the box set with Matador. There was a part of my psychology around Guyville that finally settled. I had different feelings about that album over the years. At one point early on, it felt like the fans had taken it and it didn’t even belong to me. When I became a mom and I was trying to be all fresh and clean, I was embarrassed by my times in the Wicker Park underground scamping around a bit. But bit by bit it returned to me over the years. It started like five years ago, where it kept being noticed on lists as an important album, and I kept flowing back into my younger self… does that make sense? It sounds ridiculous, but I reconnected with my younger self and that was a glorious thing for me.
It’s a glorious moment to feel personally connected, to have fans feel connected, and to say it’s the thirtieth and let’s do this, let me tell the emotional story behind the songs. Can you imagine revisiting your college self with thousands of other people? It’s a crazy thing. It’s both hard when you’re still growing and when you’re older it’s a gift. How many people get to have a snapshot of their life shared communally so we’re all screaming the words out at the same time?
You mentioned telling the stories of the songs; will there be a narrative aspect to your show?
Yes, and hopefully it will not be cumbersome. I’m working with Kevin Newbury, who I encountered first [when he directed] Kansas City Choirboy for Courtney Love and Todd Almond. I was so blown away by that production — it was like watching somebody develop a new language about speaking emotionally through music. That’s what Kevin and I are trying to develop right now [as co-directors of the show] – without doing big production numbers, telling a little more of the story of the girl living that life. We’ll see; we’re definitely trying to do something different. I want to create, for people coming to the show, a much more immersive experience, so even if they think they know the album well, they come out with a new take on it. I’d like you to come into the theater and kind of be transported.
We last spoke when the live music shutdown was just starting to end, and you were still understandably feeling a little edgy about going on tour again. Was coming to terms with touring again, period, part of this process for you?
I think I always need a good reason [to go out on tour]. I need something beyond myself that I believe in. Because it isn’t easy for me to tour — it’s not something that comes naturally, and frankly I don’t necessarily miss it. I miss my fans, but I always think of creating rather than performing. To think of this as an opportunity to tell that story from a new angle, to deepen that angle, that really gets me going.
Plus, I’m not at the beginning of my career. This is the last time you’re gonna see me do Guyville in its entirety. If people really like it, we’ll put some more dates up, but there’s something poignant about knowing you’re doing something that won’t happen again.
From both a technical and emotional perspective, what has preparing for the tour entailed for you?
I’m taking all these supplements for lung health, doing vocal stuff, working out. It is a physical endeavor and as you get older, you have to prepare a little harder. It’s easier to be out of shape when you’re older. It takes a ton of stamina. That’s something I always think about and am mindful of: can you physically do it? And yeah, I know I can.
And the other thing is just listening to the old music. I’m not even kidding: This sounds strange, but I will look at a picture of myself when I was young and be like, “Talk to me.” I know that sounds freakish but I’m literally communing with my younger self and getting her to open up to me. And she’s saying that I don’t have the balls to do what she did! She’s saying I’m like, a sad sack! [Laughs.] It’s a challenge. She has these like, haunted eyes, but they’re determined. There’s a sharpness. When you’re out in the world and young and fighting to be creative, and fighting to make your voice known, there’s something intense about that. She’s like a warrior chick. I’m trying to get my warrior back on.
Courtesy of Matador Records
Are there things you’ve learned about singing in the past 30 years that you think will make performing these songs each night easier than the first time around? Or are there elements the way you performed back then that you want to get back in touch with?
You are so smart — and that is the challenge for me at the moment: [What do I do with] this voice I have developed over the years, that does have more range? Most artists start with a higher voice and it ends up lower, I started with a lower voice and ended up with a higher one. Guyville songs are hard to sing onstage. The register is very low. Brad loves a talky vocal, which I really appreciated – he’d just be like, “Just say it into a mike while you’re sitting there!” So how do you get this to cut [through] when you have this young, hot band behind you? How do you get that low, casual off-the-cuff delivery?
These are the kind of things that I thrill to – how do you solve that problem? It’s better than the Spelling Bee. If you can hear my low voice cut through the auditorium and it gives you thrills, then I won.
Is listening to the recording itself part of getting ready for this, too?
Normally I don’t really do that a lot — but this time I will, because I want it to sound closer to that era. I will do departures from that during the show, but yes, I am literally studying myself. I’ve sung these songs so many times that I’ve developed my own way of performing them live. But for this show in particular, we’re gonna break it back down to build it up again.
It’s weird — I’ve never ever before for a tour studied my earlier self this much. I could not have done this any earlier [in my career]; I could not have felt relaxed about it. Any time before now, I would have been acutely aware of… I mean, I’m still acutely aware of how much I dared to go onstage unprepared when I was young. I just had this chutzpah. I honestly feel like I’m kind of getting into character. I mean I’m not going full Daniel Day [Lewis] but… a little bit. Management calls, I’m like, “I’m at a bar. I don’t know where I am. Can someone come get me?” [Laughs.]
Do you think the concept of “Guyville” has changed since you were coming up? There are so many great women playing rock music now; at the same time, it’s dispiriting to see what so many of them still face, whether it’s the trolls accusing the Haim sisters of not really playing their instruments or the dudes upset that Phoebe Bridgers smashed a guitar on Saturday Night Live.
I was just really worried about [Bridgers’] shoulders and wrists! That can be very damaging to your body now! [Laughs.] Part of me is cynical. Part of me thinks we’re going to be struggling with these things for awhile. I don’t know that it’s a top-down fix. I think it’s essential that we continue on, because bottom-up fixes are better anyway. And so much has changed. But then when I hear these stories of young female artists, and they’re like, “It’s no different,” it’s just… I can’t believe it. It doesn’t happen to me anymore, but it still happens to them, and I cannot whitewash everyone’s experience who’s still going through it.
But when you see how many female artists are doing their thing with their own voice and their own vision, that’s proof things are better. When I came up, I would tour and I’d hardly see a woman out there. Now it’s the opposite, and to me that’s wonderful.
Blondshell seems like such a perfect choice as your opening act for this tour — how did she come on?
I was freakin’ spoiled for choice. They sent me a bunch of artists who were possibilities, and I said yes to like, all of them. I would love to tour with so many people. Blondshell’s music — the songwriting, the sound, the point of view — I just loved her immediately. Just such talent and presence. I can’t wait. I’ll definitely rope her into performing with me for sure.
Is there a Guyville song that stands out as one you have a very different relationship with now?
It’s interesting because we found a song from the Guyville sessions, a Girly-Sounds [tapes] song called “Miss Lucy” that we’re putting out. In my song-by-song response to Exile on Main Street, it was potentially a replacement for “Flower,” for the [Rolling Stones’] “Let it Loose” slot, but “Flower” is what I ended up going with.
I wouldn’t play it during the Trump era because I didn’t want to give men the satisfaction. So it became this thing of, I’m still thinking about it, how do I want to contextualize “Flower?” It’s a lightning rod song and it means different things depending on what’s going on around me. It’s a difficult song to do in the spirit it was performed on the album. How does one deal with the blowjob queen when you’re 56 and coming back in? [Laughs.] I mean, now, with what porn stars do, I’m a blowjob jester — I’m not a queen anymore!
I know Guyville felt like a perfectly normal album for you to putting out when you did, but has your perspective on how radical it truly was changed in the years since?
Well, yeah. Considering how history went afterwards, it’s fascinating and horrifying to realize, living through the #MeToo era thirty years later, very little had changed. I was shocked at how pertinent it still was. But proud too, because it meant I’d spoken up about something that needed to be spoken up about. I was working off of artists that came before me, and then people worked off of the people from our era in the ‘90s.
And to see the continuity of women picking up the baton and saying, “I’m gonna say what no one expects me to say, I’m gonna bare my shames and embarrassments and the strength that comes from that and the strength we continue to amass for women to be full participants in society, and to be protected and to have autonomy” — it’s an ongoing fight. It’s wrapped up with everybody’s fight to live a fair and equitable and safe life.
Demi Lovato is back. After releasing “rock versions” of previous Billboard Hot 100 top 20 hits such as “Cool for the Summer” and “Heart Attack,” the Grammy-nominated powerhouse vocalist has surprised fans with their first new song since last year’s Holy Fvck album. Titled “Swine,” the new single arrived on Thursday (June 22), just two […]
On Aug. 18, Jagjaguwar will release a five-album box set titled Epoch, which will include unreleased music along with a 114-page story on the short-lived indie-rock band DeYarmond Edison. The four-piece act boasted Joe Westerlund and Phil and Brad Cook, all of whom later formed the psych-folk band Megafaun, along with Justin Vernon, who went on to form and front Bon Iver.
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On Thursday (June 22), a new two-pack single from the forthcoming release has arrived: “Hazelton B/W Liner.” The stunning and stripped-down songs laid the groundwork for what ultimately became the Bon Iver standout “Holocene,” off the band’s second album, Bon Iver, Bon Iver. “Holocene” received Grammy nominations for record and song of the year a dozen years ago. Bon Iver won best new artist and best alternative music album that year.
“Hazelton B/W Liner” is not only the oldest song that would become part of Bon Iver’s catalog — Vernon first recorded it between July 2005-May 2006 for his third solo album, Hazeltons — but also arguably the song that caused DeYarmond Edison to split. One month after Vernon’s Hazeltons arrived (released only on CD, with just 100 hand-numbered copies made), DeYarmond Edison played its final show. Less than one year later, both Bon Iver and Megafaun would release its respective debut albums.
Hazeltons will be one of the five LPs included in Epoch. The physical edition will include an exclusive live version of “Hazelton” that Vernon recorded with Aaron and Bryce Dessner in Paris. The box set’s other albums include All of Us Free, recorded between November 1998-July 2005 when DeYarmond Edison was a group of high schoolers making music as Mount Vernon; Silent Signs, DeYarmond Edison’s second studio album that has been remastered and pressed to vinyl for the first time; Epoch, Etc., which chronicles the band’s move from Eau Claire, Wisc., to Raleigh, N.C.; and Where We Belong, which houses buried treasures found after the band’s breakup.
As the box set’s executive producer and biographer says of Epoch as a whole, “This is the sound of sorting through an overabundance of new info, mostly for yourself. And, even in the rather fraught process, finding out just where it is you’ve been headed your whole life.”
Listen to “Hazelton B/W Liner” below.
On Oct. 27, 2018, Portugal. The Man played its second sold-out hometown show at Alaska Airlines Center, a 5,000-capacity arena in Anchorage. It marked the end of a globe-spanning two-year trek promoting Woodstock, the band’s 2017 album that yielded its Grammy Award-winning crossover hit, “Feel It Still.” But as soon as the celebratory finale ended, frontman John Gourley was crying in a bathroom.
“I just broke down in tears,” he remembers. “The second we got offstage I was just realizing that emotionally, we took on so much for an introvert [like myself] who just prefers being at home. And being thrown into all of that, it was really intense. But we didn’t realize until that night, like, ‘Oh, wow. This is… difficult to do.’ ”
He had no idea that the following years would prove even more trying. That after having the biggest hit of the band’s career, Portugal. The Man would nearly fall apart. And that, 20 years after the group formed in Alaska in the early 2000s, he would be forced to face his anxieties as a frontman who cringes at attention to prevent its fragmentation.
Today, Gourley is back where he feels at ease. At 42, a boyish wonderment consumes him as he walks his father’s woodsy plot of land in Wasilla, just over 40 miles north of Anchorage. There’s the main house and its attached garage with floor-to-ceiling shelves of construction materials — the family business — and a greenhouse in the back. There’s the detached garage that stores a motorboat. And there are two small guest homes, one filled with music memorabilia, including sleeves of vinyl albums that inspired Gourley as a kid: The Beatles’ Revolver, the Bee Gees’ Idea, Jefferson Airplane’s Crown of Creation and dozens more. There’s a Portugal. The Man poster on one wall, and above the door frame, a life-size ticket stub from that last night of the band’s 2018 tour.
Portugal. The Man — a name inspired by David Bowie’s larger-than-life fame, contrasting the enormity of an entire country with a single person — initially formed as a side project led by Gourley and bassist Zach Carothers, both of whom got their start in the emo band Anatomy of a Ghost. The longtime friends and bandmates met at Wasilla High School and quickly started making music together — while also quickly realizing that to make it their career, they would have to leave Alaska.
“It was kind of my push,” says Gourley, who has since operated much like the Wizard of Oz, quietly leading from behind a curtain. “ ‘We’re going to leave Alaska and just keep going.’ So we bought a minivan and a rice cooker — we had no money at the time and probably spent more money on gas looking for a rice cooker at Goodwill. We found one for six bucks, went to the Asian market and got a 5 pound bag of rice and just went out on tour.”
Gourley at his father, John Gourley Sr.’s, house in Wasilla, standing in front of the tree he climbs in the music video for “Noise Pollution” off Woodstock.
Brian Adams
By 2004, they had made Portland, Ore. — a 44-hour drive southeast of Anchorage — their home base, fleshing out the band with drummer Jason Sechrist and keyboardist Ryan Neighbors along the way. In 2006, Portugal. The Man independently-released its debut album, Waiter: “You Vultures!” and within months signed with manager Rich Holtzman (currently senior vp of marketing and artist development at AEG Presents), who helped the act establish a five-year plan.
Festival appearances at Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza followed, as did four more independently released albums, arriving annually. All the while, Gourley maintained an unusual relationship with his role in the group: As much as he could, he avoided being a frontman entirely. He leaned on Carothers and the other band members to help absorb the spotlight, even performing with his back to the crowd.
By 2010, five years into its existence, Portugal. The Man signed a deal with Atlantic Records. “I just felt that they were so original and didn’t sound like any band out there at the time,” says Craig Kallman, the label’s chairman/CEO. He was so impressed, in fact, that he brought another then-rising signee — Bruno Mars — to see the band perform at the tiny (and since-closed) Los Angeles venue Space 15 Twenty. After the set, Mars offered a pivotal piece of feedback to Gourley: “That show was so cool, but all I could see was your ass.” Gourley has played facing his growing live audiences ever since.
Portugal. The Man has released three studio albums on Atlantic: 2011’s In the Mountain in the Cloud, 2013’s Evil Friends and 2017’s Woodstock. But while all landed in the top 50 of the Billboard 200, Woodstock altered the band’s trajectory completely, thanks to breakout single “Feel It Still.” The groovy, uptempo song — which samples The Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman,” a Gourley family favorite on trips by dogsled to the grocery store — became an undeniable, and entirely unexpected, career-defining hit, and ushered in a series of firsts for the band.
“Feel It Still” scored Portugal. The Man its first Billboard Hot 100 entry, peaking at No. 4; it became the band’s first No. 1 on several charts, including Alternative Airplay, Hot Rock & Alternative Songs and Pop Airplay; and it earned the band its first Grammy nomination and win for best pop duo/group performance. (Gourley gave his trophy to Holtzman.) To date, “Feel It Still” has racked up 1.21 billion on-demand official U.S. streams and generated approximately $25 million globally (in recorded music and publishing royalties) from track sales, streams and radio play, Billboard estimates based on Luminate data. It’s also a go-to among music supervisors; the song has been Shazammed over 20 million times, earning key synch placements in the trailer for the film Peter Rabbit and shows including Love, Simon and Riverdale.
Though Gourley often refers to the hit vaguely as “that song,” he’s grateful for the success it brought the band. “ ‘Feel It Still’ gave us so much,” he says. “We have houses, I have a car… it feels so special and I’m just so gracious of everything that came along with that song.” But “emotionally, it was really difficult. It was this really stressful period for the band, just having that crossover success.”
Even so, the band believed it was ready to hit the ground running with its ninth album and hoped to return to the frequent release schedule of its early days. Mainstream success afforded the group its pick of producer, and the band ultimately landed on Jeff Bhasker, whom Gourley had dreamed of working with since Bhasker produced Kanye West’s game-changing 808s & Heartbreak. What was on track to be a two-year project became three, and then five, with the band finally turning in the album last December — and along the way, everything changed.
During that five-year period, the band members variously faced personal loss, addiction, a potentially career-ending health issue and an “aggressively progressive” diagnosis, all of which happened amid the isolation of the pandemic.
In 2019, Chris Black — a close friend who, after meeting the group in Los Angeles in the 2010s, became its unofficial DJ and MC — died suddenly. Black always kept the band members laughing, quick to crack a joke or put someone in their place. “It’s not common for a band like us to have an MC, but it made me feel really good,” says Gourley.
“He was also the glue for all of our friends,” he adds. “The thing that I miss the most is the way he held that friend group together… it just slipped away a little bit, and I think it’s difficult, recognizing that.” Coupled with the fact that, for the first time, the band members were living apart for an extended period of time through the pandemic, a natural rift formed — or perhaps widened — within it, leaving its lineup in limbo. Portugal. The Man has a long history of revolving musicians — its Wikipedia page includes a color-coded timeline of 13 past and present members’ histories — and Gourley and Carothers are the only two who appear on every album; the current lineup consists of Gourley (vocals, guitar), Carothers (vocals, bass), Zoe Manville (vocals, percussion), Kyle O’Quin (keys) and Eric Howk (guitar). (After rejoining in 2016, drummer Jason Sechrist has exited again.)
Gourley at his father’s house in Wasilla.
Brian Adams
The second of two guest homes on John Gourley Sr.’s plot of land, which houses music memorabilia.
Brian Adams
With the band members — who, up until Woodstock, had lived together — now by necessity living in the separate homes they only recently were able to afford, they were left alone with more time on their hands than ever before. By the end of 2018, Gourley was experiencing the worst pain of his life. He broke his jaw (the left side, he learned, had actually been broken for years; the right side snapped from the resulting pressure) and later split two teeth. He was bedridden for months, largely unable to sing or perform for over a year.
Then, in 2021, Gourley and Manville (who married in 2017) learned that their 11-year-old daughter, Frances, had a rare neurodegenerative genetic disease known as DHDDS, which shares symptoms with both dementia and Parkinson’s (she is one of only six known patients with her specific mutation). By June 2022, Howk, Carothers and O’Quin had all battled different addictions and entered rehab (the three members declined to share further related details).
Now, come June 23, Chris Black Changed My Life — the album that began with Bhasker almost five years ago — will chronicle the band’s turbulent last few years following the runaway success of “Feel It Still.” Though the album is finished, the band is still working itself out — and determining in real time how to juggle what comes next, from promotion to touring. With the band members’ relationships and finances riding on this album’s success, Gourley is now embracing the role he has long avoided: an actually-front-facing frontman.
“Everybody has their personal things going on. We finally understand what has been happening with Frances,” he says. “The stakes have changed. The motivation has changed. The reason I’m doing this — it has all changed. I can’t be the anxiety-ridden kid anymore. There’s this moment of adulthood and growing up or whatever it is… It’s stepping out and taking on that role in a way that I haven’t in the past.”
“Who the f–k is Portugal. The Man?”
That’s the question Jeff Bhasker found himself asking in 2017, when he randomly browsed iTunes after a period where he had tuned out popular music. “No. 1, ‘Feel It Still’ by Portugal. The Man,” he recalls. “Just the name of their band was kind of arresting and makes you curious. It got me really interested in who they were.”
About a year later, the group showed up at his door. “We were traveling around L.A. doing the tour of producers that wanted to work with us post-massive song and they’re all like, ‘They must have another one in there!’ I’ve written a hundred songs, dude. I have one,” Gourley says with a laugh.
To determine who should produce its next album, the band decided the best approach was to just get in the studio and write. Bhasker was at the top of its wish list — but when the band members arrived, instruments in hand, at his house, he proposed they have a conversation before jumping in. “We just listened to music and talked about Alaska and experience and clicked as people,” says Gourley.
“I like to let the artist tell me who they are and meet them where they’re at,” Bhasker explains. “It was so interesting hearing about the white van and the rice cooker — just on the highest level of being a broke band. I love the way they describe their progression of like, ‘Well, on the first album, we learned how to play our instruments.’ ”
Gourley skipping rocks.
Brian Adams
Gourley at Knik Lake.
Brian Adams
Bhasker says the years that followed — pandemic aside — felt like an “Usain Bolt-level sprint to finish the album,” with the band clocking hours at studios in Los Angeles, New York and Portland, as well as Bhasker’s studio in Malibu, Calif., and Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, where Portugal. The Man recorded its first album with Atlantic over a decade prior.
After first signing with the label, Gourley explains, he’d felt the need to bring his bandmates into the studio for his mostly solitary writing process. (Through In the Mountain in the Cloud, the sole writing credits on the band’s albums are his.) “It was just this feeling of like, ‘We’re a band — everybody comes in,’ ” he says. “And I think it was also the expectation of producers a lot of the time. They always think, ‘Stick Portugal. The Man in a room and they’ll just jam and sing.’ That has been the process every single time, and we had never done it pre-Atlantic.”
For the band’s ninth album, everyone left the studio at first — “It felt more personal,” Gourley says — though O’Quin eventually joined most sessions, and Carothers and Manville are credited as co-writers on several tracks.
Gourley recalls his first recording session while still rehabbing his jaw, working again with Electric Guest’s Asa Taccone (who co-wrote and co-produced “Feel It Still”) on four tracks that made it onto Chris Black Changed My Life. Looking back now, he says the brooding and downtempo “Plastic Island” stands out most because he can hear himself literally singing through his teeth, since he still couldn’t open his jaw all the way. On the song, he wonders: “Is it the end, my friend?” The album’s pensive closing track — the nearly six-minute-long “Anxiety:Clarity” featuring veteran songwriter and ASCAP president Paul Williams — opens with the line: “I’m not supposed to be here.”
“That’s the way I was feeling coming out of everything and finally getting to express myself after two years of like, ‘I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do this again,’ ” says Gourley. “I laid in bed thinking I would never be able to do anything ever again. I thought I was going to die. I thought about Frances, and what’s she going to do? I was depressed.”
Frances herself appears on the album, singing on “Ghost Town” and “Time’s a Fantasy”; Gourley calls the latter, which also features Canadian rapper Sean Leon and Bhasker, one of the album’s heavier songs. “We had just found out that Frances has this very rare genetic disease,” he recalls. “Zoe and I were just bawling in the studio with Jeff and Sean, and Frances ended up singing on it. She must have felt some spiritual connection to this song because it’s so slow and emotional, but she would hear it and loved singing [the line], ‘I got a feeling it’s gonna be just fine.’ ” (The band recently launched a donation page called Frances Changed My Life to raise money to fund both multimillion-dollar research and treatment for her.)
An old boat seen in a Portugal. The Man music video on Knik Lake stuck in the silt flats.
Brian Adams
Gourley wears a shirt honoring the band’s late friend and unofficial member Chris Black.
Brian Adams
Bhasker says nailing down the album’s subject matter was understandably difficult. “It’s all about John’s anxiety, and all of them and everything they went through and are all going through as a band, as a family, as people who just struggled to achieve a dream — and achieved it,” he says. “And then maybe questioned, ‘What are we doing here, and what do we really stand for?’ ”
Both Bhasker and Gourley recall their time at Sonic Ranch in the fall of 2022 fondly, mostly because that’s where a thematic track list started to take shape. “To see the album kind of emerge, and most of all to see a smile on John’s face… it was kind of like a ’70s movie where they would just shoot endless footage and hope there’s a movie in there,” says Bhasker. “And then to see the movie unfold and work was the most satisfying moment.”
The end result is a deeply layered and complex album that is equally beautiful and heartbreaking; with everything Gourley and the band have endured, and continue to experience, how could it be anything else? Even the uptempo lead single, “Dummy,” co-written with Taccone (and which debuted in a Taco Bell commercial), hints at the album’s unifying ethos: “Everyone I know is running from the afterlife,” sings Gourley.
“It is our best album,” Gourley confidently states. “I was really surprised when we got to the end of it, because this had been the thing that I had been searching for forever. It’s these really tight, concise ideas, like, ‘Can you tell a story in a sentence?’ I obsess over that, and I feel like this record, we did it. I did the thing that we were chasing. This is what I have been trying to write forever.”
Gourley exhales, taking in the towering snowcapped mountains of Hatcher’s Pass, just north of Wasilla. These are the mountains he would ditch high school to snowboard with Carothers. The same ones he recently carried Frances up while she napped on his shoulders. And the same ones that today are prompting him to wonder why he ever left. “I just miss Alaska so much,” he says with a sigh.
In a recent clip on Instagram — part of the band’s Knik Country Broadcast series, in which Gourley answers quick-hit questions — Gourley said, “Everything I’ve ever written is about Alaska.” It’s also fair to say everything that Portugal. The Man does is for Alaska.
In 2020, while still enjoying the “Feel It Still” high, the band launched the PTM Foundation — the acronym is a double-entendre that also stands for Pass the Mic — which advocates for human rights, community health and the environment, with a particular focus on Indigenous Peoples. (In 2022, the foundation raised $93,000 in grants given to 40 different tribes, impact organizations and community groups.) The band was always intended to serve more than itself, operating with curiosity and care for the surrounding world — and questioning its place in it.
When Bhasker started working with Portugal. The Man, it had been a while since his last collaboration with a band (by his estimation, it was with fun. on its 2012 smash hit, “We Are Young,” featuring Janelle Monáe). “It was definitely a challenge to navigate all the dynamics and all the growth and all the changes they had been going through — and especially during COVID, when everyone was going through all kinds of existential changes and being faced with a lot of really deep, personal struggles and revelations in their lives.”
As Gourley sees it, the success of “Feel It Still” — paired with perhaps too much time apart — amplified and exposed those individual struggles. “I think with that song being so successful so late in our career, it’s a rare thing,” he says. “Eighth record, a song like that? There comes complacency: ‘I’m content. I have a house. I don’t have to do this.’ But I still feel very hungry.”
A pair of moose on the way down from Hatcher’s Pass.
Brian Adams
Gourley on the road through Hatcher’s Pass.
Brian Adams
Playing so many festivals, in particular, he believes, can be “the death of a band… I was forgetting lyrics to ‘Feel It Still’ because of the monotony — and I love that song. I love that song more than any song we’ve ever written. I have never been built to show up and play a setlist, and we got stuck in that for a long time. I think people want comfort, and I feel like comfort is actually not the best thing for creativity.”
Portugal. The Man relentlessly toured through 2019 and resumed in 2022, co-headlining arenas with Alt-J. But this year, despite a new album, its schedule is significantly pared down. In June, it returned to Bonnaroo and in August will play Lollapalooza Chicago followed by the Austin City Limits festival in October. Otherwise, it has booked only a handful of headlining shows at iconic venues in key territories, like Colorado’s Red Rocks, New York’s Radio City Music Hall and Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl. The band’s live lineup adds four new musicians to the mix, including a new drummer.
When speaking of what the band’s present — and future — looks like, it’s clear Gourley isn’t entirely sure what to say, or how. He’s cautious not to speak only for himself but also not for anyone else, often seesawing between “I” and “we.” (The band’s other members did not speak for this story; for this album cycle, Gourley has chosen to do press by himself.) He recalls a particular phone call with legendary musician and singer Edgar Winter, whose “Dying To Live” is sampled on the Chris Black Changed My Life track “Champ.”
“This is what I would say about the situation with the band,” says Gourley. “It’s a pretty easy way to sum it up: [Edgar] called me one day and said, ‘I’m going to tell you about the best band I ever played in. The best band I ever played in lived in Chicago in a one-bedroom apartment. We had all had success, but we lived in a one-bedroom apartment. We could all afford things, but we lived in a one-bedroom apartment. We ate together, we slept together, we had this experience together. As soon as we got our own places, we stopped being the best band I ever played in.’
“The thing is, no matter where I go, I’m still sleeping on the floor in that one-bedroom apartment,” continues Gourley, speaking in a slow, hushed voice. “For this band to keep going, you have to have that excitement constantly around you, so you don’t forget that we worked really hard to get [here].”
He already has his sights set on the album after this one. “I am so excited to go back into outer space and do the craziest [stuff] and experiment with structure post-this record,” he says.
But for now, he’s grounding himself where it all started — running around with his nieces and nephews at his father’s house, hanging from wooden beams like monkey bars. Fortunately for Gourley, he can always come back home. As his father fondly jokes, “When he started playing music, we lost our best roofer.”
After all this time, it seems a fair trade. Gourley found himself.
06/22/2023
John Gourley in his home state of Alaska.
06/22/2023
With their earthy, blues-drenched sound, The Teskey Brothers could be from anywhere, any time.
The siblings, Josh and Sam Teskey, actually hail from Warrandyte, Victoria, a short drive from Melbourne. And right now, their third and latest studio album, The Winding Way, is having an effect on fans everywhere.
The Teskeys’ sound is untouched by modern life, and unlike anything else pumping on radio — guitars, drums, sometimes keys, and Josh’s distinctive vocals.
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Produced by Grammy Award-winner Eric J Dubowsky, known for his work with artists such as Flume, Kylie Minogue, and Tones and I, The Winding Way was shaped by lockdowns, growing families, and attention to detail.
That style, as though the tracks were unearthed from a time capsule, was no accident.
The Winding Way, a nod to the group’s old recording studio, on a street called Winding Way in Melbourne, was recorded on tape at Sydney’s Hercules Street Studios.
That old-school approach was something the brothers had tested on earlier, live recordings.
“By simplifying” the process, says Sam Teskey, himself a Grammy-nominated engineer (best engineered album, non-classical) for Run Home Slow, “I think it has actually brought a lot of authenticity and character to the sound. And I think people resonate with that.”
Returning to analog has brought in fans, he tells Billboard, folks who “really dig that sort of music and just enjoy the chillness of it. It’s more relaxed to listen to.”
Those fans in the U.K. and Europe are getting a taste of it right now. The Teskeys have been on the road throughout the warmer northern months, and includes support slots for Bruce Springsteen and Hozier. They’ll tick off another bucket-list item this Sunday (June 25) with a performance on the Other Stage at Glastonbury Festival.
North American concerts follow from early August, with a 13-date national headline tour of Australia and New Zealand kicking off in November.
The Winding Way is the followup to 2019’s Run Home Slow, which peaked at No. 2 on the national chart and won three ARIA Awards, including best group, and their debut from 2017, Half Mile Harvest, both of which were recorded at the now-shuttered Half Mile Harvest Studios in Warrandyte.
As the pandemic forced bands off the road, the Teskeys enjoyed a rare moment to savor when Live at the Forum went to No. 1 on the ARIA Albums Chart — their first leader. And with that feat, a circle completed. The last homegrown live album to climb the summit on the national chart was AC/DC Live back in 1992, a group that cut many seminal records in that audio laboratory on Hercules Street.
Released through Ivy League in ANZ and Glassnote in North America, The Winding Way features the previously-released cuts “Remember The Time,” “London Bridge,” “Take My Heart,” and “Oceans of Emotions”.
It was “unintentional,” notes Josh, ”but the album slowly became all about those ‘growing up’ themes of nostalgia, connection, displacement, and finding a path through the winding way of life. I think we discovered that we’re not kids anymore.”
The Winding Way is out now and can be streamed in full below below. And click here for the Teskey Brothers cover story in the June edition of Rolling Stone AU/NZ.
They didn’t just f–k things up, if you noticed, for the “Lilith (Diablo IV Anthem).” In fact, Halsey sounds pretty satisfied about her collaboration with BTS‘ Suga to promote the latest installment of the Blizzard Entertainment game.
“Collaborating with Suga on a project that revolves around our mutual admiration for dark mythology has been a longstanding dream of mine. ‘SUGA’s Interlude,’ our previous collaboration, while introspective, is pretty whimsical in tone,” the Grammy nominee tells Billboard of their new take on the song — which dropped June 5 — off her critically acclaimed 2021 album If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power. “Together, we were able to infuse the anthem with intricate narratives that encompass a wider range of emotions I wouldn’t have been able to tell without him. He added a whole new perspective to the song. Plus, it was just honestly really cool to do something so badass with my friend.”
The reworking of “Lilith” — which Halsey calls “an exciting challenge” to capture the “essence” of the game’s character of the same name — includes not only “actual sounds from gameplay throughout,” but a new verse by the BTS rapper. Midway through the song, Suga rhymes, “Step out of the moment that’s been trapping you in/ All this negativity of hatred and insanity/ Don’t dwell on the past/ It’s time to make a change/ Look around believe in what you see/ I have returned to hell.”
Halsey, who says they were “beyond excited” when Blizzard reached out to her to collaborate on the Diablo IV anthem and music video — which arrived alongside the revamped track — tells Billboard she “wanted to capture the game’s dark and immersive” tone. The visual for “Lilith (Diablo IV Anthem)” — which also features Suga — was filmed at the Chapelle des Jésuites in Cambrai, France, a setting that beautifully captures the gothic feel of the game. The musician added to that tone by using their line of about-face makeup to create the look for Blessed Mother Lilith, whom she portrays in the music video.
“Every visual aspect of this collaboration — including my outfit and makeup — was carefully crafted to be in tune with the character Lilith,” explains Halsey, who looks every bit the fierce warrior in her leather outfit and sword. “The web around my eyes simulates a placenta, which is part of the Lilith lore in its origin, but also the web of viscera that descends from in her character intro for the game.”
And while it was Suga whom Halsey collaborated with this time, the star is down for working with any and all members of BTS. “I would never say no to working with any of them, ever,” says the artist, who previously collaborated with the group on 2019’s “Boy With Luv,” which peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100. “They are always so dedicated and committed, and they bring singular talent to everything they do. We’re all so busy working all the time, it’s always one of my favorite parts of the year when we have something collaborative going on, because then we actually get to hang out!”
Revisit Halsey’s revamp of “Lilith” featuring Suga below:
Machine Gun Kelly went to Hellfest with his teenage daughter last week and all he got was some fresh ink. The “Emo Girl” rap rocker posted a series of pictures from his slot at the festival in Clisson, France on Tuesday (June 20), beginning with one of 13-year-old Casie Colson Baker wielding a tattoo gun […]
Machine Gun Kelly swung back into rock mode last week when he hopped on stage with Mötley Crüe for a live rendition of “The Dirt (Est. 1981),” their 2019 collaboration for the soundtrack to the film adaptation of the band’s biography of the same name. The rapper joined the metal legends during their set at […]
Greta Van Fleet singer Josh Kiszka came out as a member of the LGBTQ community in a poignant Instagram post on Tuesday (June 20) in which the frontman described his decision in light of recent laws in his home state of Tennessee targeting the state’s LGBTQ citizens.
“Where I’ve settled a home in Tennessee, legislators are proposing bills that threaten the freedom of love. It’s imperative that I speak my truth for not only myself, but in hopes to change hearts, minds, and laws in Tennessee and beyond,” wrote Michigan-bred Kiszka in a post accompanied by a live photo of the singer on stage surrounded by rainbow-colored lights.
“These issues are especially close to my heart as I’ve been in a loving, same-sex relationship with my partner for the past 8 years. Those close to me are well aware, but it’s important to me to share publicly,” he continued. “Over the years, the outpouring of love for the LGBTQ+ community has been resounding, but there is still work to be done for LGBTQ+ rights in TN, the nation, and the world.”
Kiszka’s post comes in the wake of conservative Tennessee legislators passing a recent bill attempting to ban drag shows on public property where minors could be present, as well as another bill signed in March that bans gender-affirming healthcare for children. One June 2, a federal judge ruled that Tennessee’s first-in-the-nation law restricting drag shows violated the First Amendment and was an “unconstitutional restriction of freedom of speech,” which sent the closely-watched legal battle to a federal appeals court.
While Kiszka did not specifically mention those two pieces of legislation, he said he wanted to share links to organizations doing good work to combat such policies, including: Human Rights Campaign Nashville, Inclusion Tennessee, Oasis Center Nashville, ACLU Tennessee, Nashville Pride, HRC, the Trevor Project and the ACLU.
“The LGBTQ+ community is a cultural pillar, constantly championing positivity and acceptance through art, music, literature, film, and most importantly, legislation,” Kiszka said. “The greatest mortal gift of all is our capacity to love and as we travel through time, may our greater understanding of the matter around and within us teach us to love ever deeper.”
See Kiszka’s post below.