Photo Credit: Owen Ela
Portugal. The Man’s new album, SHISH, sees John Gourley going back to his roots and working with producer Kane Ritchotte, someone who is no stranger to Gourley. As a teenager, Ritchotte was Gourley’s drummer and the two played off and on together. This incredible partnership created a record full of honesty, with lyrics focusing on what is going on in the world around us and where all of it will take us.
Gourley’s unique but inspiring Alaskan upbringing is on full display, and his thoughtful lyrics are accompanied by a profound sense of musical freedom – leaving fans with the question, what would you bring on your six foot toboggan?
mxdwn: Hi, my name is Eve Pierpont and I’m the editor for mxdwn’s Music feature section. I’m here today with John Gourley from Portugal. The Man. Hi John.
John G: Hey, how are you?
mxdwn: Good, how are you?
JG: I’m doing well, thank you.
mxdwn: So, how does it feel to have your own record label?
JG: {laughs} It’s honestly like, we did this at the very beginning of this band, this was what I set out to do when we started. So we have like four or five releases on our own label, pre-Atlantic [Records], and part of our contract with Atlantic was that they would allow us to release things on our own imprint as well. We just didn’t really get around to it. It just felt like we were kind of like running nonstop. This is the way I move best, I come from the DIY space. We came up in the hardcore scene, which was always weird for indie and like alternative bands, like when we’d end up around them, they would say, I remember this distinctly, it was a conversation with the Grizzly Bear saying oh, like all these all ages venues, how do you do that? How do you play all ages? Because all these bands are so cool at the time, like it’s all 21 and over, and that’s all that we want to do. You know? All the indie bands are like, well, we want to play the cool bar, the cool space. We just wanted to tour nonstop and hardcore did that, and that’s how we got in front of all ages audiences, consistently was just going out with those bands that would play community centers, VFWs, music halls, like just really random community center spots.
mxdwn: I love that. That’s awesome. But yeah, I get that. It really makes a show, I guess, when you’re in those kind of settings.
JG: Definitely, and it’s just the DIY space. Who’s got a venue, who’s got a place to play. Like we played basements all the time, so having our own label, it’s just kind of a return to the Atlantic years, I mean, really, really, really, really amazing education in music and in production, in songwriting. I mean, that’s really what I wanted to learn when I went to Atlantic. The whole point was that I like playing music. I like learning more about music. I like learning why people do certain things. I grew up on Motown and the Beatles, like if we’re talking about kind of insane amounts of creativity and just perfectly crafted songwriting. I know that space sometimes gets a bad rap {laughs} from people on the outside. They’re like, oh, major label space. Homie, they give you lots of opportunities to get into rooms with some of the most talented songwriters in the world. What do you do for a living? We all write songs. I want to learn from people and I want to respect that space. And Craig Kallman and Julie Greenwald really, really fostered creativity and this like, idea that I could do whatever I wanted in Atlantic. So when we completed the contract, it was just like, I have every label I can talk to now. I can kind of go in and anywhere that I want to go into, and it was cool taking a couple of those meetings. But along that part of my journey, I went into a room and I’m talking to some folks about like, so what would you even do? What would you do with Portugal. The Man? What would you do that I can’t do? It was honestly a very candid and transparent conversation about, well, there’s nothing really that we can do, like more than you, at this point. So, what they suggested was that I get together with Kane Ritchotte, who is my old drummer. I played with Kane just before I was at Atlantic and putting out records all the way through. He’s played with me off and on, he’s on Chris Black Changed My Life, he’s on Woodstock, he’s on Evil Friends, and he’s just kind of been around me, but he was a little kid when he came into my world, 18, 19 years old. So, he and I played together really young. He was kind of like a little brother, the person who’s hands you’d slap in the green room, and you go, don’t touch that. Hey, stay away from that, that’s a problem later in life, trust me. You got some problems that you got to like, you know, some things to navigate. The suggestion was that Kane comes in and produces with me, and I thought it was so interesting that I walked into this, again, it’s another major label space, and the suggestion was, why don’t you do what you were doing before you came into this space? And I thought it was really smart, and it’s what we did. I had Kane come up. We were just on the idea that we were just going to mess around, like we’re just going to play and see what comes out of it. And opening up my space to my peer Kane Ritchotte, no longer little brother, no longer the intern, he’s coming in and I’ll tell you what, he’s always had this really amazing creative energy around him, and just one of the best musicians I’ve played with hands down, he came in with so many great ideas and recording techniques, and it was just a very fruitful process. I mean, we sat down, we jammed and immediately you’ll know this feeling like when you sit down with something that gives you creativity or like inspires you in some way that you haven’t touched in a while. It could be a guitar, it could be a pencil, it could be like, oh, that’s the pad I used to use, and you sketch something out and it like has something in it. It was like that playing with Kane. So, a lot of those old jams came back, a lot of that. I even picked up a thinline Telecaster that I hadn’t played since our early records. It just felt like, oh, this is the type of album we should be writing. And I’m forever grateful to Kane for kind of coming up and just inspiring that and producing that with me. It was a really incredible partnership.
mxdwn: Oh, that’s awesome. And it’s funny you bring that up because my next question was actually about working with Kane and how he was suggested and that over a decade ago, he made his way into the band in the lineup as like a fill-in drummer and how you felt about, you know, hearing his name as a suggestion given your history. But you basically answered that, but if you want to add anything else.
JG: Oh, I can expand on it. It’s funny, like you see it a lot in any sort of office job. Somebody comes in as an intern and it’s like working your way up within that system, whatever that business is, is sometimes difficult because people will always want to see you as the person that got the coffee and took the notes, and it’s so disrespectful to me, like that’s my take on it. You’re supposed to mentor people so they can eventually take your position.
mxdwn: Everybody has to start somewhere.
JG: It’s the whole point. We live in this society that’s so, like the corporate world and I mean, it’s a lot of things. We don’t need to get super deep on because everybody knows it at this point, like we’ve seen the cracks, like it’s showing, but the corporate world is so fear-based. It’s like, oh my God, they’re going to take my job, keep getting me coffee, Kane, keep getting me coffee. Just get me coffee. I don’t need you in my space. And I come from Alaska. I come from like small, rural community.
mxdwn: That’s what I was reading about.
JG: Yeah. So, that’s where I come from. I don’t understand that world. The whole point is that you give people the tools to be able to do the job and do it as you’re equal.
mxdwn: Yeah. No, exactly. And that’s a fantastic mentality to have.
JG: And Jesus, Kane has always been incredible. He’s always just been such a great player and I like being able to take a step back and say, “What’s he going to do?” I wonder what he’s going to do. And all the moves were very smart, very thoughtful and considerate. There was a point even where we were recording and we had all these songs and I could tell, I was sensing a little bit of this, you have this like hangover where you’re like, I can do all this stuff, I learned a lot, I got to play with Jeff Bhaskar and Paul Williams, and I still play with Paul Williams and Jeff Bhaskar, but getting to learn from them, like, I can do that now. Like, I got those tools. The truth is, it’s those partnerships that grow that fruit. You know? That’s a really specific thing. You can never really have what they have without them because it’s, it’s coming together, I believe, very strongly in partnerships – John and Paul. I think it’s necessary to have those, for me personally. Maybe I have codependency issues {laughs}. I need help.
mxdwn: No, no, I get it {laughs}.
JG: But I think it’s very cool having somebody to bounce ideas off of, but that hangover really made me feel like, okay, like I’m going to write some songs and it’s going to be a record. And that process was the initial few months that we just started writing and just seeing what was going to come out of it. Also, a part of my process is, I don’t really write in advance. I just kind of go in and say like, okay, start writing. We started tackling it and we got to the end of that first process, and I just had this feeling like, you know, the suggestion of working with Kane was that we kind of go back to that space, like pre-all of this. And I said, you know, we don’t really need that. What happened when we were just jamming, these riffs were coming out and it was super fun and like heavy and it was weird. Let’s bring that back in, and Kane just like, when you’re playing with somebody who really gets you and really understands where you want to go with it, being fluid with that and making it sound good, it was very exciting being with somebody who just said, “I know you’re headed somewhere and we need to capture that.”
mxdwn: Oh, that’s awesome. I love that. So, what did it mean to you to have “Angoon” on the album? Not just musically, but also personally given its home to a tribe whose name I am not going to try to pronounce because I don’t want to butcher it, and the tragic 1882 U.S. Navy bombardment?
JG: “Angoon,” to me, I was writing about things that are currently happening in the world, and you see stories about Angoon, like the U.S. military gets them to, this tribe, to surrender, to sign over everything. And they won’t do it. They just bomb them. This is on U.S. soil. I mean, you’ll see a lot of these stories as you dig in deeper. Like a lot of our treaties are pretty, for a lack of a better term, whack, and destructive. And I mean, you see what happens and that stuff is still currently happening in the world. I mean, that’s what’s happening in Palestine. That is what’s happening in Sudan and it never stops. It’s happening here. It’s currently happening here. You’re just not seeing it in the same way. It’s opening up Alaskan wild to mining. It’s what’s happening with like Ambler Road. I heard an NPR story talking about it, and I think that’s really great that it’s becoming like a national story because the MAGA crowd, they’re about making America great, bringing in jobs, growth, no taxation, it’s what’s happening in Ambler Road. There’s a $2 billion road project coming up. It’s going to be Alaskan taxpayers that pay for it, put a road out to Ambler, put in a mine, a copper mine is going to be very destructive to the waters out there. And you can say, oh, there’s thousands of rivers. Oh, well, they all feed into the same space. So salmon beds, like spawning beds, they get affected by it. For everybody who doesn’t know, I’m going to talk to the lower 48 for a second, Alaskans should know this, and Alaskans are the people who are pushing for this apparently, I guess. I’ve watched salmon runs dwindle year to year, let alone, like, my lifetime. You should not be able to get salmon in every coffee shop you walk into. Growing up that was like a seafood restaurant, like there are spots you should go to get this stuff, and there’s a whole industry around it. We are taking more than we need. Then you look at this mine, it will destroy spawning beds and it will destroy them all the way down those rivers and tributaries all the way down. So we’ve seen this destruction. Why would we be putting in a $2 billion road across permafrost, which will cost millions. It’ll be billions as well in repairs. Permafrost again, for the lower 48 people who don’t know it, it thaws and refreezes, it’s frozen ground. So that’s like what tundra and permafrost are. It moves. What happens when the earth moves, these roads get busted up and they’re going to have to keep repairing these roads. It’s not even an Alaskan company going in there to mine. It’s an Australian company. We’re talking about putting in a road so an Australian company can take resources from your land, under this guise of like creating jobs. This is how they get you. This is how the UFC works. If anybody follows MMA, it’s like we’ll give you a bonus, there’s backroom bonuses. Oh, cool, I was paid 50 to show 50 to win. In the backroom, Dana White gave me an extra 250 grand, great quarter of a million dollars. It’s nothing in comparison to their profits. Your support is very easy to buy. And I have no idea why we’re talking about this right now {laughs}. It drives me insane because I hear support in Alaska, I hear people who support it saying, oh, it’s going to lower food costs in our town. I totally understand. And again, explaining things to people in lower 48, you go out to these villages, cereal’s 20 bucks. A head of lettuce, $10, $15. It’s all very expensive. But when you go out there, there’s a whole other group that gets access to this, hunters, sport hunters, the Rogans of the world, the Joe Rogans of the world who go, oh, I’m about conservation, and you know, you got to thin these herds because, whatever like excuse they give themselves. I’m going to tell you what happens when you bring in a fan boat to go hunt these animals. When you just go out there, just in small numbers, it’s not just you. I mean, that’s like selfish people have this selfish thought that they’re the only person that went out there. It’s just me with my bow. You’re out there for two days, you know, there are other people out there doing this and there will be more. And what happens when you go out there is you scare these caribou herds off of natural migration routes. They’re on a 20 year migration route. Like natural migration, where, this is how they find food. They follow these paths. It just leads them around. It’s the circle of life we’re all traveling around. You scare those caribou herds off of that migration route. This is why you see whales beaching themselves. Oh, a whole pod beaches themselves. We found a whole herd, dead birds. It’s more than just like, oh, something must have happened. Oh, they got poison. Like it’s as simple as airline routes have pushed your birds off of their route. They don’t know where to find food. Those whales don’t know where to find food. They’re lost, you know, their migration routes are like now shipping routes. Things I think about {laughs}.
mxdwn: Yeah. No, that’s super interesting, because I’ve never thought about that kind of stuff.
JG: Well, it’s a lot.
mxdwn: It’s important too.
JG: It’s a lot. And these are like very Alaskan lessons.
mxdwn: Yeah. No, that’s super interesting because like you say, the lower 48, which I’ve never heard before, but I like that. It’s very Alaska, and I’m in Florida and I live in Florida, so I’m very far so it’s very interesting to me to learn these things because I also like to learn and it’s just something that is never brought to my attention because, you know, not that it doesn’t have to, but it’s just so far off the radar of where I am in the country. But it’s very interesting because it’s a whole different climate and reality than I live in. So, I love learning about this stuff and listening about it. So, I don’t mind.
JG: Well, thank you for listening {laughs}.
mxdwn: Of course.
JG: I’m talking about Angoon because it’s colonialism, which I hate, it’s genocide, it’s Apartheid. It’s really sad to me. I look at it and I think, man, all this struggle, all this like death over resources and land, which we have plenty of, and it’s for profits. We can like frame it around religion, these are all built like constructs, they’re built to control you. Like they’re not for me, they’re for you. I stand to benefit from it, like you being caught up in these endless battles. I mean, I was writing about what we’re watching today, whether it’s ICE raids in the U.S. And just the random stops, Palestine. This is where you’re headed. You know? This is where everything is headed and what’s happening over there was not happening, or what was happening, before October 7th, before all of this. Like, hey, I’ve been on the internet a long time and for some reason my family, we had a generator. We did not have like power. We did not have those things. But my dad, to his credit, he still doesn’t know how to use a phone, he knew the internet had like a value to it for us as kids. Because we didn’t have neighbors, I’ve been on the internet forever, and you know what? I’ve seen a lot of them taking their own videos and laughing at people’s pain and at destruction and death. I’ve seen it and you can see it on both sides. I know who has the power in that situation, and I know how it feels to be like, just in the most basic, privileged way, to be squeezed by that machine. And I can go anywhere I want. I can do anything I want. I can leave, I can get food, I can go fish. I can do so many things in my life and I’ve felt squeezed and I feel like lashing out when I get squeezed. Yeah, that’s a really serious note to end that on, but {laughs} it’s a very serious subject.
mxdwn: Yeah, it is. Definitely. I did have a question on how you make a reference to your mom fixing the generator in “Tyonek,” and how that’s also a village name and what that means to you, but also, I found an interview from 2017 that you did with Alaska’s News Source that mentions your parents both being dog sled mushers and growing up with a generator on Knik Road before it was Knik Goose-Bay and your label’s name is the same name, and how you have a song on SHISH titled that and just what it meant living on that road and it’s connection to dog sled mushing and just all of the different places in Alaska and those times and how it’s kind of shaped you and your music and everything.
JG: I guess I realized over the last few years, the pandemic, I think everything shutting down, that’s a big reminder of where I come from. I mean, the second we got shut in, I was like, okay, okay, Zoe, we’re getting canned butter, canned bacon, so like, this is going to be a little bougee for the rural Alaskan folks, canned butter, canned bacon and sourdough starters, spam. I kind of decked us out. And in doing that, I realized that I grew up different than even the people that I had played music with. You know? Alaskans are all very different. They’re road system Alaskans, which I was, but then there’s city road system Alaskans and Town Road System. There are Village Alaskans. I am a rural Alaskan that grew up within the road system, so it’s kind of this weird in-between space where you’re not, I don’t have neighbors, I have to go somewhere to be a part of a community.
mxdwn: Yeah.
JG: So, I don’t know, and I was super, super shy growing up, so it was really just me and my family all the time with these dogs. It was just dog mushing and riding four wheelers and snow machines. We call them snow machines up in Alaska. FYI, anybody goes up there, don’t call them snowmobiles, we call them snow machines.
mxdwn: {laughs} Good to know.
JG: So, we do that. Dirt bikes, and yeah, that is where everything comes from. It’s why we started a foundation. It’s why I believe in mentorship. It’s why I believe in so many things that I do, is because I didn’t have any of these things growing up. So the village has the village.
mxdwn: Mm-hmm.
JG: You know? Like rural folks, they have each other and they go and they do their thing, and we go to the grocery store once every couple of weeks and we get supplies, and sometimes it was three hours to go to the grocery store from where we were. I mean, there were periods where we, this sounds crazy, but dog sled or snow machine is the only way in or out, and we would do that. I really love that sense of, I guess pride in being able to do that, to live that lifestyle that a lot of those folks have, it’s out of necessity. I mean, the Gourleys have always been this, everybody kind of talks about it back home, and when you come into our world, it’s so natural for us, but the Gourleys only hang out with the Gourleys {laughs}. When I’m in Alaska, that’s like what we do. I hang out with the Gourleys, that’s my family and my dad makes me get up and go to work with him in the morning to go build, and he did that forever. Like, I would come home from tours and he’d be like, 5 a.m., alright Johnny, let’s go, don’t forget where you come from, drive me up to work.
mxdwn: I love that.
JG: I’d be like, dead asleep. I’ve never slept a lot because of that lifestyle. It’s a lot like growing up on a farm. I guess. I do really connect with, when I meet Alaskans outside of Alaska and it’s just what I call them, you find a lot of them in Australia. There’s a lot of Alaskans in Australia.
mxdwn: Interesting.
JG: Not real like birth Alaskans, but yeah, they’re Alaskan as hell. You’ll find them in Idaho and Montana and Florida. You definitely find a lot of Alaskans in Florida there. You got some wild folks out there.
mxdwn: Yeah, that’s for sure. {Laughs}
JG: But yeah, I relate to all that stuff, like the generator, all of these things my mom, I mean, bad as hell.
mxdwn: She sounds like it.
JG: They, they ran the Iditarods together. She raised those dogs. She trained those dogs. We would be out in the dog lot with her every morning and every evening like feeding and watering and cleaning up. And we love all those moments looking back. She’d get the fire going for us when the generator would turn off, and typically we’d have it off at night, so we’d have a fire going and yeah. Really, really kind of incredible. And an incredible woman. Once all the kids left home, she became a firefighter. We have wildfires in Alaska often, so she became firefighter, EMT, rescue diver.
mxdwn: That’s hard stuff.
JG:Yeah, and it’s especially difficult in small areas like when you’re rural, every call you’re on is somebody that you know. I feel like though, the folks that got my mom on those calls, whether they made it out or not, are very lucky to have such a caring person to be showing up, and very considerate of them, and always like carried a lot of love for people around us. We had foster kids growing up. She kind of did everything, took care of everybody. Even my bully growing up, you know? I won’t say his name, actually, he’d never see this, but she would take care of these kids. There’s this kid he’d like, pick on me, push me around, and we eventually, like later in life, become friends. But it’s funny how she would give him a ride home and then I was like, mom, why are we giving him a ride home? He’s so mean to me, you know? Like pinching me and punching me in the stomach, in the backseat, you know? And she would just say, well, you know, he has a really hard time at home, so this 30, 45 minutes that we can give him a lift, that’s a nice little break, without the anxiety of sitting on the bus, riding home and thinking about that. So she’s always been a very caring person and really always kept my eyes open to that other side of things, what could be happening in other people’s households that’s different than yours.
mxdwn: That’s beautiful. Honestly, I love that. What do you hope listeners get from SHISH?
JG: You know, when you make music and when you make art, I just have a philosophy around it that is, it’s up to you. You know, does it look good to you? Like, does it sound good? That’s basics. You know, is it honest? That’s probably question number one is, is it honest? Is it true to you? Is it true to your story? This is where real success is found, across the board. I mean, if I’m offering anything, like here’s my little bit of advice for like my mentor toward people is, honesty is key. And honesty will always win. Think what you want of pop music, they live and breathe that truth, and they deliver that. They feel that song, they feel that lyric, they feel that emotion harder than anybody else in the world, and that’s why you connect with it, when it works. Sure, there’s things that like slip through the cracks that are like, oh, that was just good candy melody, because sometimes you want that, sometimes you want candy. You know? But a lot of these, like Gagas and Olivia Rodrigo and people like that, they live and breathe this stuff and they are punk. There is nothing more punk to me. Olivia Rodrigo is punk. And kind of one of the biggest punks in the world. So sick. Alright. So our album, my dad always drops these really funny little nuggets of knowledge and wisdom along the way, and there was one point I was talking to him, he does these really funny doodles, he’s a builder, so like he’ll drop plans and stuff and he’ll do these doodles. He would draw these dog sleds. I said, hey dad, I’m working on this album, and this is pre, lyrics are not like fully there yet and everything, would you draw a picture of a dog sled? I really want a picture of a dog sled in this artwork. I kind of do like everything at the same time, and that’s where all the inspiration comes from, and I asked my dad to draw a dog sled and he said, oh man, Johnny, uh, you know, I’ve been thinking about sleds and as I lay in bed, you know how I fall asleep every night? I lay in bed and I think about the things I would take with me in a six foot toboggan when I’m ready to leave. And I just love the visual of, you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t ask him where he is going either, that’s like another Alaskan thing. It’s like, wherever he is going, he’s going to go there and these are things I’m going to take with me, and it’s a really big thought to take with you because that applies to me. That applies to you, that applies to everybody in some way. And it got me thinking about like, okay, what are the things? Like, okay, what is he putting in his sled? Actually, dad, will you make me that list? Because I have my list, you know, if I’m in Alaska, here’s the berry list, I need some candy, I need a tarp. It’s like multi-tool stuff.
mxdwn: Yeah.
JG: So, Alaskans are very much like, I bring a tarp because I have multiple things I can do with it. You can collect water, use it for shelter, and it can be insulation, if you need. And it’s like literally a lyric in the album, it’s about that. So what you want people to take from it is what do you put in your toboggan? It could be anything for anybody, but that’s why I’m writing about like Palestine and connecting it to these things like, hey, don’t forget that there are other people out there in this world dealing with much heavier things than you. That’s what we fight for and what we represent.
mxdwn: Yeah. That’s awesome. It’s been such a pleasure talking to you.
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