For years now, rock music has been going strong, but the genre hasn't produced as many mega-hits as it used to. The radio waves and the top of the charts seem to be primarily reserved for pop, hip-hop and dance, though every once in a while, something really special breaks through, and usually when it does, it holds on for weeks at a time and ends up moving the needle and pushing what's happening in the music world towards a more guitar-centric sound. This year, Imagine Dragons scored the first rare rock top 10 hit on the Hot 100 with "Believer," and now as that tune is working its way down the ranking slowly, a new cut is taking its place, carrying the flame even higher on the listing.
Portugal. The Man, an alt-rock outfit that has been together for many years without the mainstream noticing, has scored perhaps the most surprising hit of 2017 with their single "Feel It Still," which has now spent a pair of frames inside the all-genre Hot 100's highest tier. There's no telling how far it will go, but there's enough buzz surrounding the song to help it end the year as a massive hit.
I spoke with frontman John Gourley about how the track, which interpolates beloved 1960's Motown hit "Please Mr. Postman" and makes it appeal to an entirely new audience, came to be, and what they're planning on doing now that they have exceeded their wildest expectations.
Hugh McIntyre: Congrats on the success of the single! You must've seen it rose again recently.
John Gourley: Yeah. It's pretty wild to watch.
McIntyre: What is it like every week to see it growing and growing and sit back and wonder what it'll do next week?
Gourley: Well, to be honest, we've been so slammed with press and shows and doing pretty much exactly what we've always done in the past. It's really hard to take a step back and recognize what any of it means. I mean, when we started we never thought we'd ever have a number one record or be on the charts in this way at all. It's just been cool. I think everybody in our group from people in the band to our crew members on tour, everybody's really excited and happy to watch it do what it's been doing. I mean, you couldn't have predicted it. I don't feel like we could've written this song if I tried to sit down and say, "Hey, you know what? Let's write a hit song. Let's do that thing." It’s been fun.
McIntyre: What do you think it is that makes this song resonate with such a large group of people?
Gourley: Well, I'll be honest with you instead of going, "Oh, I don't know. I have no idea why it works," I'll tell you what I think about the song. I heard the second the bassline go down sitting in a side session and a guy in another band hears me playing this bassline and asked if he could record it. The way it all happened was very natural and it was really organic. There's this odd pocket to the bass, and it's a loop. It's not set on a grid or anything. I think it's that nostalgic feeling that you get when you listen to it, and it's not just the “Mr. Postman” melody. It's not just that. There are a lot of factors in it. It's 1960’s Hofner bass that's been played on the verses that you've heard on Beatles records and Motown records.
I think it's just this combination of these just different feelings that you get when you hear it. It's a fresh lyric and the sentiment of the song, being a rebel just for kicks, I think that that felt like me as a kid. That felt like me in high school. Sometimes you just talk shit for the sake of talking shit. I will tell you though, I don't think I could've capture that had I set out to do it. If I had looked at the bass and said, "Oh, that's the bass that's gonna crossover. My parents are gonna hear that bass tone and they won't know it, but that's gonna trigger this feeling of, ‘Oh, this is how I felt when I heard that whatever Motown track or whatever Beatles track’." It just happened to be the closest bass to me. I think there's just something that came out of it that was really natural, and again, if we could this stuff every day, we'd have albums full of them.
McIntyre: So, was this the first song you guys have done that specifically interpolated something from the past?
Gourley: Oh, do you want me to get ourselves in trouble right now? Tell you everything? I mean, it all comes from something. To be an artist that is fully original, it doesn't exist. There are very few people that land in there, and even Bowie, he would've told you the same thing. He's pulling from everything. He's watching movies and putting together outfits based on what he sees, and that's what art is and what it should be. It should naturally kind of come around. In this case, it was honestly just that the melody popped into my head while I was singing. The whole thing happened so quickly it was just... We recorded that bassline, I wrote a bridge progression, and Asa [Taccone, the song’s producer] just handed me a microphone and said, "Hey, sing whatever's in your head."
I had the “I'm a rebel just for kicks” line and I tried to use it a bunch of times. I tried to use it with some really, really great producers, but it never really clicked, and it's just the way the bassline felt. It reminded me of driving two hours to get to town to buy groceries growing up in the middle of nowhere, Alaska with dogsled mushers for parents. I mean, that's what it reminded me of. It reminded me of singing along with oldies radio on those trips to town. I mean, I really love the way it came around. The second I did it, it gave me all these feelings of not only just nostalgia myself, but it reminded me of that era of folk music and where this pop music all comes from, anyway. It comes from people like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie traveling town to town and taking up a new local folk song in Idaho Falls from learning whatever the local folk song is and taking it to Missoula from there and writing a new verse along the way.
You know, like here's the center. It's where music comes from, and I like the idea of not trying to change it. As you can imagine, we had lawyers and colleagues telling us, "If you change this note here and here, you'll own it outright," and I just don't feel right about that. I'm cool, man. Give them their percentage. Let's keep supporting the older artists and support where this music comes from. I'm not into hiding it and into tucking it away and pretending like it's this fully original thing, but it is a new song and there's a new sentiment. It doesn't mean the same thing at all. It is new.
McIntyre: So, there's a lot of inspiration, but the people who wrote “Please Mr. Postman,” you credited them as songwriters, so they're getting the credit that's due to them. Have you heard from the original songwriters about the success?
Gourley: I haven't heard anything from them, honestly. I mean, I wish I had. A thank you would be nice. I mean, it could go both ways. It just is what it is. They got it from somewhere, too. Again, music is about something being in the air, and I think there's also the factors of the political and social climate right now. It's connecting with that era, and there's something about that crossover and that's probably what got into my head. I mean, we've never dealt with anything like this before, and I gotta be honest. Everyone in the music industry makes it so much harder than it needs to be.
We borrowed a rhythmic thing from somebody that's written a piece, and I hit them up to just say, "This is too close to what you did, and I want to give you credit for it and I want to pay you as a member," and they asked for more than a member share of the track, and I thought that was odd. I just think it's a strange thing. Money messes up everything. It ruins art. The second you start putting price tags on this stuff, it's... Art isn't for just the wealthy. It's for everybody to enjoy. Why does it have this absurd value on it, or how do you figure in how much you get paid over anybody else?
People have tried to steer us away from crediting them or tried to steer us towards changing a couple notes, and it just doesn't feel right to me. That's probably really harmful for us as people that want to be successful artists, but at the same time, we never shied away from that. I play in a band because I grew up on The Beatles and I heard Wu-Tang for the first time in high school and I heard that everything they were sampling came from this era that I was really familiar with, all these rad soul samples, and I might not know the song that RZA is sampling directly, but I know the sound of that amp, I know that guitar tone, and I know the sound of that mic on the piano, and you don't need to have a technical knowledge of music to understand why you're connecting with these things.
I don't need to know what year the amp is. I just need to know that it gives me this feeling when I hear it. I'm just not into the shady side of the music industry. Give credit where credit's due.
McIntyre: The band has been together and putting music out for over a decade, but now I'm sure you have a huge group of people who are just discovering you for the first time. Is that weird?
Gourley: It's not weird. We've grown. This is far beyond anything we've ever done and any growth this band's ever made, but we've grown with every album we've put out, and that feels really good. It feels really, really good to be able to go out and play shows and know that next year we're gonna go out and play that bigger music hall or that auditorium. The idea that our band has been able to do that is really cool. You do see the growth. You do see the changes, as your little fans are crying through the set at the front of the crowd going, "Oh, my god. Is this that band that wrote Feel It Still? They're on Disney Radio now."
McIntyre: Oh, wow.
Gourley: "They're on Radio Disney. I thought I was coming to a different show." Yeah, I see those things, but at the same time, we're not gonna change who the band is for any of this. We're not gonna change who we are. We've always done what we do and we go out and try and get better with each record we make. If you look at the history of the band, we were together for six years before we signed to Atlantic, and to me, the way I always looked at where this family's headed and what we were doing, it was just “Let's go out and play music and see how far we could take this thing.” Every year, let's just tour as much as possible, and every year let's record a new album and see how much we learned.
I remember making that first album. It was just me playing guitar the way somebody who doesn't play piano pecks at a piano or somebody on a keyboard who doesn't know how to type pecks at a keyboard. I was just playing out everything one note at a time and writing melodies over it and making loops and eventually learning a little bit more about guitar and learning that, hey, the heavier stuff was more fun. We tried that and it didn't feel like... It was closer, but I want to learn the chords now. It was a lot of learning and a lot of attempting to make music. None of us are school guys. We didn't go to school for this, and all found different routes we could've taken to get here. We decided to just go out and apply it. It's just like any trade job.
McIntyre: You mentioned that you guys have made an album every year, and then there's a several-year gap between your previous one and Woodstock. You want to talk about what went on in there?
Gourley: Well, it's the same thing. When we signed for Atlantic Records, that was that point where we took a step back. We had just played Bonnaroo in 2009, and we got a DVD. They put out part of a DVD after the show. We watched it and it was the first time I think any of us ever sat back and looked at a show that we had played and went, "Oh, wow. That sounds pretty good. It looks alright." I said, "It looks like we're actually a real band," and it's silly to look back on it now like we weren't a real band before that point because obviously, they booked us at Bonnaroo, but it just wasn't... It was never our goal to be a super tight band and play every festival we can. It felt really good.
That was the point when we signed to Atlantic Records, and when we signed there, you do it knowingly stepping into a totally different arena. It's competing on a level that... Anybody can self-release an album. Anybody can step into a bedroom and make some music. Anybody can go out and get shows, but it takes a lot to be able to step into that major label music world and say, "You know what? I'm gonna put out music and I'm not gonna get dropped, and I'm gonna do the best that I can for Ahmet [Ertegün, one of two original founders of the label]. The dude put out some of my favorite records. He put out Rolling Stones records, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles.
When we stepped in there, we made it a point to say, "Not only are we gonna write the best songs that we can, but we're gonna take a step back and say, 'We're gonna do whatever it takes to get there,' and if that album isn't as good as the last record, we're not gonna put it out." I think with this album we were a little bit too ambitious, more than anything because we pretty much started writing music immediately after Evil Friends was finished, the second that was done.
We worked with Danger Mouse on a lot of stuff, and it's all really cool, really fun music, but during the same period that we were working with Danger Mouse again, we started working with Mike D on a totally different album, so here we are. We have two albums started that are both going at the same time. One's being recorded in Malibu, basically on the beach at Shangri La at Rick Rubin's studio out there, and the other one's being recorded with Danger Mouse and it's really cool and classic Mike D stuff, but very progressive for us. Lyrically it’s really exciting and just the right amount of fun. I can only imagine how much fun these dudes have in the studio making those records because it all ultimately led us to finishing Woodstock, which is a 10-track record four years later, but I think we were taking on too much.
We got Mike D in the studio. You can't buy Mike D. Mike D doesn't have to work on new music. Danger Mouse doesn't have to work on new music. We're in the studio with two producers that you technically can't really buy. You just can't pay for them to make any records you want, so the rope that we had was just do whatever you want, work wherever you want. At the end of the day, it took going back home and hanging out with my dad, who's a builder, he's a contractor up in Alaska, and Zach and I were hanging out with him at his place having some beers, and of out of nowhere said, "Hey, man. What's taking so long with this record? Don't you just go into a studio with some instruments and write some songs and put it out?" I sat there, Zach and I both looked at each other and said, "Yeah. I mean, I guess that's what you do."
There's obviously more to it than that, but it made me realize we put so much pressure on ourselves to put out a record with a hit, and not necessarily a hit, but just the best songs you can write. It's gotta be better than the last album or you're done, and it made me think of bands like Jet. Jet is always the one that pops into my mind as it's just so confusing to me. This band put out their first record with three hit songs that were smash hits for rock and roll. They can write songs, they can produce songs, they can make you feel something when you hear it, and they put out this awesome release and there's no hits on it, so Jet breaks up.
That's never made any sense to me. You don't need to have a hit on your record to keep going. Does the public really think that they can't write pop songs now? If they can write three of them, they can write three more, but I think it's just this weird pressure that gets put on people that we just... I don't know. I feel lucky that we've stayed pretty out of it up until this point, but I imagine next record, you think I'm not gonna look at “Feel It Still” and go, "How do I beat that? How do I write a better song than that?" Fuck yeah, I'm gonna try.
McIntyre: What is next for you guys?
Gourley: I imagine we're gonna try to move quicker with the music from now on, simply because of that track. I've been talking to my mom and dad about music, and looking at The Rolling Stones. They put out a lot of records. It's not hits on every record. They were doing that. They had two records in a year. Beatles, two records in a year. Yeah, so what? I'm just writing the best music I can and putting it out. I mean, we could easily do that. We wrote 40 to 50 songs during this four-year period, and how'd it all come out? I think it was hard for the label to deal with this crazy output, and then trying to pull everything back together because we wrote “Feel It Still,” and it’s gonna be a smash.
Do you think we would've gotten the same promotion that we did for this record and the same backing had we put out three or four records before this over that four-year period that could've potentially not been the commercial success that this has been? I mean, would Atlantic have just packed it in and said, "Well, we made a bad call on this band. Let's throw it on the shelf and get them back out there. Let them go do their thing?" I think it would've been difficult had we been putting out music, so it's this weird area where I'm kind of torn. Do you follow The Stones and The Beatles and Pink Floyd? Do you follow these classic artists that just went out and made the music that they wanted to make, and who cares what anybody thinks? It's just music. Or do you look at “Feel It Still” and try and recreate that?
I'm not the type of person that wants to recreate something that we've done, but “Feel It Still” is a song that I will play the rest of my life and feel completely happy with because of the feeling it gives me, not only because of what it's done for our band, but it's the fact that it makes me feel like a kid riding to town with my parents in Alaska to get groceries and get dog food and do those things. It was a huge part of my life before I wrote it. I want to consider all of that a lot more when I'm writing music and not be so precious with ideas that are like... Had we stopped and said, "Oh, that's ‘Mr. Postman,’" and changed those two notes or three notes or however much you need to change a melody to legally make it yours, who's to say it would've been the same success that it's been?
I don't want to let any of that get in the way. I just want to keep trying to write the best songs we can, and hell yeah, I want to have another hit. Hell yeah, I want to try and do that, but I'm not gonna sacrifice who I am to get there, and I'm not gonna screw over other artists that paved the way to get there.
