Portugal. The Man, Twin Peaks
Maclay Heriot
Portugal. The Man
Alaska’s former indie-rock darlings Portugal. The Man have made the jump to platinum pop status. The new single “Feel It Still” exchanges guitar riffage for synth-based EDM grooves, and the new album Woodstock recruits kingmaking producers such as Danger Mouse. Lead singer John Gourley’s versatile voice is still the centerpiece, jumping from falsetto crooning to a staccato hip-hop delivery. With several genre changes already under their belt, fans of PTM’s bluesy, alternative-rock past will find hints of that influence in their newly accessible pop sound. Chicago’s Twin Peaks opens.
press release: Presented by Frank Productions, Majestic Live & True Endeavors
With special guest, Twin Peaks.
Tickets go on sale to the public FRI, NOV, 3 at 11 AM. Questions? Call the ticket office at 608.258.4141. $42.50 ($39.50 adv.).
“Well, we’re ten months into 2017 and the world continues to burn like an avalanche of flaming biohazard material. But hey, it’s not all bad: Portugal. The Man has a new album called Woodstock.”
PTM’s last album came out over three years ago—a long gap for a band who’ve dropped roughly an album a year since 2006. And in true, prolific band fashion, they’ve spent almost every minute since 2013 working on an album called Gloomin + Doomin. They created a ton of individual songs, but as a whole, none of them hung together in a way that felt right. Then John Gourley, PTM’s lead singer, made a trip home to Wasilla, Alaska, and the album’s trajectory completely changed.
Gourley found his dad’s ticket stub from the original 1969 Woodstock music festival. It seems like a small thing, but talking to his dad about Woodstock ’69 knocked something loose in John’s head. He realized that, in the same tradition of bands from that era, Portugal. The Man needed to speak out about the world crumbling around them. Then the band made a seemingly crazy decision: they took all of the work they had done for the three years prior and they threw it out.
The totally insane decision paid off. The band went back to the studio—working with John Hill (In The Mountain In The Cloud), Danger Mouse (Evil Friends), Mike D (Everything Cool), and longtime collaborator Casey Bates (The one consistent producer since the first record). In this new-found creative territory, the album that became Woodstock rolled out naturally from there.