“We love to see things, we love new experiences,” says Portugal. The Man bassist, Zach Carothers. “Just in general, travel is so important to us.”
Right now, Portugal. The Man are half way through their most extensive Australian tour yet. Since late October, the band’s been making its way across the country for 23 completely free gigs.
“We kind of lucked out on this one,” Carothers says. “We have the most unbelievable time in Australia, so we’re very, very excited that they offered us this tour. Five weeks hanging out down there doing that many shows in small pubs and bars? Hell yeah, of course we were up for it.”
Carothers and vocalist/guitarist John Gourley started Portugal. The Man back in 2004, and together they’ve spearheaded seven full-length albums. It’s their latest two releases, 2011’s In The Mountain In The Cloud and last year’s Evil Friends, that brought them to the attention of Australian listeners. Evil Friends landed the group a main stage slot on this year’s Big Day Out tour – the mention of which triggers fond memories for Carothers.
“[Big Day Out] is pretty much summer camp for bands,” Carothers says. “Some of the craziest nights we’ve ever had, actually, were in Australia during Big Day Out. We had these parties after Arcade Fire did a sideshow in Sydney. We went to Frankie’s Pizza… One of the bartenders for some reason had face paint, so we had our tour manager go around and paint everybody’s faces. We just pretty much rallied with Grouplove, Mac Miller, Arcade Fire, Diplo and his backup dancers.
“You look at the list and you’re like, ‘Oh, I’ll probably make friends with these guys and make friends with this guy,’ but who knew that we’d become best friends with Mac Miller? If you ask anybody on that tour who the general MVP [most valuable player]/coolest guy was, everybody will tell you Mac Miller. We had a blast with that guy and he is hilarious.”
It’s otherwise hard to draw many tenable links between Portugal. The Man and the potty-mouthed rapper, Miller. The band’s music owes significant debt to ‘60s pop and ‘70s psych rock, so it’s about a million miles away from the terrain of hip-hop. However, Evil Friends features the production stamp of studio maestro Danger Mouse (AKA Brian Burton). These days Danger Mouse is commonly associated with rock acts The Black Keys and Broken Bells, but it’s not long since he was making records with rappers such as MF Doom, Jemini and CeeLo Green.
“We learned a lot about songwriting, a lot about trimming the fat off things,” Carothers says of the experience with Burton. “We always stack up so many sounds on a lot of our records and it almost gets confusing. A lot of times we’d do that and then Danger Mouse would sit down with the four of us and be like, ‘Alright, there’s all these different melodies going on here, each one of you pick one that you’re going to play.’
“You’ve got to keep it simple enough [so] no matter how many things you stack up, you still always make sure that one person can sing it and play it on a guitar or a piano and it still comes through.”
Whether they’ll team up with Danger Mouse again remains to be seen, but the lessons learned while recording Evil Friends are certain to influence Portugal. The Man’s next work.
“Every time we go in it’s definitely a learning experience and it’s definitely practice for the next record,” Carothers says. “We have a thing where we try to be a different band every time we do a record. [Working with Danger Mouse], we learned so much about music in general, about style and about our own ears.”
It seems clear Portugal. The Man don’t just take advantage of their job’s ridiculous nature, but they’re also committed to creative progression. To do this, it’s essential to keep a cool head while being introduced to wonderful individuals and unreal scenarios. Though, Carothers can’t help sounding a tad boastful when he recounts his number one bucket list achievement.
“I got to sit in a car with Neil Young – in Neil Young’s Cadillac – and listen to music with him for about an hour at Bonnaroo a couple of years ago. That was probably the craziest thing I’ve ever done. My little brother was graduating college that very same day and I couldn’t make it because we had to play this festival. John and I were sitting in a car with Neil Young and I was texting my dad. Neil Young’s his favourite artist of all time and he was a very proud father that day.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
