Portugal. The Man-The Satanic Satanist

John Baldwin Gourley Vocals, Guitar

Zachary Scott Carothers Bass, Percussion & Vocals

Ryan Neighbors Piano, Rhodes, Organ, Synth, Farfisa... etc. & Vocals

Produced by Paul Q. Kolderie, Anthony Saffery & Adam Taylor

Release Date: July 21, 2009

“Save me, I can’t be saved” —Opening line from Satanic Satanist

“...I don’t believe.” —Closing line from Satanic Satanist

“These two lines are like bookends to the new album. They tie into the way my dad and other people escaped to Alaska in the ‘70s, and represent their proud independence and courage. The album’s last line finishes the thought of the first line. It was Alaska. Everything we’ve gotten to be and everything we’ve gotten to go through, we’ve been lucky enough to have what we have.” —John Baldwin Gourley

“But it’s the songs themselves that truly set this band apart.” —Alternative Press

Within days of Alternative Press including Censored Colors on its list of 10 Essential Albums of 2008, the members of Portugal. The Man were trekking through the Boston snow to start work on their fourth release in four years, The Satanic Satanist. As John Baldwin Gourley, named the year’s Best Vocalist in that same issue of AP, explains the pace at which his band has turned out any number of the decade’s more inspired moments, “Honestly, I think we should be putting out more music. It keeps you thinking, keeps you growing and progressing. If you stop and let it sit for too long, I feel like you start to lose track of where you were going.”

For 2008’s Censored Colors, Portugal. The Man spent two weeks in Seattle with their friends in Kay Kay and the Weathered Underground making an album Gourley says he wrote in tribute to the music of a youth spent tuned to oldies radio as his parents drove around Alaska. One of his earliest musical memories, finding a tape of Abbey Road in a box of his parents’ cassettes, resulted in Censored Colors’ second side where all the songs are strung together in an epic suite.

For The Satanic Satanist, Gourley and his bandmates—Zachary Scott Carothers/bass, and Ryan Neighbors/keyboards, and the drummer for the album, Garrett Lunceford—flew to Boston’s Camp Street Studios to work with Paul Q. Kolderie, whose previous clients include both the Pixies and Radio- head, with additional production help from Adam Taylor (The Lemonheads, The Dresden Dolls) and Cornershop sitarist/keyboardist Anthony Saffery.

This was a big step for the band. From the time Gourley started the group in Wasilla, Alaska as an outlet for his growing fascination with tape loops and sampling—as captured on 2006’s Waiter: “You Vultures!” through the soulful yet art-rocking swagger of 2007’s Church Mouth, and then to the richlytex- tured majesty of Censored Colors—the band had always recorded with friends.

But the group, now based in Portland, Oregon, was clearly ready for the next big step. Historically, the band waited until they actually entered the recording studio to begin writing music or lyrics; this time, they did some pre-production.

“Save me I can’t be saved I’m a President’s son, I don’t need no soul.”

“I was terrified,” Gourley confesses, with a laugh. “We’ve only worked with friends, you know? It’s always been people we knew really well. And this time around, we were working with Paul, Anthony and Adam who have all been involved in very successful projects. So we wanted to do what they would have expected us to do rather than just throw something out there. And actually, it felt so much better doing it that way.”

Gourley also did his best to tighten up the structure.

“I was really trying to go for the more Motown structure than anything,” he says, “the really short, tight songs with three parts and that soul vibe that we’ve been trying to go for this whole time. It really took stripping things down to even get that sound. You know, ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ is the same riff for two minutes.”

As bassist Carothers, who started the band with Gourley, admits with a laugh, “We always say we want to make a straight-up soul record. I think we’ve said that every single time before we’ve gone into the studio and it never totally comes out that way. But we were definitely listening to a lot of more rare soul and funk lately. And Adam and Anthony and Paul all had a big effect on that, because from the time we decided to go with them, they were sending us just tons of music over email.”

“What a lovely day yeah we won the war, May have lost a million men but we got a million more.”

“People Say,” the lead-off track, finds Gourley speaking out against the human cost of war. On “Lovers in Love,” the band works the groove like Isaac Hayes or Curtis Mayfield in their blaxploitation days, while “Work All Day” could pass for ?uestlove slowing down the beat to “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise).”

The Satanic Satanist also finds them working more with loops and samples than they have since their 2006 debut.

“We played all the songs live to begin with,” Gourley recalls, “then went back and tweaked it. But I’ve always loved loops and samples. I think it has such a cool vibe and such a specific sound that you can only get from sampling. You can’t get those sounds from real drums. We just hadn’t had the chance because we’d been touring so much and I guess Church Mouth needed to be that stripped-down record coming off of Waiter, when we realized that we couldn’t do the samples live. And recording Censored Colors, was done with Kay Kay, so it didn’t make sense to be messing with loops when we had so many real instruments lying around the place.”

And, it’s not just the beats that were sampled.

As Gourley tells it, “I would play some of the lead lines and Adam would go back through and chop ‘em up. I’m really glad we’re the way we are as a band, where we’re not precious about things like that, because he spliced together some really cool lead lines that we wouldn’t have thought of.”

They also made use of the studio’s vast array of classic keyboards, allowing Ryan Neighbors to play a more prominent role on this, his second album with the band.

“Ryan brought a lot to the recording this time around,” says Gourley. “He and Anthony just went for it. They pretty much used every instrument that ever had keys.”

For Neighbors, as much of a departure as this album represents, it still feels like it’s part of a continuum with everything they’ve ever done.

The songs all just kind of work together,” Neighbors says. “They all have the Portugal sound even though the ideas themselves can be drastically different. It’s all still Portuguese.”

“We took that trip out in ‘87, yeah found that place where we don’t fear heaven.”

“The whole record is between 1987 and 1993 of my life growing up where we moved around a lot,” Gourley says. “It felt like we were constantly escaping something and constantly running. And it made me think a lot about my mom and dad leaving New York and coming to Alaska in the ‘70s. They just went out to the woods and lived in cabins, away from everything.”

“When I lived in the woods, everything was alright.”

Alaska’s been a constant source of inspiration on Gourley’s music.

“It was just amazing,” he says of his growing up. “I think it really spawned a lot of thought and a lot of imagination. We had this video store down the street from my house and every animated film that came into that place would be put in the family section, no matter what it was. So I would watch Fantastic Planet and Light Years and Fire and Ice and Wizards, all these crazy, intense stories that I can look back on now and know that they have made me the person I am. All these sci-fi movies that I watched in combination with the cold and the dark and the snow and isolation really painted some cool pictures and cool memories.”

“Do you believe there is loyalty in man...”

You get the feeling Gourley would have stayed there if it hadn’t made more sense to base a band that does an average of 250 dates a year a little closer to the action, which is why he and Carothers moved to Portland.

As to what effect all that touring has had on their evolving sound, Gourley says, “We’re playing every single day. It’s so much practice and so much playing together and so much getting to know each other as musicians. When we go into the studio now, it’s just very obvious what’s going to happen the second the first note is played. I mean, this being the first time we’ve done pre-production, these songs came out basically the way they sound on the album without us even talking about it. We just walked into our friend Jake’s house and sat down and started playing and it all just came together. It’s really just being able to see that every single night and being able to see each other every day. It’s playing in front of people and knowing what works and what doesn’t. We could have eight hours a day of practice in a practice space and I don’t think it compares to the 45 minutes to an hour and a half we get a night out on tour.”

“If you look real high, you just might find sitting in the stars, glistening, glistening, waiting for the band to come...”

Track-by-track

John Baldwin Gourley breaks it all down,

People Say “I hadn’t written that song, initially, on the demos we had done, and I came back to Alaska and my dad had bought me a banjo. He said, ‘Hey, you’ve gotta listen to Pete Seeger.’ (laughs). And just randomly, there was a show on TV about him and we were watching it and it was one of those things where I had to get up and write a song because my dad has such a connec- tion with this guy’s music and we had just been talking about the war and Pete Seeger spoke out pretty strongly against Vietnam. It was just one of those connections between our time and everything my parents had gone through. People really lose track of the fact that there are people dying over there for something that we instigated and brought on ourselves.”

Work All Day “As with all this stuff, I think it really just goes back to family and Alaska. A lot of this was that chain gang-type rhythm, which is what we were trying to go for, as far as the tempo of the song, and that’s fully my dad and my brother’s work ethic coming through. You work all day, you keep the rhythm through the night. Alaska’s a pretty intense place. It’s a lot of guns and drugs. It’s so bad if you’re living in the towns and don’t have family to keep you out of it. But the chorus is kind of about my friends that have gotten lost in all that and forgotten to work, forgotten about family and the love they had.”

Lovers in Love “‘Lovers in Love’ actually came around because we had never written any song about love at all, I guess. To be honest, it started as kind of a joke and the chorus just worked really well, so I ended up writing lyrics around it and going for almost a Curtis Mayfield vibe to the whole thing, trying to more or less write a song in under a few sentences as opposed to everything else we’ve done, which is just piles of random words. When we first tracked that song, I have to say I was not into it. We tracked it and it sounded like a dance track, to be honest. It was just this fast beat. The cymbals were all loud. And in the mix, we brought in this guy Steve Smith from the band Dirty Vegas and he played congas and shakers and all the percussion on the record. And he so sold the Curtis Mayfield vibe. It pulled it back from dance to just cool ‘70s soul.”

The Sun “Again, it’s all 1987 to 1993 and that was so much a little kid’s mind working in all daylight during the summers and all darkness during the winters. That’s just total sci-fi. That’s so Fantastic Planet and Light Years and all the cartoons I watched when I was little. You end up just looking up at the stars for 18 hours a day. It really gets your imagination going. Everything that we did on this album lyrically was so much fun for me to do because it was so easy to step into when I was 10 years old.”

The Home “That was about my parents just picking up and moving and just saying ‘I’m gonna make a home here.’ Wherever we went, it felt like that. We always just jumped into it. And that whole outro where I sing ‘I know I was fine before,’ you’re always fine with where you’re at until you take those next steps.”

The Woods “We’ve always had woods around us and that’s one thing that Zach and I miss so much and always talk about is the fact that you can’t just walk out into the woods and get away as easy as you can up in Alaska. But that song is a continuation of ‘The Home’ in the sense that when you’re living out of a place like that, the people that are closest to you become your family and that’s the way this band is.”

Guns and Dogs “‘Guns and Dogs’ is 1987, when we lived out on Icy Lake in the cabin. We were really away from everything. It was just us and our dogs and that’s it. Snow and trees and a lake. And my dad had just gotten into dog sledding. He had picked up a bunch of dogs from Joe Redington, Sr., the founder of the Iditarod. And we went out there, my dad started training and getting ready to run the Iditarod which is just so my dad, to get up and do the most random thing you can think of. But family was what we had so we just stuck together.”

Do You “‘Do You’ is kind of me moving out of Alaska and coming back. I was afraid of everything. It’s not necessarily just talking about my fears. It’s everybody’s fears, just everything that we’ve seen after moving, everything that we’ve seen being in cities. It’s one of those songs where you sit back and think about everything you’ve done. That’s what it was to me, thinking about everything you’ve seen and everything you’ve done and if we’ll ever finish what we’re doing, get to where we’re going. And then, the bridge was so the little kid getting to come out again and write more about the winters and just how dark everything was. I was terrified of the dark. Until recently even.”

Everyone is Golden “That was one that I had written at home when I was sitting with my dad and in the verse, my dad thought I was saying ‘Everyone’s a soldier’ when I was writing ‘Everyone is golden.’ And that just really, for some reason, brought me back to that Pete Seeger stuff and obviously it was kind of written in the same time frame. But I decided to write it about when we lived in Healy, Alaska. I guess that was in ’93. Healy was another of those crazy Alaska towns where everyone knows each other and everyone is golden. It was also my first experience with death. I never knew anybody really close to me to die. And I happened to be living in this small town and going to school in one these schoolhouses where I guess there were eight other people in my grade, but kindergarten through high school was all in the same building and this kid, one of my friend’s best friends, died in an avalanche when they were playing in the snow. And I remember them coming to school and it just being so intense and the kid bawling and telling us the story. It’s just one of those things that hap- pens that I think never really goes away.”

Let You Down “I don’t play piano and for some reason, I sat down at the piano and was like ‘I’m gonna write a song.’ And it was just one of those moments where I was actually feeling really down. I was really depressed. That just hap- pens out of nowhere for me. Sometimes I’ll just shut down. But I love how it all came together.

Mornings This was kind of the bookend to the record—obviously, being the last song on the record. But the first lines on the record are ‘Save me, I can’t be saved’ and then the last line on the record is ‘because I don’t believe.’ It kind of finishes the thought. It was Alaska. Everything we’ve gotten to be and everything we’ve gotten to go through, we’ve been lucky enough to have what we have.

Lyrics

People Say Save me I can’t be saved I’m a President’s son, I don’t need no soul All the soldiers say it’ll be alright we may make it through the war if we make it through the night all the people they sing What a lovely day yeah we won the war May have lost a million men but we got a million more All the people they say Share with me all of your pain and I won’t share your love I need all your love All the soldiers say it’ll be alright we may make it through the war if we make it through the night all the people they sing What a lovely day yeah we won the war May have lost a million men but we got a million more All the people they say You can’t save me I can’t be saved I don’t need no love I’m a president son All the soldiers say it’ll be alright we may make it through the war if we make it through the night all the people they sing What a lovely day yeah we won the war May have lost a million men but we got a million more All the people they sing All the people they sing It’ll be alright All the people they sing

Work All Day If you work all day you keep the Rhythm Through the Night If you work all night you keep the Rhythm Through the Day If you sell that soul you’ll be burning up right If you ain’t got no soul thats fine alright All I ever known is true Pick it up pack it up put it in a bag Stack it up like cinnamon we’ll get it real fast Until there’s nothing left for you Pick it up pack it up put it in a bag Stack it up like cinnamon we’ll get it real fast Until there’s nothing left of you Keep the Rhythm Through the Night If you need a little money keep it working alright It’ll help that soul a little help may do some right You don’t need that soul well thats fine alright I work all day I don’t have no one I don’t have no one but all I’ve ever known is true Pick it up pack it up put it in a bag Stack it up like cinnamon we’ll get it real fast Until there’s nothing left for you Pick it up pack it up put it in a bag Stack it up like cinnamon we’ll get it real fast Until there’s nothing left of you Until there’s nothing left of you

Lovers in Love Crawl from the fire into the pan What we don’t need hell will demand higher higher higher Well I’m not in need therefore don’t demand And what hell can sell you I can’t defend higher higher higher higher and if another lover takes that love away from you be careful with your mind and what you’re bound to do Lovers in Love lovers loving love just like these lovers are loving in love and if another lover takes that love away form you be careful with your mind and what you’re bound to do Lovers in Love if we make it I’ll come back lovers loving love just like these lovers are loving in love Lovers in Love higher higher higher

The Sun If you look real high you just might find sitting in the stars glistening glistening waiting for the band to come just waiting for that man to come oh I wonder slip on down from the sun to climb down to earth and down to things like time because we are all we are all just lovers born of earth and light like all the others if you’re talking to the moon the moon might sing about the universe shouting out I don’t need I don’t need time I breathe in time where are we now where are we now slip on down from the sun to climb down to earth and down to things like time because we are all we are all just lovers born of earth and light like all the others if you’re looking for the river just find the mouth it’s grind- ing like gnashing teeth foaming out foaming out mixing up that hell to come just mixing up my hell to come and it’s fixing up to swallow me whole fixing up to swallow me whole fixing up to swallow my soul fixing up to swallow me whole slip on down from the sun to climb down to earth and down to things like time because we are all we are all just lovers born of earth and light like all the others Where are we now oh I wonder

The Home Do you ever listen to the sounds that your hands make did you know that we could make sounds I don’t know what the palace knows but I don’t run with sheep the shepherd can’t herd me My feet ever slow with the age that takes me I’ll slip out to the mountains where nobody knows me I will make my home here I will make my home here I will make my home here Grow a field of plenty to hold me tight and keep us warm from the cold that burns me My feet ever slow with the age that takes me I’ll slip out to the mountains where nobody knows me and I will make my home here I will make my home here I will make my home here do you ever listen for the sound that your head makes did you know that know that it could we could make sounds I don’t know what the palace knows but I don’t run with sheep the shepherd can’t herd me My feet ever slow with the age that takes me I’ll slip out to the moun- tains where nobody knows me I will make my home here I will make my home here I will make my home here I will make my home here I know that I was fine before

The Woods When I lived in the woods when I lived in the woods Everything was alright rivers rolling west through the people just working it right Never cared where we are never needed to know never needed to know just where we are Everything was in sight everything they were the people living the light As I breath in time To be where I was and if I need baby give me all your love If we need To find the time We’ll never see All your love If you find yourself in need, If we gotta go then bring along some company and if you find yourself alone, if we got it all then we got just what we need Why, Why, Why As I breath in time To be where I was and if I need baby give me all your love If we need To find the time We’ll never see All your love When I lived in the woods When I lived in the woods When I lived in the woods everything was alright ev- erything everybody was alright Well ya gotta get out gotta make some money Baby gotta grow Baby gotta get bigger All the people will lift it up all the people all the people will help you out Yeah, I needed time To get back where I was Because it’s still your love No one can buy your love As I breath in time I see what I was It was always love All your love All your love Why, Why, Why

Guns and Dogs We took a trip down in ‘87 We were looking for a place were we don’t fear heaven Yeah we got some guns, got some dogs but just like them dogs, well those guns just get bigger Looking to the town to show us what what they got we’ll take it to the cabin and we’ll show ya what we got we got space to do what you please still you’ll never ever come back If I never stand at another corner trying hard to be a father Lets be love If i never need again I’ll find that sleep again We took that trip out in 87’ yeah found that place where we don’t fear heaven oh once you crawl in you’ll never come back again If I never stand at another corner trying hard to be a father Lets be love If i never need again I’ll find that sleep again Though I never pray God reigns today Though I never pray God reigns today Though I never pray God reigns today Though I never pray God reigns today oh once you crawl in you’ll never come back again And if you catch us coming up about around the bend And if we step a little higher will we find it then There’s gotta be something roaming up about around the bend If I never stand at another corner trying hard to be a father Lets be love If i never need again I’ll find that sleep again Though I never pray God reigns today Though I never pray God reigns today Though I never pray God reigns today Though I never pray God reigns today

Do you Do you understand the people that we are Do you believe right from the start Do you see that everybody needs Do you feel when you’re burning in that hell Yeah we can make it here Did you find your fear did you find your fear did you find your fear did you find your fear Do you fear the marching of the lamb Do you believe there is loyalty in man Do you see when others turn away Do you hear it swimming in your head Yeah we can make it here did you find your fear did you find your fear did you find your fear did you find your fear he came down from the moon and rained down on all of us rained down on all of us and everyone was saved he fell into the sea just to swim around just to feel the clouds on the way down and everyone was saved everyone was saved everyone was saved did you find your fear did you find your fear did you find your fear did you find your fear

Everyone is Golden Diamonds shine like stars beneath the ground little rivers run in rings around the town and every one’s a soldier just marching towards the ocean Everyone is Golden and nobody will love them yeah they all took trains into the town and stuck another needle in the ground if we never get another sound then we know we’ve packed up all we had to move from ‘93 Everyone is Golden and Nobody will love them And they can’t lift you up We gathered around the school hear just what they found but they told us they had tried, The little boy had died We gathered around to hear just what they’d done they shine like stars under the ground like seals filed rings around the sound and everyones a soldier just marching towards the ocean Everyone is Golden and Nobody will love them Nobody will love you

Mornings Mornings go best with the sunrise The sunrise I used to see but will never see now even if I was waiting we would just build it all up and look all around until we find The people found the mountain climbed up from that hole in the ground through the cracks in the sky and threatened to fall still I don’t believe, no I don’t believe The future was born with the sunrise The sunrise that builds into days and even more days And as it rolls burning burning up like the trails of the comets pulled tails As the sun it rose up from the belly of sea found his bedding of clouds where it hung for years Still I don’t believe While colors rained and poured from the cotton bound pools and the drips, the drips stained us all painted us all Still I don’t believe The people found the mountain climbed up from that hole in the ground through the cracks in the sky and threatened to fall still I don’t believe, no I don’t believe.

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