Breaking: Portugal. The Man

Who: A hard-working, hard-touring indie-soul four-piece whose spotlight-stealing sets at this year's Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza festivals were honed by averaging 250 shows a year. Now stationed in Portland, PTM were the most famous exports of Wasilla, Alaska, until a certain vice-presidential candidate rose to prominence. "It went from having to explain to people where Wasilla is to, 'I saw that place on The Daily Show,' says frontman John Baldwin Gourley.

Sounds Like: Fourth album The Satanic Satanist, released on their own Approaching AIRBallons imprint, is a blast of stripped-down, Motown-inflected, three-minute pop mutated through a scruffy indie-rocker's lens. A psychedelic slurry of influences, a PTM song is as likely to include a hidden Beatles riff as it is an unlicensed sample of a breakbeat.

Vital Stats:
• Despite their pop hooks and sunny dispositions, PTM started out touring alongside the tireless go-getters in the metal and hardcore circuits. "We were on this hardcore tour with Poison the Well," says Gourley. "The people in this audience are mountainous men. Huge, huge people. There's one guy that's towering — he had to be a foot above everybody. Middle finger in the air the second we step on stage. Not even a note to let him know we’re not what he was looking for. It was unavoidable — not only would you see him, he would lock eyes with you. It was such dedication that you had to respect that he completely hated you."
• When Gourley named the band, all he knew about the actual country of Portugal was the capital was Lisbon, they have beautiful beaches and "it just sounded cool." He recently went over there for the first time with Nine Inch Nails and found that the band had been a secret sensation for years, thanks to a sense of national pride. "It was crazy. We found out after we got there that we've been played on the radio since the beginning of the band. If you run a search for 'Portugal' on Google, we come up in Portuguese news. We had no idea. I feel at this point we should just go over there and hang out."
• Songs like "The Woods" and "Guns and Dogs" are written about Gourley's Alaskan upbringing, spending parts of his pre-adolescence living in a cabin his father built on a spot called Icy Lake. "It's literally an icy lake. You only go out there in the winter, because it's all lakes and swamps, so you can't get out there in the summer. It's 24 hours of daylight. I would go out at 2 in the morning sometimes and run out into the woods, climb up trees, run down to the inlet. We had beluga whales that would come up and you could hear the whales singing their songs. We took baths in tin buckets and just listened to the radio. It's like living anywhere else. Anybody can do it. You just have to want to."

Get It Now: Click above to watch the band performing "1989."

• 
  MUSIC 100 Greatest Debut Albums
• 
  MOVIES 'Star Trek' Is Crazy Good
• 
  TV 10 Shows to Watch This Summer
• 
  POLITICS No Price Big Banks Can't Fix

Song Stories

“Help Me”

Joni Mitchell | 1974

Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded this song for her album Court and Spark, but she had to switch from her regular band to make the song sound exactly the way she wanted. "I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players," she told Rolling Stone. "They’d laugh, 'Awww, isn't that cute? She's trying to teach us how to play.'" Mitchell switched to a jazz band, Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, and scored the biggest hit of her career in the process.

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter