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To showcase its catchy anthem "Got It All (This Can't Be Living Now)" from the upcoming album, In The Mountain In The Cloud, Portugal. The Man went to Alaska's icy climes to weave a tale of a dogsledding exhibition gone horribly awry. And those icy climes, it turns out, exist right in lead singer John Gourley's backyard.
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Push play on the video above and you'll be transported to a landscape out of time -- an eerie, snow-encased world in which a trapper (Gourley) can accidentally shoot himself in the head, and then carry on singing after his life has slipped away.
While such a whiteout world might seem exotic to the average city dweller, this is home for Gourley, who hails from Wasilla, Alaska. (No, he doesn't know Sarah Palin.) His parents both competed in the Iditarod.
"It felt like we were a bunch of kids doing a high school project and running out and jumping on my parents' dogsled and filming something on the fly," Gourley says of the video, which premieres today ahead of the album's July 19 drop date.
Gourley himself dogsledded until high school, where the sport wasn't looked upon as the coolest pastime.
"My dad would come to pick me up from high school in a beaver skin cap, big gloves, his parka and everything," he says. "It was so funny to see him show up -- his beard all frozen from being out with the dogs."
A bad case of frostbite, rather than abject embarrassment at his father, was what took the joy out of sledding for Gourley. Still, the singer braved 25- to 50-below Fahrenheit weather to create this chilling (pun wholly intended) vid, which is a smaller section of short film that premiered on IFC, directed by Mike Ragen.
The song has a kind of rallying quality, one that would likely be helpful to a frost-bearded traveler mushing through the countryside with many miles to go. But Portugal. The Man wasn't trying to match lyrics to images.
"I think it's more about the sounds than the subject matter," he says. "The reason I got into music was obviously because of bands like The Beatles and Pink Floyd, things like that. But it was also people like Quentin Tarantino putting these really great songs to these amazing scenes in movies."
Indeed, "Got It All" has a Tarantino-esque quality. If you're at all bothered by images of dogs munching on singing corpses, we suggest covering your eyes toward the end.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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