Portugal. the Man singer thought he'd never sing again. How that inspired their new album

It took eight albums and 11 years for Portugal. The Man to take the mainstream by surprise with "Feel It Still," a six-times-platinum triumph that won a Grammy. The time it took to get there only made the taste of victory that much sweeter for John Gourley and his bandmates.

"I'm, like, a kid from Alaska," Gourley says.

"That's one thing about this band. We're so excited about everything. Like, 'Oh my God, can you believe we're at the American Music Awards?!' 'Can you believe we're at the Grammys?!' Everybody's like, 'This is the craziest thing!' That song was everywhere."

And then it won a Grammy.

"It's so funny, dude," Gourley says. "That song was so big that they didn't even allow Portugal. The Man in the rock or alternative categories. That to me was the craziest thing, that assumption that we're a pop band now. Like, 'Yo, are we seriously competing against "Despacito" right now?!'"

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From dogsled mushing with 'Mr. Postman' to the Hot 100

It isn't hard to hear what made that single such a massive pop hit in 2017, from its effervescent bass groove to Gourley's fantastic falsetto delivery of a chorus hook he borrowed from the Marvelettes' "Please Mr. Postman," a song he learned to love on lengthy car rides with his parents through Alaska as a child.

"My parents were dogsled mushers," Gourley says. "So we were in the car listening to Motown and singing along with oldies radio all day, every single day, hours and hours."

Gourley says the lyrics to "Feel It Still" are "by far the most honest thing I've ever written," addressing his life as a parent trying to find the right balance between the responsibilities it brings and the rebelliousness that comes with having grown up punk.

"I always thought punk bands were supposed to be subversive," Gourley says.

"And that's what 'Feel It Still' is meant to be. It was pretty amazing to see a song break through that was a commentary on how do you be a parent and be a punk? How do you balance these worlds? How do you deal with these heavier subjects? And I think you just kind of have to have fun with it and make the best of everything."

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How Mad Magazine inspired 'What, Me Worry?'

In February, Portugal. The Man released a one-off single titled "What, Me Worry?" from the sessions for their first full-length release since "Woodstock," the album that gave the world "Feel It Still."

"That was super fun," Gourley says of recording the song just as the world was coming out of pandemic isolation, its title line inspired by Alfred E. Neuman's shoulder-shrugging motto from Mad Magazine.

"Everything for the last couple years has just felt like Mad Magazine to me," Gourley says. "And oddly, at the same time, we couldn't laugh at anything. The world was in kind of a wild place. And it still is."

The song was produced by Jeff Bhasker, a Grammy-winning producer whose hits include Mark Ronson's "Uptown Funk," fun.'s "We Are Young" and several Kanye West releases.

It's one of several tracks on their forthcoming album that features drums by Homer Steinweiss of the late Sharon Jones' band, the Dap-Kings. They would do one take of each song with Steinweiss playing pretty much the part they had in mind before turning him loose in the studio.

"We'd just say, 'Do whatever you want,'" Gourley says. "And pretty much every time, we used the ripper take. I mean, that beat on 'What, Me Worry?' is hectic."

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Portugal. The Man's new album was shaped by Gourley healing from a broken jaw

The lyrical tone of the album was inspired in part by the anxiety of life during a pandemic while also dealing with a broken jaw that meant he couldn't even sing.

"I kind of went through a lot," Gourley says.

One of the final shows they played before the shutdown was in late February 2020, singing through a "pretty nasty" broken jaw at Innings Festival at Tempe Beach Park.

"When we were there for Innings Fest, my jaw had just broken," Gourley says. "I was grinding through it for those last few shows while in pretty severe pain."

The break was caused by the long-term effects of a previous break he'd never treated.

"I didn't even realize that my jaw was busted," Gourley says. "I just kind of went through life singing every single night and it put more and more pressure and ground down where the previous break was. I think I've just been in pain for such a long time, I can't really feel it the way I should."

He narrowly avoided surgery and required a year and a half of rehab on his jaw.

"I'm still doing it now," he says. "When things shut down, it was kind of a blessing in disguise for me because it gave me time to step away and try to heal. As soon as I could sing again, I went back in and wrote an album."

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'I didn't think I'd ever be able to sing again'

Writing helped him through that time.

"I didn't think I'd ever be able to sing again," he says.

"And it just left me like sitting with the anxiety that had built up in me and watching everybody else during this period. I've always dealt with anxiety. Being on stage is actually kind of terrifying for me. So I just ended up writing a lot about those feelings and everything that happened in the world."

He also wrote a lot about the importance of family and how we create a lot of our anxieties.

"I was kind of being introspective and trying to look at how do we go forward from this point, how do we deal with the past and overcome a lot of that and also just embrace it," Gourley says.

He even found himself embracing his anxieties.

"A lot of those anxieties in me are what makes me want to make music," Gourley says.

"I'm not very good, in the moment, conveying my thoughts. I don't have the vocabulary. But when I sit down and write, it helps me deal with those anxieties and form the thoughts a lot clearer. I think actually, a lot of these anxieties are good for us, as scary as they may feel in the moment."

Gourley credits Bhasker with helping him bring those ideas to life.

"He's legitimately the best musician I've ever seen," Gourley says. "And he has this way of pulling great things out of you. You're like, 'Damn, dude, how can you have so many of these talents and then also be so considerate of the art and really giving space for me to say what I want to say."

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Photos of Oasis and the guy who wrote 'Rainbow Connection'

Musically, Portugal. The Man's new album explores a more Britpop-inspired direction than previous efforts.

"I'm a big Oasis fan," Gourley says. "I've never really listened deeper to, like, Happy Mondays, Stone Roses, Blur. But I've always been really obsessed with that British confidence in that Britpop stuff. It's so cool."

He and Bhasker printed out the coolest photos they could find of Britpop heavyweights, from Liam Gallagher to Damon Albarn, and made "a mood board" for the studio.

"So it was like, 'What do I think these bands sound like? What do I think that sound is, based on pictures of it all, just kind of from memory?'" Gourley says. "It's a really cool record. There are very cartoonish songs that deal with heavier subjects and very heavy-sounding music and intimate-sounding music that is hopeful but it sounds dark."

Among the outside writers helping Gourley turn his new ideas into songs was Asa Taccone, who cowrote "Feel It Still."

"He and I have a similar writing style," Gourley says. "I like taking him out of his box. And he likes putting me in a vulnerable space. We were just like, 'Let's get out of our comfort zone.'"

He's especially stoked to have worked with a songwriting legend whose hits include the Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun" and Kermit the Frog's classic "Rainbow Connection."

"Dude, honestly, one of the people that helped me write this new album the most was Paul Williams, weirdly," Gourley says.

"We've all been fans of Paul Williams for such a long time. We met four or five years ago. He really helped me be able to write from a place of vulnerability and speak my truth."

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'I don't really have to go to Berklee'

The whole experience is just the latest step in his ongoing musical education.

"It's cool that I don't really have to go to Berklee," Gourley says.

"We get to learn from the top of the class in a lot of these writing rooms and just be so inspired by these people who just have a genuine love for music. It'd be silly of me to be like, 'Oh, I'm in the studio with a pop song writer. They don't know what I do.' Or 'They don't know this obscure band.' They usually do. It's pretty funny."

Now that the album is done, he's excited to get it out and see what other people think.

"It feels like it's our most complete work," Gourley says. "For sure. I had really good people pushing me, like, 'That needs to make sense in this context.' I wouldn't call it a concept album, but it's not not."

Although this is their first new album since 2017, they did release an album last year that Gourley says is like a time capsule of who they were in 2008.

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'I don't want to see a show where there's no chance of falling on stage'

"Oregon City Sessions" is a live recording captured in the studio to document the songs they'd been performing on the road. They also filmed those sessions, but that hasn't been released yet.

Why release these old recordings now?

"Dude, it was sitting down and going, 'Did we never release that?! We recorded this thing and we never released it?! That is not very Portugal. The Man!,'" Gourley says with a laugh.

Watching the film of those sessions, he says, "was a really fun way to unlearn a lot of the habits" that were picked up as they were touring "Woodstock," playing festivals for massive crowds that didn't necessarily know their catalog and doing all they could to win them over with the biggest songs at their disposal.

"They weren't bad habits," Gourley says. "You're playing these slots where you kind of have to show up and bring everything. But if the music's ripping, if the music's good and fun, it needs to be a little bit unpredictable. Personally, I don't want to see a show where there's no chance of falling on stage."

He's hoping they might shake things up a bit in Phoenix, where they're headlining the second day of the inaugural Zona Music Festival on Sunday, Dec. 4. This town has always held a special place in Gourley's heart.

He speaks fondly of early tours making their way through a "tiny, tiny" side room at the Clubhouse and a sweltering all-ages gig with no A/C in downtown Phoenix at a venue that eventually turned into Matt's Big Breakfast.

"Arizona has just always been one of those places I'm extremely grateful to," Gourley says. "I'm gonna pull out some old, old stuff, despite being on a festival. Give us a chance to fall down again. I like that."

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Zona Music Festival

With: Portugal. The Man, Beach House, Bleachers, Tegan and Sara, Japanese Breakfast and more.

When: 12:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Dec. 3-4. Portugal. The Man play Sunday night.

Where: Margaret T. Hance Park, 1218 N. Second St., Phoenix.

Admission: $89 a day; $175 for a weekend pass.

Details: zonamusicfest.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Portugal. The Man's John Gourley shares scary story behind new album