Portugal’s Gourley a man of many layers

Portugal. The Man

Rex Theatre

1602 East Carson Street

412.381.6811

Thursday,8… Portugal. The Man

Rex Theatre

1602 East Carson Street

412.381.6811

Thursday,8 p.m.

All John Gourley needed was his blue jacket.

The singer and songwriter for high-concept rockers Portugal. The Man, Gourley not only loves theorizing on religion and individualism in his music, but, well, he also loves his outerwear.

“I use jackets and hoodies as security blankets while onstage,” explained the soft-spoken musician in a telephone interview with The Pitt News. “I was changing my shirt in Toronto and I had put down a jacket for literally a few seconds. I closed the trailer door and it had blown away. We searched up and down the streets looking for it,” Gourley said.

Luckily, the show went off without a hitch, but Gourley, who suffers from social anxiety and panic attacks, was quite shaken up. He should have no worries, though, as his band blows through Pittsburgh’s Diesel tomorrow night: The show these Alaskan natives will put on promises to be nothing short of epic.

Portugal. The Man was officially formed by Gourley in 2005, but the band has a long history stretching not only several years earlier, but also several thousand miles away. The band began as a songwriting project for Gourley to fight the solitude of living in Alaska, where he grew up basically cut off from modern culture.

“My parents ran the Iditarod, and when we first got dogs for mushing, we moved to a cabin by a lake,” explained Gourley. “It was miles from even the main highway – the only way to get there was by dogsled,” explained Gourley. So not only did he miss out on perks of modern life like roads, but John Gourley was never exposed to the music that was being made as he grew up.

“We always listened to oldies when we’d be driving into town,” said Gourley. “I have no attachment whatsoever to the music of the ’80s or ’90s – I just think everything sounds so insane. I can recognize good songs, but I can’t place why they sounded like that.”

It makes perfect sense, then, that Gourley’s new album with Portugal. The Man sounds like a transplant from the early ’70s. Called Church Mouth, the disc is full of the big, funky guitar parts and pounding, in-the-jungle percussion of bands like Led Zeppelin or Creedence Clearwater Revival, but with a distinctly modern twist: echoing, ethereal vocal accompaniments, wildly looped instrumentals and a consistent backbeat that’ll get your hips shaking in your seat.

Gourley began his professional career in a very different musical stratosphere, however, as he handled the vocals for the screamo / post-hardcore band, Anatomy of a Ghost. Friends from their childhoods in Alaska, the members of AoaG called Gourley in 2002 to join them in Portland to pursue music full time.

“I thought to myself ‘If I’m ever going to do this, to get out of here, it’s got to be now,'” Gourley said of his decision to pack up and leave Alaska for some warmer weather. To the benefit of the future Portugal. The Man, Anatomy of a Ghost seemed doomed from the start.

“Anatomy got lumped into a genre that we felt we didn’t belong to,” Gourley said. “Plus, we all wanted to go different directions. Everyone did what they wanted musically, but only a fifth of the band was what each of us wanted. We became too much about compromise.”

And soon, from the ashes of the recently deceased Anatomy rose what would become Portugal. The Man, and the flow of ideas had already begun. The first of which, of course, was the new band’s name: Portugal. The Man. If you’re thinking, ‘What the hell does that mean?’ then you’re not alone.

Allow Gourley to explain: “We wanted to give the band that Elton John or David Bowie quality – a name that was huge, a giant. We didn’t want to use our own names, but instead create a character, just like the Beatles had Sgt. Pepper.” Gourley said. “In picking a name, a country is much more fitting because it’s an individual mind made up of a group vote. We made our character a country.”

Gourley stopped