Cut holes in yr clothes!
PORCHES tha slapper god comes thru talkin' cool jawn mutilation, Kurt Cobain's genius, Tony Soprano's breathing, peaceable kingdoms, and other popping s**t
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I’ve got one major problem with Porches’ fantastic new album, All Day Gentle Hold!… The s**t is over way too soon, what the f**k!
As we speak, I am listening to ADGH! for the ~47th time since it dropped last month… I’m savoring these scuffed-up beautiful melodies, these sneaky riffs, these faintly wounded vocals, these obliquely funny lyrics… And then before I know it, the 11 songs are done and I’ve gotta smash the replay — only to have the same thing happen again 25 minutes later??
This might be the tightest album to dominate Spyplane HQ since Pusha T dropped Daytona, d*mn…
Porches, a.k.a. Aaron Maine, isn’t just an NYC synth-pop prince who “keeps ‘em wanting more” when it comes to these big chunes … He’s also a certified Mach 3+ clothes-rocker known to get off vintage fits with panache, whether it’s a shredded Accutane sweatshirt (all the way up top), a beautifully faded indigo Barneys rollneck (above left), or — in the excellent video for “Lately” — a highly Spyplaney “Robby Müller Red” t-shirt tucked exquisitely into belted jeans:
So you know we had to hit up Porches on the mf Spyphone and discuss Mach 3+ topics such as cutting holes in yr clothes to make ‘em yrs; making an album for imaginary packed rooms in the middle of the pandemic; digging deep into Kurt Cobain’s genius; chowing down on Tony Soprano-inspired 2 a.m. meatball parms; fantasizing about inter-species fellowship… and much more.
Blackbird Spyplane: I was reading about how you wrote & arranged the new album under lockdown at the cribbo in Chinatown, but the whole time you were imagining yrself playing for rooms packed with people. You can really hear it in the songs…
Porches: “It was an interesting place to be making music from — I had to ask myself some big questions, like, you know, if I was even gonna continue making music, and if so, what that meant in a pandemic and under quarantine, and I had to take a look at what my music was doing for me, and what I thought it was doing for the people who listened to it.
“I was able to get to a really positive place where, if a song wasn’t joyful to make or play for a friend — why would I spend my time trying to push anything into the world but the most enjoyable thing? Not ‘easy listening,’ but I wanted to set myself a bar for emotion and energy and spirit.”
Blackbird Spyplane: It’s a way punchier and more revved-up album than Ricky Music, which came out right in the middle of March, 2020 — wild timing.
Porches: “Yeah, listening back to Ricky Music, it demands a lot of patience from the listener. Not that there’s anything wrong with slower, quieter music, but it felt almost annoying in hindsight for me to just expect that level of attention from the audience. So with All Day Gentle Hold! I had a really good time imagining the potential celebration of live music happening once lockdown was over, and thinking, What would be the most celebratory foot to put forward?”
Blackbird Spyplane: U rocked a very Tony Soprano fit in the “Do U Wanna” video, above left, and Tony’s in the lyrics on “Lately.” What does he mean to you?
Porches: “The first time I watched The Sopranos was the winter of 2018, and I wrote like 6 different versions of that little part that wound up in ‘Lately,’ just as a nod to spending a winter alone watching 3 hours of that show every night, then eating meatball parms at 2 a.m. because of all the food on the show—”
Blackbird Spyplane: Is the lyric, “Tony Soprano, I’m makin’ meatballs??” I know it can’t be, but that’s what my brain keeps hearing.
Porches: “Ha ha, other people have heard ‘meatballs,’ too, but no, it’s ‘Tony Soprano, I make-a me hurt.’”
Blackbird Spyplane: Mamma mia!
Porches: “I had these different attempts sitting around that I wasn’t able to turn into proper songs, but when I was writing ‘Lately’ I worked in the part so it feels almost like a dream sequence — it transports me back to that weird winter Sopranos haze.
“My feelings about Tony are complicated. The first time I watched it I struggled to like him, then I felt sympathy, but recently I tried to watch it a second time and it was a crazy different experience, like, I don’t know if I can spend so much time with this guy again. I remember hearing something, like, David Chase thought audiences were rooting too much for Tony, so they turned up the sound of Gandolfini breathing and all the grunts and snorts when he eats — tweaking these little audio things to make you like him less.”
Blackbird Spyplane: You’ve talked about going thru a big Kurt Cobain phase last year. I’m curious to hear Cobain through your ears — what about him as a songwriter became clear to you, or surprised you, when you made music under his influence?
Porches: “Surfacewise, from a production standpoint, there’s more distorted guitars and live drums and live bass on this record than maybe the last 3 Porches releases, and that came from listening to Nirvana for sure. That’s the format I first learned to make music in, so it felt comforting to not try and throw any wrenches in my wheels this time and go back to this familiar place.
“I think Kurt was one of the greatest melody-writers of our time, and that’s weirdly — I don’t wanna say underrated, but it’s overshadowed by the tragedy of his death and drug addiction. We hear Nirvana as these songs that were just plucked down from the Perfect Song Cloud; they don’t even feel like someone wrote them. But there’s a reason they took the world by storm, so I learned a handful of his songs, and I was so impressed by how they felt to sing, what the melodies were doing, paying attention to the chords and harmonies and dissonance. Because that stuff’s kind of disguised.
“With his lyrics, too, a lot of them feel like collages from whatever he’s written down in a notebook, and put together they create this mood you can’t put your finger on. They’re almost gestural, where, as a lyricist, you could get caught up trying to get a sentence across, but with him it’s more about the way the phrase sounds. That’s something I found myself trying to do throughout this record: get my head out of my own a** and create an almost physical feeling more than a literal meaning. That felt good.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Speaking of Kurt, you sent over a pic of yr favorite pants — a beautiful pair of TOASTED Wranglers that you told me “make me feel a little ‘Kurt Cobain’ when I slip them on.” I love the look of mended jeans, and generally speaking nothing you wear looks very ‘off the rack’ — there’s this real loose, lived-in feeling to yr clothes…