Interview: Portugal. The Man’s Zachary Carothers On Danger Mouse, Playing Live And How To Infiltrate The Mainstream

By: Curtis Sindrey (@SindreyCurtis) –

Portugal. The Man.

Portland by way of Wasilla, Alaska psychedelic rockers Portugal. The Man released their seventh studio album, Evil Friends, on June 4th and the album’s creation process wasn’t without both its setbacks and new beginnings in the form of producer Danger Mouse, of Gnarles Barkley and Broken Bells, who they recruited late in the game of the recording process.

Late last spring when the quintet was already 10 songs deep into Evil Friends, they suddenly got a call from Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton, of Gnarles Barkley and Broken Bells, and with that, they scrapped what they had done and started fresh.

“We wanted to take the chance to work with Brian,” says Portugal. The Man bassist Zachary Carothers. “And we just wanted to start from scratch because we wanted to start this new collaboration with Brian from the start.”

Burton’s work with Carothers and the rest of the band was hugely beneficial to them, as Burton knew where the band was and where they were coming from with their ideas.

“He has been exactly where we are and he has a lot more insight to a band dynamic,” Carothers says. “And how to keep your integrity while trying to create successful music because he did “Crazy” with Gnarls Barkley and that’s maybe the biggest song of the last 10 years, but he always kept it cool and he kept telling us that he wanted us to be playing these songs for 10 years and that we had to do what we wanted.”

With more bands surrendering their artistic integrity for mainstream success, Carothers says that to be truly successful as a band, you have to make the music that you want to make and not what the industry wants you to make.

“It’s all about doing what you want to do,” he says. “And with us, we get a lot of people who hate on us and even other indie rock bands who want to be successful but won’t admit that and all they want to do is write these underground songs and that’s not what we want to do because we want to make the music that we want to make, but it’s not that we want to part the mainstream, we want to make the mainstream cool.

Carothers cites David Bowie as an artist who despite numerous flashes of wild experimentation and even more wacky personas during his decades-long career, “nobody has ever questioned his artistic integrity or said that he sold out.”

“… It’s not that we want to part the mainstream, we want to make the mainstream cool.”

“I like people like David Bowie,” he says. “Because he can do whatever he wants but still have everybody love him, which is a very difficult thing to achieve for other artists.”

The sessions for Evil Friends were less strenuous for the band, unlike the In the Mountain In the Cloud sessions, which “almost killed us”.

“This album made things a lot better within the band because it has been a rough year or two,” Carothers explains. “It’s always a hard thing to do especially with our dynamic where we work together, we eat together and we do absolutely everything together and especially the last few weeks of making the record everybody involved was when it was really tough, but I was really proud of all my boys and everybody worked hard, but those last few weeks made the band stronger.”

For a band that never plays the same song live as they recorded it, Carothers says that this album was “the easiest for us to figure out live” because “we put so much thought into it before hand than any of our previous albums.”

“We’ve played enough shows, about 1,000 now, and we know ourselves and when we listen to stuff we’re very careful in making sure that we can pull it off live,” Carothers says. “And not that we have to pull everything off live because the song always evolves before we take it to the stage and sometimes we create a song that we really love on record and it just doesn’t translate well live, but we’re not going to change it because we want to showcase the actual song.”

Whether you’re a casual fan or a loyal devote of Portugal. The Man, you’re familiar with their tendency to experiment and Carothers says that’s because “we just want to keep evolving and we never want to stay the same.” But it’s never a conscious decision on their part, it’s merely the naturally evolution of song that occurs during the creative process.

“This album made things a lot better within the band because it has been a rough year or two.”

“I probably have 23 different versions of “Purple, Yellow, Red, and Blue”, Carothers admits. “And it’s really fun to go back and listen to them because that will give us better ideas, but it’s just weird how the songs have taken shape in a really natural way, even a song like that which is more tongue in cheek, a little jaded song, and everybody liked a different version.”

Portugal. The Man will visit Toronto on June 11th for a gig at The Phoenix Concert Theatre, and as Carothers recalls when they last performed in Toronto which “was when we played out in the square opening for The Flaming Lips, which was the same day that the Radiohead stage came down, and that was a crazy day.”

“When The Flaming Lips play it’s just going to turn into a giant party,” Carothers says. “And our guitarist and drummer dressed up in big, inflatable spaceman suits and were out on stage with them so it was pretty good.”
“We’re big fans of Canada being from Alaska and we feel more connected with Canada than we do with America more often than not.”

You can buy tickets to Portugal. The Man’s June 11th Toronto show  here.