Still feeling it

WASILLA — Sunday night, Portugal. The Man walked off the stage at the 60th Grammy's with the award for the Best Pop Duo/Group Performance for their hit ‘Feel it Still’. According to Zach Carothers, the song was born as a side project while working on their new album. They didn't even bother to write down the words. Half of Portugal. The Man's six members were born and raised in the Mat-Su Valley, and fame has not changed their AK pride.

Carothers and lead singer John Gourley were in a metal band near the turn of the century called Anatomy of a Ghost. Gourley and Carothers started Portugal.

The sound on 'Woodstock,' the album on which 'Feel it Still' appears, is a long way from their first album 'Waiter: 'You Vultures!'" from 2006. With an ever-changing sound and lack of defined genre, the band embraces the freedom to make whatever music they want. During a concert on the Borealis theater at the Alaska State Fair in 2015, the band played the theme song to 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.' Despite the worldwide success, the band proudly proclaims The Last Frontier as their home, using the Grammy stage to shout out rural villages. Alaska's influence is clearly shown in their lyrics, with lines like "paint me that arm/that lies directly over the mountains/where the glaciers climb so tall" from A.K.A. M80 the Wolf. The words "born and raised in the Valley" pop up in their song 'Horse Warming Party'. While Carothers and Gourley have been there since the beginning, Eric Howk joined the group in 2015. Howk also grew up in the Mat-Su.

What follows is the interview between bassist Zach Carothers, whose sounds open 'Feel it Still,' and Frontiersman reporter Tim Rockey. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

TR: When you and John Gourley were sitting in the Wasilla band room, did you ever say to one another, 'Hey, let's win a Grammy someday'?

ZC: I don't think anybody knew. No, man. We didn't realize until a lot later than that, that we could even be a band at that level. What started was we played music together and knew we were going to do it for a while. We started out with no delusions of grandeur whatsoever. It's the opposite of what you think. Most people join a band to make money. It's not the 90's anymore. When we came to Portland, I went to college for a little while and started seeing bands for like 3 dollars at a little bar. We'd get in a van and go to the next town. You don't need money to do anything, you just get paid enough money to get gas to drive to another town and see someplace new. We were very grounded. We loved playing music never and thought we'd do anything like this at all.

TR: What does it mean to you to have received music's highest honor?

ZC: It's pretty crazy. It feels pretty good and hasn't completely sunk in yet. It's nice, I don't know what it is specifically that makes you feel that, maybe it's the sense of accomplishment. We never needed anything, we've always just done what we've done and been ourselves. It is something special to get that nod from the recording academy to be like hey, we're with you, we see you, we like what you do, we just want you to know that we got your back. To be up there in the annals with people who were up there before and nominated with us and how we did it too, our song has been on fire for last year and still is. It's pretty wild but it's completely surpassed everything we thought. It got too big to be considered alternative or rock so we had to go up against Despacito and huge huge songs, worldwide jams that break records. And it's pretty insane and nobody could've seen that coming and it does feel really, really good. It's completely overwhelming and amazing all the love that we're getting. My phone's broken. Everybody that's ever had my phone number texted me or called me. Everybody I've ever known is coming out on social media... It's unbelievable.

TR: When you wrote 'Feel it Still,' did you set out to write a hit, or were you just jamming and it happened?

ZC: It wasn't really either, it was kind of completely by accident. John was taking a break, we were working on 'Live in the Moment' actually. We were doing some new edits and mixes on it and every now and then you've got to give your ears a break. Went in the lab nd started messing around on the bass our buddy from Electric Guest is like, 'hey man, keep plyaing that.' So we threw a mic on the bass amp and started recording it. It was almost annoying. We wen't, let's do something like this, you got words? No, we don't neeed to write a new song right now, and it just started being really fun. We just started having a good time with it. It just took us 45 minutes come up with. We'd come up with a sentence for the verse, hit record, track that verse, stop, and we'd write another verse. It was by far the fastest song we've ever written and the most natural. It was really really cazy because sometimes you bang your head against a wall for a year to get a song and we had the song in about an hour. After that we stripped it apart changed everything and put it back together, but went with pretty much what we did on that first day. Nothing else changed we made a slight replay on the drums and stuff to make it sound a little better, but you can't do that kind of stuff on purpose."

TR: If a Frontiersman reader is going to listen to Portugal. The Man for the first time, how do you describe what they are about to hear?

ZC: It's kind of hard to pick, honestly. We just usually say rock n' roll and it's not because of the sound, it's an attitude. We just make whatever we want. We're a rock band and that's more of an idea, the punk rock vibe. It's not a t-shirt, it's a lifestyle also. It is just a cop out so that we can say that we do whatever we want which is why we're artists in the first place. We have fun. The biggest part to us is having a good time and doing what we're doing. Not everything has to be so serious. We were really fixated on the fact that you know you can be serious and dark and say very deep things, but also say something tongue in cheek. We deal with very heavy issues whether it is social problems or politics or death in the family, we've always dealt with everything with comedy and sarcasm. It's a serious coping mechanism for us and a lot of our country for sure. A lot of people get most of their political views, it's getting to the point where, with John Oliver and John Stewart, comedians get the information but the sarcasm and the satire behind it.

TR: You have scheduled tour dates all over the U.S., Canada, the Dominican Republic, Portugal, of course, and Europe. When will you come back to play in AK?

ZC: We've done a bunch of random shows up there. We are getting back to working on something now. We will be coming up as soon as we can. We've missed playing Alaska and we're going to get back up there for sure. I really miss it.

Eric's mom use to work for The Frontiersman, actually. Because it's what made us who we are. It made half of us. Where we're from, it's nature and nurture. We have both of that in AK, it taught us that you really had the space to know yourself up there. I wonder if it hadn't been dark and cold in the winter nights, would I have played as much guitar? Would I have been out doing other things? A lot of the space and insane beauty growing up in a very non traditional way or, extremely traditional on the scale of humanity. It's a lot smaller and a lot slower. We didn't have a lot of outside stimulation when we were growing up like movie theaters arcades, we had music. We had long drives and we had music. My parents had a really good record collection and my folks were the got first people I knew to get cable. My 16 year old cousin come move with us and my dad got MTV. I grew up just watching Headbangers Ball and MTV Raps with my cousin. That's what made me love music"

TR:Why do you make a point to say that you're from Alaska?

ZC: A huge thing for us is the work ethic, everybody in AK works so hard. If you stop working, you freeze to death. Everybody grew up building house, and we took that to art and that's why we did a lot better. When it came to bands you can't argue with work ethic and getting better every time you write a song. We are an incredibly hard working band and we've learned that from Alaska. When it comes to repping villages and stuff like that, we've got friends out there and I feel like as Alaskans... We're out in the world and bring the world's stories back to where we're from. The native culture that I was fascinated with early on is very beautiful and not very well known and there is a lot of issues going on out there that people don't even know about. When you're picking something to talk about accepting an award, there's 1,000 things going on that everybody should be talking about, but one that's very close to us that doesn't have a large voice on the world stage is native culture and what's going on. It's just something that we'd like to talk about and not a lot of people have.

TR: What advice would you give to young musicians?

ZC: I'd say find your voice and find what you want to say, and I would tell them it's a giant whirlwind of hard work, talent, and luck. I guess whether it's arts, science, or anything when you have that drive and find something you want to do, it's very important to focus on that while you have the time before you go to college and have serious relationships or children. Focus on something you love that's just yours. You may not want to turn it into the career, but try out different things that make you feel good when you do them and try to use that to make the world a little bit of a better place. The main reason I play music and love writing is because I love listening. We make music based on whatever we want to hear. The times we can inspire a new generation of music that's the biggest thing to keep rock and roll alive. The Melvin that inspired Kurt Cobain, I hear Nirvana for the first time and that is literally what made me pick up a guitar. Don't be scared to give it a try. You don't have to go all in, just find out. Any parents, give kids the tools to try and find themselves. That's why we're all about supporting music programs in public schools specifically with Shishmaref, we've donated art supplies and their music programs, and a lot of those things are failing. You give the kids the tool, it could be soccer, hockey, you throw things their way that way they have the opportunity to get it out

TR: If you were not making music with Portugal. The Man, what type of music would you be making?

ZC:"I really like hip hop a lot. I don't know if i'd play it necessarily, but I'd be interested in helping produce rap songs, I like making beats and writing really fast songs."

TR: If you were not making music, what would you do for a living?

ZC: "I'd be fishing, a fly in fishing guide or fly fishing or something like that sounds nice. That's what grounds me is getting back on the river. I really do miss fishing a lot and I get to do it but not as often because we keep pretty busy. That's another thing that makes me happy. We love AK. We rep forever. We're out doing our things and if all goes to plan I was born there and I'll die there. We'll be back up as soon as we can."