Top 60 John Gourley Quotes

We tour, we do the distance from friends and family, not really knowing how to connect with people on the same level. I’ve understood now, as much as we tour, we live day-to-day, so our lives are much different than the people who stay at home and go home every night.

It’s so perfectly Alaska to be like, ‘Dad we’re going to the Grammys,’ and for him to be like, ‘Oh, well that’s great, Johnny. All right, gotta go back to work.’

Getting nominated for a Grammy is as high as it gets for us.

Some New York bands you’ll see rocking Ones or Dunks and things like that, but it is weird that the sneakerhead thing has become so massive. Personally, I think it’s really silly.

My dad would come to pick me up from high school in a beaver-skin cap, big gloves, his parka and everything. It was so funny to see him show up – his beard all frozen from being out with the dogs.

Portland is where all the fringe groups went to escape. Where the outliers brought that DIY, punk rock attitude and made the city their own.

Poor Ron Paul. He means well. He really does. But there’s something about him. I don’t know what it is. From falling victim to Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno to that old-man shuffle, he just seems like kind of a… like kind of a sissy.

My favourite piece of music is actually ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ as a whole. For me, it’s the most perfect and brilliant example of rock song writing.

Mental health is personal for our whole band. As touring musicians, self-care can quickly become make it or break it on the road.

I love running and good running shoes.

Whether it be tour posters, album packaging, videos, stage design, etc., the visual aspect of music is very important to us.

Right after we recorded ‘Satanic Satanist’ and ‘American Ghetto’ here in Boston, we decided we’d grow our hair out. This is – was – like the Beatles thing. I wanted to see these pictures later in life.

We went to Japan and stayed an extra day just to go shopping. New York is one of those places where we never get that. If we’re there, we’re working.

We lived out in the middle of nowhere – the most random places – because of my father’s work. We spent a lot of time in the car on long drives, just to get anywhere. We listened to oldies rock on the car radio, and the most-played group on oldies rock radio is the Beatles.

A country is an individual in the world that represents a group of people, so I decided we would name our band after a country, and Portugal happened to be the one that popped up.

There’s no making art for art’s sake. You’ve got to make the best art you can.

The whole band is from Alaska. It’s like growing up anywhere else.

You can’t just be a rock star by rehashing things you’ve seen or done before. Bring something new, which is what hip-hop does best.

My dad builds houses, and, for the earlier portion of my life anyway, we moved around quite a bit. It took us to some just really amazing places.

Basically, great directors know how to combine music with the scenes that they are working on.

I think we’re pretty spiritual people, the band in general. We’re not a bunch of hippies or anything like that, but we like to work together and work with people. We believe that positive energy is pretty necessary in life, although it’s not always easy to maintain.

The Alaskan summers are one of the most amazing things you can see.

I see a lot of people say you just make the music you wanna make and just love what you do, and that is what we do, but I wanna write the best songs we can.

Growing up, I just always doodled, which is the worst word for it. I would just draw things in class, get yelled at by my teachers, get my drawings taken away. That stuff happened all the time.

I love Unknown Mortal Orchestra, who are from New Zealand, living in Portland.

When I was in high school and first starting to drive by myself, I listened to Wu Tang in the car, and I recognized their soul and R&B roots.

As much as we love an excuse to dress up, the red carpet is not the place.

For the people that don’t know it, we’ve had members come and go from this band since the beginning. It’s always been about collaboration, and it’s been about just playing music with our friends.

‘Feel It Still’ came around pretty much as organically as you can put a song together.

Portugal. The Man, to me, doesn’t have any real ties. We try to change things up with every album, really progress, and let things happen.

I was a shy kid growing up, and I liked the idea of playing under this alter ego: like, I could be Ziggy Stardust, but I also knew I could never be Ziggy Stardust.

It’s really hard to escape where you were brought up. Not that I would ever want to escape it.

The worst gift I have ever gotten on Christmas is going to see Tim Allen in ‘The Santa Clause.’

It’s OK to fail once in awhile.

When we were kids, my favorite thing was coming to upstate New York where my family is from and hanging out with my grandparents’ friends pre-Internet and them asking if we had stores or ‘Do you have TV in Alaska?’

Miles Davis and Felonious Monk, they’re both great artists who enhance things.

We started playing music because of the Wu-Tang Clan.

We’ve always done what we do, and we go out and try and get better with each record we make.

We have an amazing job. We get to travel around the world and experience different cultures and just learn so many things.

Nike is obviously more sporty than Adidas. I always associate Adidas with Beastie Boys and Run-DMC.

Music is something that you really have to want to do it, and there has to be a reason behind it.

I’ve never been the type of person that puts things on a shelf or, like, needs to clean my sneakers every day. I just wear what I like.

The period in the name – huge mistake, I know. We didn’t think about that. We never thought we were going to be written up in magazines. The second we saw it in print, like, what a mistake, man.

You can never predict a hit.

As an artist, you can’t expect a producer to just bring you a record. If you walk in and say, ‘I want Kanye West’s ‘Power,’ it just doesn’t work that way.

There are some athletes who I feel like are just looking for likes, and then there are people who are just real.

Being robbed is a really great way of editing your belongings.

I feel like every album we make, that’s our debut album.

I grew up in Alaska, okay? My dad graduated high school and went straight to the mountains. He had $300 and staked a claim. He didn’t even have enough to put a title on the land: just had the records that he bought before he moved.

Growing up, the only acts that came to us in Alaska were the big ones. The Mariah Careys.

That’s really important in a producer – a producer that can step up and play a keyboard, play a bass, play a guitar, and help you with things instead of just saying, ‘I think this could be better.’

I like work, I like song writing, and I like the history of Atlantic Records. They’ve sat in the studio with so many artists – like Ray Charles, for example – and created something amazing. As a label, they seem to be great at growing bands rather than telling you how to do it.

The reason I got into music was obviously because of bands like The Beatles and Pink Floyd, things like that.

We should be able to write songs for a new album every six months. If you think about it, it’s not a crazy amount of writing.

You can never really know what a record’s going to be.

There’s something about Detroit, man: there’s a serious vibe there. It could be that blue-collar, working-class-mentality person who lives out there. There’s just something about it. It reminds me of Alaska. Texas has the same thing. Detroit is a little heavier than both.

It’s funny, because I had no intention of being in a band because I was so shy. But I loved playing music and loved writing songs. I always thought I’d be in the background and, if I did get into a band, be a backup musician.

I want to share music that we grew up with for this generation, the music my parents shared with me.

I’m just not into the shady side of the music industry. Give credit where credit’s due.

I feel like rock n’ roll has become very tame.