 Not as good as their old stuff but its a lot better than what the majority of people listen to now. Check out Bears In Congress!

People Say

"Work All Day" by Portugal. The Man (Album: The Satanic Satanist, 2009)

“As with all this stuff, I think it really just goes back to family and Alaska. A lot of this was that chain gang-type rhythm, which is what we were trying to go for, as far as the tempo of the song, and that’s fully my dad and my brother’s work ethic coming through. You work all day, you keep the rhythm through the night. Alaska’s a pretty intense place. It’s a lot of guns and drugs. It’s so bad if you’re living in the towns and don’t have family to keep you out of it. But the chorus is kind of about my friends that have gotten lost in all that and forgotten to work, forgotten about family and the love they had.” 

Portugal. The Man - Work All Day

"Lovers In Love" by Portugal. The Man (Album: The Satanic Satanist, 2009)

“‘Lovers in Love’ actually came around because we had never written any song about love at all, I guess. To be honest, it started as kind of a joke and the chorus just worked really well, so I ended up writing lyrics around it and going for almost a Curtis Mayfield vibe to the whole thing, trying to more or less write a song in under a few sentences as opposed to everything else we’ve done, which is just piles of random words. When we first tracked that song, I have to say I was not into it. We tracked it and it sounded like a dance track, to be honest. It was just this fast beat. The cymbals were all loud. And in the mix, we brought in this guy Steve Smith from the band Dirty Vegas and he played congas and shakers and all the percussion on the record. And he so sold the Curtis Mayfield vibe. It pulled it back from dance to just cool ‘70s soul.”

"Lovers In Love" by Portugal. The Man

"The Home" by Portugal. The Man (Album: The Satanic Satanist, 2009)

“That was about my parents just picking up and moving and just saying ‘I’m gonna make a home here.’ Wherever we went, it felt like that. We always just jumped into it. And that whole outro where I sing ‘I know I was fine before,’ you’re always fine with where you’re at until you take those next steps.”

"The Home" by Portugal. The Man

"The Woods" by Portugal. The Man (Album: The Satanic Satanist, 2009)

“We’ve always had woods around us and that’s one thing that Zach and I miss so much and always talk about is the fact that you can’t just walk out into the woods and get away as easy as you can up in Alaska. But that song is a continuation of 'The Home' in the sense that when you’re living out of a place like that, the people that are closest to you become your family and that’s the way this band is.”

"The Woods" by Portugal. The Man

"Guns and Dogs" by Portugal. The Man (Album: The Satanic Satanist, 2009)

“‘Guns and Dogs’ is 1987, when we lived out on Icy Lake in the cabin. We were really away from everything. It was just us and our dogs and that’s it. Snow and trees and a lake. And my dad had just gotten into dog sledding. He had picked up a bunch of dogs from Joe Redington, Sr., the founder of the Iditarod. And we went out there, my dad started training and getting ready to run the Iditarod which is just so my dad, to get up and do the most random thing you can think of. But family was what we had so we just stuck together.” 

Portugal. The Man - Guns and Dogs

"Do You" by Portugal. The Man (Album: The Satanic Satanist, 2009)

“‘Do You’ is kind of me moving out of Alaska and coming back. I was afraid of everything. It’s not necessarily just talking about my fears. It’s everybody’s fears, just everything that we’ve seen after moving, everything that we’ve seen being in cities. It’s one of those songs where you sit back and think about everything you’ve done. That’s what it was to me, thinking about everything you’ve seen and everything you’ve done and if we’ll ever finish what we’re doing, get to where we’re going. And then, the bridge was so the little kid getting to come out again and write more about the winters and just how dark everything was. I was terrified of the dark. Until recently even.” 

Do You

"Everyone Is Golden" by Portugal. The Man (Album: The Satanic Satanist, 2009)

“That was one that I had written at home when I was sitting with my dad and in the verse, my dad thought I was saying ‘Everyone’s a soldier’ when I was writing ‘Everyone is golden.’ And that just really, for some reason, brought me back to that Pete Seeger stuff and obviously it was kind of written in the same time frame. But I decided to write it about when we lived in Healy, Alaska. I guess that was in ’93. Healy was another of those crazy Alaska towns where everyone knows each other and everyone is golden. It was also my first experience with death. I never knew anybody really close to me to die. And I happened to be living in this small town and going to school in one these schoolhouses where I guess there were eight other people in my grade, but kindergarten through high school was all in the same building and this kid, one of my friend’s best friends, died in an avalanche when they were playing in the snow. And I remember them coming to school and it just being so intense and the kid bawling and telling us the story. It’s just one of those things that happens that I think never really goes away.” 

"Everyone Is Golden" by Portugal. The Man

"Let You Down" by Portugal. The Man (Album: The Satanic Satanist, 2009)

“I don’t play piano and for some reason, I sat down at the piano and was like ‘I’m gonna write a song.’ And it was just one of those moments where I was actually feeling really down. I was really depressed. That just happens out of nowhere for me. Sometimes I’ll just shut down. But I love how it all came together.

"Let You Down" by Portugal. The Man

"Mornings" by Portugal. The Man (Album: The Satanic Satanist, 2009)

"This was kind of the bookend to the record -- obviously, being the last song on the record. But the first lines on the record are ‘Save me, I can’t be saved’ and then the last line on the record is ‘because I don’t believe.’ It kind of finishes the thought. It was Alaska. Everything we’ve gotten to be and everything we’ve gotten to go through, we’ve been lucky enough to have what we have."

"The Home" by Portugal. The Man

Portugal. The Man

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