In a dank, secluded basement, Porches’ Aaron Maine experienced a time-warping sensory deprivation. Even though he was hidden under Lower Manhattan’s bustling cobblestone streets, while making ravenous country-tinged grunge-pop, he tapped into a childlike thrill that reminded him of his childhood home in upstate New York. During peak lunch hour at old school NYC establishment The Odeon, Maine is connecting dots about the mysteries of his forthcoming album Shirt.
“In the studio that I’m renting, there’s nothing to see outside. When I was growing up, I would make music in the basement. I had a little setup. So I wonder if that had anything to do with it,” he says. On this smothering hot July afternoon, he wears a white button down and blues jeans. A gold hoop dangles in his left ear. “The second I moved in there I felt like I wasn’t supposed to be there. This weird little cave, a mischievous sort of teenage, weirdo zone. Maybe that’s why I was imagining the outside as Pleasantville, NY.”
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(Credit: Jason Al-Taan)
It’s easy imagining the world of Shirt in a pastoral expanse somewhere upstate, with the album’s lyrics referencing barns, sheds, lakes, and extensive blue sky. At one point, Maine recalls someone describing the album as Lynchian or like Twin Peaks, and he sees the similarities. An ostensibly unassuming suburban setting that actually lives on reality’s faultline. Most of Shirt feels like it’s teetering on the edge, susceptible to change its mind at any moment. “Call my name / Don’t make a sound / Stay away / Please come back now,” he sings over a slightly dissonant acoustic guitar on “Crying At The End.” On the punchy “Rag,” he admits to plain fear: “I’m actually kinda scared / Don’t know where I am.” Shirt is a Mad Libs of mundane Americana, shifting between duplicitous and subliminal tones.
“For some reason, I feel like a lot of these scenarios happened to me in the woods or yard by a stream. It felt interesting to sort of sing about this, like, familiar childhood scenery but with a sort of more jaded or freaked out adult lens,” he explains. “At times, I was trying to play with these pastoral images with the cracks exposed or this feeling that something isn’t quite what you thought it was or there’s a darkness culminating underneath.”
With Shirt, Maine made it a point to nurture discomfort instead of suppress it. “I embraced the weirder, darker anxiety-ridden, uglier thoughts. Rather than in real life, [where] I would try to navigate around them or push them away, have a normal conversation with someone and quell my anxiety,” he explains. “Something felt good and exciting about digging a little deeper, poking my finger into the little cut harder, making it sting. Why? I don’t know. It’s freeing to do that when you’re expected to do the opposite a lot of the time. It’s good for me to confront those things, even if it’s by myself.”
(Credit: Jason Al-Taan)
Porches’ music has always felt a bit like dream logic. Real world scenes that have a surreal unease to them. His songwriting approach feels like found object lyricism, things that can’t be taken at face value. “I’m realizing that’s something that I’ve always done: very literal lyrics but they’re super abstract. Shirt is the most I pushed that—very detail-oriented scenarios and settings and names and recurring characters and stuff like that. It’s almost like a story is begging to be told but there’s no story.”
If anything, Shirt is more about conveying an anxious mood. And it is, mostly, excitingly uncomfortable. Hi-hats sound like they’re having a slapping match; shrunken vocals range from winy agitation to crying on the sidewalk vulnerable; and guitars foam at the mouth. Dogs are biting; birds are shitting; and there’s blood in strange places. There’s sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. There’s a song called “Itch.” Maine describes the album as “super cyclical and self-referential,” and that it begins with an outrageous fantasy but comes slowly into focus. It bounces between autobiographical and fever dream. But even as some sort of sense begins to crystallize, it also starts to distort itself, like a caricature. “I do think there’s this squeeze out the essence of the song in a way that’s a little unsettling, a little too shiny; the reflection hits your eye, and you’re like, oooh!’” he says, with a wince and laugh.
“Throughout the record,” he explains, “there’s a lot of things at odds with each other. To me, that created something that mirrored the feeling of anxiety when you’re bouncing back and forth or second-guessing yourself, feeling one way super intensely and then five minutes later feel the total opposite.” He continues: “I wanted it to feel like a release too, wanted these soaring moments or a dam bursting where maybe it’s not clarity but it’s some other sort of anecdote to anxiety pouring out of you, getting it out of your system.”
One of the album’s most uncomfortable moments undertakes the overwhelming barbecued patriotism that wafts through the air on Fourth of July. “Fourth of July / I ate the meat / I felt the piggy squeal and squeaking through my veins / I screamed, I cried, I prayed / USA,” Maine sings on the first verse of “USA” over Nirvana-esque guitars. His voice sounds tired, heavy. He wrote the song on the holiday a couple summers ago.
“[The unignorable patriotism was] just very present that day, and maybe some people feel excited and charged up by it and some people feel scared by it. But it’s really tangible. Assuming the position of a patriotic American and touching on these weird pillars of America: meat and cruelty, sex and control, gun violence. That poured out of me that day. By the end of the song, ‘You and I were meant to be’ feels like I’m just as much a product of America as any other American. I wasn’t trying to say anything about it explicitly. That one was strange. It’s a bit different for me as far as subject matter, but it felt important to dig in rather than shy away from those thoughts.”
It pokes the finger at American extremity without coming off as a political statement. Was he worried it might be? “I was scared that it wouldn’t read like that. And people would be like an incel or an edgelord or something. I was trying to not be either of those things,” he shares. When he’s alone, down in the studio basement, there’s an isolated limitlessness for Maine to push the boundaries of his music. “If it freaks me out or makes me nervous that might be a good thing If I’m trying to push myself and grow as an artist,” he says. “I feel like my job, in a way, is to risk stuff being wrong or taken the wrong way.”
Shirt ends far from where it begins. The closing track, “Music,” is the album’s most somber moment—a tongue in cheek love letter to the craft Maine has dedicated his life to. Lyrics make nods to cliched sentiments that could have been sung by both Jone Jett and Aaron Carter. Even still, their shiny sentimentality doesn’t make them any less pertinent: “And, I love to feel the highs / I love to feel the lows / I love it when the music takes control.” Over brooding piano, Maine doesn’t sound anxious; he sounds free.
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