“All my dreams are rock n’ roll,” Aaron Maine confesses on the final track of his latest Porches record, “And I love to play it fast/ I love to play it slow/ I love it when the music takes a hold.” The music on Shirt, which builds on the experimental, punchy rock sound that made 2021’s All Day Gentle Hold ! stand out from the project’s earlier releases, drags Maine to a very particular place, both utterly dreamlike and eerily familiar. Energized by playing the last Porches record live but made in a windowless basement, it finds the singer-songwriter reaching back to and distorting memories from his formative years spent in rural New York, peering through the veil of both childhood naivety and its picturesque surroundings – internal and external landscapes blurring together. It’s a jagged, fiery, maximalist record you should play as loud as you can, though ‘Music’, the slow awakening, is mostly backed by piano and some gentle acoustic guitar. If the whole thing yearns for a sense of home through jumbled, torn-up pieces, it also seems to come down to a new understanding of it, one clearly anchored in the present.

We caught up with Porches to talk about youth, rural New York, Nirvana, touring, and other inspirations behind Shirt.

Subconscious and youth

As you can tell from the list, I don’t consume all that much media or listen to much music. I watch some TV here and there, but it feels like more than being inspired by physical things, it was trying to get into this headspace or inhabit a kind of abstract, autopilot, subconscious flow state. Not to sound like a hippie or whatever, but there was a lot of closing my eyes and picturing myself in these dreamlike settings, with the trees and the grass and the fences and the lakes. It’s very self-referential, and it feels like there’s this strange world of my own that exists in an isolated way that I kept trying to pluck things out of. Three-quarters of the way through, it felt like I was fully inhabiting that place and kept going back to it. At times, it almost feels like a play or something like that. It clicked for me when I was working on the sequencing, when I started to see all the characters, the settings, the surroundings. It’s almost like a dream, where you have it and it makes perfect sense in your head, but when you try to put it down on paper or recount it to someone, it sort of falls apart.

How does that idea of inhabiting the subconscious relate to youth in the context of Shirt?

I was working in this basement, which is another important part of the inspirations. I was very closed off from the world; there were no windows down there, and I kept it really dim. It was a new space where I wasn’t surrounded by any of my things – my clothes or any tokens of my current day-to-day life. It felt like an anonymous spot that inspired my imagination to sort of let go of the more autobiographical, current goings-on in my life and reached back – I like this feeling of having this memory of myself as a kid and retelling it in any way that satisfied who I am today, trying to bridge the gap in between. It goes back to trying to get to that autopilot state that’s ingrained in me in a deeper way – way less literal, a lot more physical and emotional. Those moments when I was making stuff where it felt the best, when I didn’t understand what was coming out of my mouth, but it felt like it necessarily had to be that, and I was tapping into something in my subconscious or my youth or some broader experience of life – emotions that I had swimming around in this tie-dye, black-hole of, I don’t know, just feelings. I don’t know what else to call it.

Maybe part of that was the guitars and rock music that I attached to being younger, like 13 or 14, making music and playing music in bands, and that felt youthful and dramatic and angsty at times. In a way, I feel like I was trying to shed whatever understanding or hold I have over my life now and get back to that looser, more off-the-cuff space and see what would come out when I was down there making music.

Nine Inch Nails

I was in the middle of making this guitar-drum-bass-heavy record, and I didn’t want to make just another rock album. I wanted to take these familiar sounds and then tweak them and buck them up just enough so they felt like something you’ve heard a billion times, but also something you’ve never heard before at the same time, to create this uneasy, dreamlike state of confusion. I was just reading about some of Trent Reznor’s production techniques – he’s such a master at resampling acoustic instruments and sounds, twisting them into these really interesting soundscapes. That was like a guiding star for me as far as taking something and trying to make it modern, new, jarring, and exciting. That was more of a production inspiration with the Nine Inch Nails stuff.

Nirvana

With Nirvana, I was thinking a lot about Kurt Cobain’s lyrics and how he exposes parts of himself that are darker and almost villainous, touching on the evils of humanity and himself – not being afraid to share that or skirt around that and edit until you only put out the stuff that makes you seem cool or like a good person or a perfect character. I thought that was beautiful, and maybe even more useful, in people confronting themselves and not being silent or false about it; identifying these uglier thoughts, fantasies, or tendencies, with the intention of not being like that, or being more sensitive, gentle, and aware in your day-to-day when you interact with other people. I tried to experiment with that and not shy away from more provocative or prickly emotions or themes. In the past, my lyrics have been, depending on the song, pretty watercolor-esque and vibey. It felt good to embrace those moments rather than skirt around them.

Rural New York

Is Pleasantville the kind of landscape that inspired the record?

Well, there’s Pleasantville, and then there’s Greenwich, New York, where my dad moved when I was 10. I went to school in Pleasantville but would spend a lot of time up there visiting him with my brother. Maybe because I was in a basement, but I wasn’t making a New York album. When I close my eyes and imagine the scenes, it’s grass, fields, dirt, and mud. I’m not sure why I was drawn to those rural locations from my youth, but I couldn’t really write about any other place. It just seemed like my mind kept going there when I was like, “What’s happening in this song? Where are we? Who is doing what?” I’d be transported back to these flashes – some of them are real, and some of them are these distorted memories I have of being up in those places. That’s where whole record is set, in my mind. I don’t even know if there’s there’s any reference to the city or an apartment – it’s all house and yard and fence.

I don’t think I found it particularly inspiring – it wasn’t like, “Oh my God, I could write write write about this place.” But I just was there mentally. Maybe because I didn’t want to be in New York or I wanted to escape. Because there were no windows and I was all alone, I could be wherever I wanted to be, and maybe I was longing for those places because they felt familiar in a comforting way. I just wanted to spend time there in my head, and I think there’s a lot of looking back and seeing the bigger picture. Trying to understand what was going on beneath those vague memories, to come to terms with it and pinpoint some of the darker stuff beneath the surface of these picturesque, pastoral American scenes. And come to terms with that having always been the case. There’s always more to a memory than the way you initially recall it, and there’s some of that going on – re-analyzing these innocent, naive moments and trying to pick them apart a little bit more.

Working in a basement

You said being there allowed you to escape – I’m curious what other effects it had on you creatively.

I think being literally underground, sub-street level, maybe affected my brain a bit. I was beneath the surface of New York City, and I was kind of singing from this place beneath the surface of my appearance and external world. I was also able to really listen to music loudly at any point of the day. Sonically, the kick and bass were really important to me down there. I could turn it up enough to feel the kick drum in my chest, it felt very womb-like and warm, and that was exciting. In the apartment, I always felt like I had to keep it low or use headphones, definitely couldn’t turn the subs up.

I feel like it’s one of the more punchy records I’ve made, and that was definitely part of it, just making music in a different room. I never thought about it making that much of a difference, and before I moved there out of my apartment, I was like, “Oh fuck, am I even going to be able to make music outside of my house?” I’d never really done that, except when I visited someone else’s place or popped into a studio for a day or something. The more I think about it, the more I think that really had a huge effect on how the record turned out and what I was singing about.

Touring

When you were touring All Day Gentle Hold !, that must have been right after things started opening up again.

Yeah, that felt like was the most victorious, euphoric tour I’ve ever been on. The band felt really on fire, and we were turning the guitars up really loud. All Day Gentle Hold ! Is a rock album, essentially, so it felt amazing to play songs like that and not have to be so subtle or worry about electronics. It just felt really raw. I think that’s what we wanted to give, this really human experience, not something electronic in any way. It felt so good to be in rooms full of people playing music and sweating and smelling each other. I was pushing my voice in places I hadn’t really pushed it before in a long time. When I came home from that, I really did want to keep that energy going when making the next record. That was a big guiding star as well, to imagine these songs in a room with people and sing them in a way that was really charged-up, unhinged, over-the-top, celebratory, and surprising.

I was also really surprised by the audience’s response to the heavier and more dissonant moments on the All Day Gentle Hold ! tour. I thought maybe they would be put off or want a smoother synth-pop vibe, but it seemed to really land and connect, and that was exciting to me. That was exciting to me, I felt like I had the license to push that further. I was thinking a lot about what an opportunity it is to get to play shows and have some people show up. I was like, I never want to make a kind of demanding song again; I wanted it to be as devourable, in-your-face, and immediate as possible.

So it was more about feeding off that energy than writing on tour?

It was feeding off that energy and intensity, that volume, and my voice being up in that range and getting to yell. ‘Crying at the End’ was maybe the first song I wrote after the tour, and that part where I scream as high as I possibly can, the chorus – those moments even took me aback for a second at how intense and raw it felt. It was definitely a sonic and energetic inspiration, wanting to have more of those moments in the set and on this album and tap into that bliss and freedom. That drama and heavy-handedness felt really good to experience together in a room full of people. It’s really cathartic, and it’s not so prim and put together. That’s what felt right to do – expose ourselves and be freaks together and not try and pretend we’re not a bunch of freaks. [laughs]

There’s channeling the drama of live performance, and there’s also writing about it, in a way, on ‘Music’, which is the least musically heavy-handed song.

That one is obviously a very autobiographical song. I really like it at the end of the album because it feels to me like a sort of reckoning, like waking up from the fever dream of what happened in the last nine songs. Which is sort of what it’s like making an album: you enter this space and then come to, and you’re like, “What? Oh, I guess that’s what happened.” I think it stands as a standalone song and a ballad that’s very personal, but in the context of Shirt, I liked what it was doing because it doesn’t necessarily have to be me singing it. To me, it represents this broken American dream, this reckoning with whatever you thought was going on and then crashing down to reality in a really introspective way. Just tying it all together and landing myself back in the basement, trying to understand what happened and how impossibly important it all is, and how impossibly nothing at all at the same time. And accepting that – the beauty in both scenarios.

Guitars

When it came to the actual process of finding the right tones and riffs for Shirt, was that something that came naturally?

Yeah, I think that stuff is ingrained in my fingers and in my head. That’s how I learned to write a song, on guitar, and that’s how I learned to perform – with a band, with a guitar and an amp. It was really fun to embrace that for the first time in a while. For a long time, I’ve been trying to come up with other solutions, like dressing up a song or exploring different techniques or genres with synthesizers, drum machines, and synth bass. So it was fun to take what I felt I knew how to do naturally and figure out how to treat it with all the things I’ve learned over the past like 10 years of producing the Porches records.

Most of the guitars were DI, and that already takes it out of the live band record feel – it has these high and low frequencies that you don’t hear through the speakers in the guitar amps because they’re not meant to put them out. The acoustic guitar, too – I don’t think I’ve ever used as much acoustic guitar on a record since I was 17 or something, and that felt liberating and familiar. It was a really amazing texture to work with on this record. It was fun and crazy to try and tie it all together. I like how it’s like this Frankenstein-like stone, obscenely sewn back together with influences from my life to make something uniquely Porches. I feel like each Porches record becomes more like Porches in its own way.

Tension between opposites

In a way, there’s tension between those different production techniques, or even just between the acoustic and electric guitar. What other kinds of opposing elements did you notice creeping up while writing Shirt, and how did you go about juxtaposing them in a way that felt true to Porches?

I think I was feeling sort of manic and up and down, maybe more so than usual, during the time I was making these songs. Going back to each album trying to paint my internal emotional landscape, I think I was, without knowing it, using whatever tools or combinations of sounds I could to recreate this uneasiness, anxiety, fear, as well as bliss, euphoria, and rawness. Pitting the acoustic guitar on ‘Joker’ over a sort of club beat felt like a bastardized country song over the most tasteless 909 kick-and-clap thing. I think it has moments of real beauty and harmony, but I also liked how that sort of clunkiness and confusion makes you feel a little unsettled. Which is how feel most days – bouncing back and forth between two opposites.

I felt like a lot of the lyrics second-guess or negate themselves; just as quickly as I catch on to a thought, I’m thinking about the other side. There’s a lot of sudden dynamic shifts. I think that’s a more realistic sentiment than picking one vibe and riding it out for the whole record and ignoring everything else in between. Maybe it’s kind of maximal and insane to listen to in a way because it tries to pack all the ups and downs and the roller coaster of being human into one short album. But in some way, I felt like that’s I was trying to capture – the shakiness, excitement, and fear of being one snap away from the other, and how quickly it can shift. I was trying to wrap my head around that and capture that energy because my brain always darts around like that. I’m a Libra, so this two-sides-to-everything is part of it. But there’s a lot of tension, and I was feeling excited by trying to put that into the music. I wanted to make something honest and punk and angular and jagged, less beautiful and more realistic.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length. 

Porches’ Shirt is out now via Domino.