Feel It Still — Portugal. The Man (2017)

Why this song

This song exists because somebody took a break.

John Gourley was mixing a different track, his ears got tired, and he walked into a side room with a bass in his hands. Producer Asa Taccone heard the line through the wall, asked to record it and put a microphone in front of him. Forty-five minutes later the song was finished.

The bass line came first, before the chords and before the words. You can hear it: that riff opens the record with nothing else around it.

Historical context

"Feel It Still" came out on 3 March 2017 on the album Woodstock, produced by John Hill and Asa Taccone. Portugal. The Man had been playing for eleven years by then. This was not a lucky debut; it was the tenth door.

For the sung melody Gourley reached for something he had known since childhood: "Please Mr. Postman" by The Marvelettes, 1961. He dropped it in as a placeholder while he looked for something better. He never found anything better, so it stayed.

The lyric names a year — 1966 — and the production backs it up: round bass, dry drums, distant backing vocals. None of that is accidental. It is a 2017 studio deliberately dressed as a 1960s one.

Foto: Motown/Tamla Records, James Kriegsmann (Nueva York), dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

Musical characteristics

Three separate steps are stacked here. They are easier to climb one at a time.

First: four chords, not three. The same four from start to finish, no exceptions in 2:43. The chorus does not arrive because the harmony changes — it never changes — but because voices come in and the singing goes up. Four chords looping like this are a chord progression, and this one has a family name: i–III–iv–VI.

Second: the key has accidentals. The original is in C sharp minor, which carries four sharps written at the start of the stave: that is the key signature. C#m, E, F#m, A.

Four sharps in class are four problems, so the whole thing moves down to A minor: Am, C, Dm, F. No accidentals at all. The distances between the four chords are identical, they just start somewhere else. Moving a song like that is called transposition.

Third: the bass does not land on the beat. This is the real step. Tap the pulse with your foot and play the bass line over it: almost no note meets your foot. They fall in the gaps, and several chord changes arrive slightly early, pushing. That deliberate mismatch is syncopation.

It is what makes the song feel like it is walking forward while repeating the same thing. It is also why the song is easy to play and hard to play well: the chords take ten minutes, the placement does not.

That short repeated bass phrase is a riff, and it is the lead voice of the record.

Hard facts: C sharp minor, 4/4, 160 BPM, 2:43. Form: intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus.

Trivia and curiosities

• Three of the five writers of a 1961 song are credited on a 2017 one. That is what borrowing a melody costs, and it shows the line better than any explanation: new harmony and new rhythm do not make an old tune yours.

• "Please Mr. Postman" was Motown's first number one on the US pop chart, in December 1961. The song quoting it reached number 4 in 2017 and won a Grammy. Same melody, fifty-six years apart.

• Bassist Zach Carothers explained what the "1966" in the lyric stands for: civil rights movements and protest against the war. The date is chosen, not decorative.

• Gourley wrote the verses thinking about his daughter. In his words, it is hard to be a punk when you are thinking about your baby at home. The rebellion in the lyric is not about what it seems to be about.

Classroom activities

• Play: Am, C, Dm, F, one chord per bar, on a loop. Once it works, play the same four in the original key — C#m, E, F#m, A — and check that it is the same song. Transposition explains itself there.

• Play the bass: half the class claps the pulse, the other half plays the riff. Listen to how rarely they meet. Then swap.

• Analyse: a closed question. If the chords never change, what do you use to say where the chorus starts? List what does change: voices, register, instruments coming in.

• Create: take four chords of your own and place the notes off the pulse instead of on it. Steal the procedure — syncopation — not the song.

Key vocabulary

• Chord progression — progresión de acordes: la serie que se repite en bucle
• Key signature — armadura: las alteraciones escritas al principio del pentagrama
• Transposition — transposición: mover la canción entera a otra tonalidad
• Syncopation — síncopa: la nota cae entre los tiempos, no encima
• Riff — riff: frase corta que se repite y se reconoce sola

Resources

Where it is explained — this song is studied in ¿De quién es la melodía que estás cantando?, from the modern music history book.

The tutorials are in the original key, with sharps. The classroom version is in A minor: the fingers change, the song does not.

Official video

Guitar tutorial — Marty Music. He also covers the short lick that turns up a few times.

Keyboard tutorial — Marks Piano (PGN Piano). Chord-based, which is how it will be played in class.

Bass tutorial — Eric Blackmon. This is the one to watch closely: he plays the riff slowly and you can see where the notes fall.

Drums — Paolo Cantarella, with notation on screen and a simplified part.

• Chord and form sheet — https://jamzone.musicwill.org/songs/feel-it-still
• Tab — the button opens it in Songsterr