Porches' Aaron Maine on 9/11, Childhood, the Future, and Embracing the Haters

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Last time I talked to Aaron, it was roughly six months or so after his long-running Porches project released the excellent All Day Gentle Hold!, which felt like some sort of creative rebirth for him and Porches at large. His latest Shirt is evidence that he never stops moving sonically, with a grungier and more distorted take on the Porches sound than ever before. It's fascinating stuff, and I was happy to get him on the horn again to talk about what went into pulling this new one together and much more:

You've been pretty prolific thus far, but this is the longest time between Porches records to date. Why's that?
I'm still trying to figure out why it took as long as it did. I've written, like, the same amount of songs. You know what I think? Coming out of COVID and doing this last tour was really fantastic and special, so I had a grand idea of the production value and production qualities of this record. Maybe that's where the extra time went—I was just experimenting and trying to aim for this sound that I had in mind. But you learn a lot and adjust a lot along the way.

I dove pretty deep with this one—production-wise, and emotionally too. I don't know if I had a more concise vision of what I wanted to accomplish and had to spend a lot of time figuring out how to get it there. But I'm inspired as ever. I went around and worked on it with some other people and had a lot of stems that I came home with. At one point it became a sci-fi sound design record. I went way over the top with the production. It was, like, unlistenable. So I pared it back to the meat and potatoes of all the music that I've made, and brought it to where it is today.

You're always choosing very evocative album titles—they conjure something that I can't really put into words. Unpack this one for me.
I had the album title before I even fully conceived of the album. It doesn't feel like I'm always making these decisions myself, at the risk of sounding like a channel or something. But, you know, when I hear it, I know when it's right, and I know when it's wrong—and Shirt just felt right. It's stupid and simple and American and bold. You could project a lot of things onto a song—or a shirt. And I like how open a shirt itself is. I think of, like, a shirt of a lover, crumpled up on the ground in your room. It could be romantic, it could be idiotic—aggressively taking your shirt off, or smelling someone's shirt. It just felt bold and saturated in this abstract way that felt like it was in line with the record.

You've used guitars pretty liberally throughout your career thus far, but this one seems to lean especially hard on distorted guitars.
When we went on the tour for All Day Gentle Hold!, I felt like for the first time in years the band was on fire, so we turned everything up and we arranged the songs even heavier than the recordings, with distorted guitars and louder live drums. I was pushing my voice further, screaming and jumping around and thrashing, and I was surprised at how excited the audience was by us letting loose in that way. When I was thinking about what to do next and what direction I wanted to go in, I took that part of the live show and tried to inject it into these songs without being afraid to crank it up or make it a little more abrasive, aggressive, or dissonant, because that was feeling really good for me too.

That's also how I learned to play music—in bands, just playing straight-up rock music. I feel like I've gone on a lot of tangents and been interested in so many different genres and instruments—drum machines, synthesizers—and it felt nice to take all of that like research and time spent learning about those things and reintroduce distorted guitar in a very forward way. I was imagining a hyper-grunge Porches record, where a lot of the sounds—the distorted guitar, the acoustic drum set, the live bass—I wanted to sound familiar and reminiscent of grunge and hard rock. But I also wanted to push the production past that and tweak the sounds to this uncomfortably sharp, processed, and chopped-up level, where it would be reminiscent of these things, but you can't put your finger on what the instrument actually is. So I was having fun, and a lot of headaches, trying to bring that vision to to life.

I feel like All Day Gentle Hold! kickstarted a new chapter for you artistically—a more confident era in your music. Do you agree?
I do feel more confident, and I think that has a lot to do with getting older and going at my craft for the last God knows how many years. I don't want to say that I've become a little sure of myself—not in the way that I think I'm, like, great—but the noise around it has died down in a way where I can be myself and explore my voice, melodies, lyrics, and production in a way that I was hesitant to do in the past, when I was thinking about what other people thought and not spending enough time with my thoughts, being distracted.

If you've followed the Porches trajectory, it's been a while—three EPs that were acoustic, one of them on a four-track, one of them with a Casio-like dance beat. That's where I found my love of uptempo beats, pianos, and synthesizers. Slow Dance in the Cosmos, some of the heaviest Porches songs that exist are on that album—there's double kick drums and blast beats. I just feel a little freer, and I've always felt free.

If there's one thing that people have learned to expect with the next Porches release, it's to not expect anything, because they're all pretty disparate genre-wise. But I feel confident that my voice is the throughline through all these albums, and I feel lucky to experiment and just put out what feels right. That's always what I've done, and whether that's benefited my career or I've shot myself in the foot, it doesn't really matter to me, because most of the time I feel pretty fulfilled and thankful that people are willing to listen to what's next—to what I've been working on, interested in, twirling over, and obsessing about.

Let's talk more about expectation, as well as your relationship with the press. Any misconceptions you feel like you've faced over the years?
Well, I'll start by saying that I'm fucking thrilled to do press, and I've been at every point in my like quote-unquote career. Because I make a living off of making music—which is a miracle—it's a bizarre thing, because you make this stuff in such a secret, sacred, personal, emotional space, and then you put it out in the world. I don't think I've ever really been prepared for what that feels like.

I've been putting music out since I was 17 years old, and it's still this insane rush—this feeling of, "Oh my God, I can't believe I just put that out there in the world for whoever wants to, like, read my diary. Oh fuck, why'd I just do that?" But that's the beauty of it, and it's forced me to to grow and examine myself a lot more than if I wasn't sharing so much of myself with the public and whoever's listening—fans, haters, critics, friends.

It can be painful to experience a growing pain publicly, or to stumble and fuck up or misspeak—but, like, I'm not a jackass. I'm stubborn, but I'm just trying to make the best shit I can make and be the best person I can be. So it's par for the course at this point, and I'm grateful that I have this platform to learn about myself and make mistakes. It's a really unique experience, and I've learned a lot throughout the years, putting myself in this situation over and over again when you're just a sitting target for love and admiration and hate and distaste.

For whatever reason, I'm compelled to keep doing it—and I wonder what that is in people which defies all logic and tells people to just keep making stuff and sharing it. Going through all those emotions, to me, it's beautiful. It's my purpose that I feel lucky to have—this guiding light in my life. I wake up, and what I think about first is, "What am I going to make today when we get to the studio?" It's like I'm on autopilot.

Tell me about the image on the album cover.
The image is what I like to think of as my first selfie that I ever took on my Digicam when I was in Vermont. I was probably 12 or 13 when I took it. A lot of this album is me reflecting on and re-living a lot of these teenage childhood fantasies of mine through my current lens—re-imagining scenarios, fantasies, crushes. Something about it just felt like right. The fact that that's me as a kid—that same kid is the person singing this album—kind of blows my mind. It's also a little abstract to me, and I like that about making music. A lot of the time, I don't really know what's going on. It feels like something else is steering. It felt raw, wholesome, and maybe a little unsettling too.

Walk me through what adolescence was like for you.
It was nice. I grew up in this town called Pleasantville. I was into skateboarding, drawing, painting, the bass guitar. I was into ska and Sublime, and then it was Arcade Fire, the Strokes, Velvet Underground. I had some really good friends—a little community that was interested in the same things that I was. We were the nerdy, arty, long-hair loser kids in the school, but at least we had each other, and that felt great.

I realized that I took that for granted until I went to to college and one of my buddies was like, "I was the only kid that even knew who Radiohead was in my entire town at school." And I was like, That's a deep kind of isolation—when you really don't have anyone that you can relate to taste-wise. Luckily, I had a bunch of friends that were into music and skating, so I just spent most of my time doing that and trying to do good in school.

I did pretty well in school. My mom did an incredible job instilling this fear in me that if I didn't get good grades, I'd be in prison or living on the street. In hindsight, it's obviously not like that at all. It helped over time with my sense of discipline, though, so I'm thankful for my mom instilling that in me, since I've applied it to my art. Whenever I have to leave for the airport, the band is always like, "Are you kidding? We're leaving that early?" And I'm like, "You can never be too sure. Better to be early than late."

That's been my airport approach since day one. I'm there as early as possible.
I've only missed one flight in my life, but it's because I slept through my alarm—it wasn't cutting it close.

How old were you when 9/11 happened?
Somewhere in the 11-13 range.

What's your memory of 9/11?
Gosh, that's sort of a crazy question.

It's a lifelong fixation of mine—you'll have to excuse it.
At that age, it was impossible to process, As I get older, everything that's happened is still coming into focus, and I'm getting closer to just understanding...you get what I'm saying. Now I live in New York, and it's just impossible to wrap my head around that while living in the city—that's a whole another way to look at it.

I remember that day, going home from school and it being on the the news. I wonder, as a parent, what that would be like—to try and explain this to your kid, whose extent of their emotions and understanding of human life and politics is only so developed at that point. Honestly, I was thinking about it the other day, and I don't think I really understood it then. I was sad, and I just didn't get what happened at the time. I understood that something incredibly horrific had happened, based on everyone's attitude around me—but as far as really processing how many lives were lost and the level of what happened, I don't think I was anywhere close to understanding it.

I went to the 9/11 museum last year and I found it to be an extremely emotionally overwhelming experience.
I just went to the Pitchfork offices at One World Trade, and it's such an insane place to be. I can't imagine reporting to work there every day. I had a full-blown panic attack in the office, just being there on the 30th floor or whatever, above the Memorial. I had to leave. It's just super emotional in this state on this planet, you know?

One thing I think about with regards to that time was this feeling that things were really uncertain, and wherever the future was headed, it obviously wasn't great. Obviously, that's been a commonly held sentiment for the las five years too. When you were younger, how did you feel about the future, versus how you feel about the future?
I miss how naive, innocent, and unaware I was as a kid. The future to me then was, "What was I gonna eat after school? Would I finish my homework on time? Does Carrie have a crush on me back?" My world was really small, and I sensed this anxiety and fear from my parents with the Bush administration, the war in Iraq, and the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. But I didn't really feel the weight of all these things, and I feel it more and more as I get older. I think that's sort of part of growing up—your experiences pile up to digest what's going on in the world in a different way.

It's just getting scarier and scarier—not necessarily scarier, just heavier. I feel everything more. I feel the earth dying. I feel, I don't know—like, war. Like, geez, what am I getting into here? And it's all real and becoming more tangible, in a beautiful, terrifying, and deeply human way. It's a wild ride, being alive. It was really crazy, and such a gift, and that's a lot there that's never a dull moment, as far as I'm concerned.