Field Report with Joe Pug
Saturday, March 14
Opolis | Norman
Living in a world of long winters, bitter cold and deep snow, Milwaukee, Wisconsin native Chris Porterfield is in something of a songwriter’s paradise. It’s tough to get out of the house — sometimes physically, often just psychologically — burrowed up in the comfort blanket of a fireplace-warmed home. So there’s a lot of time spent alone, and it’s time spent drinking, making music or doing a little bit of both. And for Chris Porterfield, the man behind Field Report, that means a lot of memories spilling out in the form of songs. Sometimes it’s snapshots of the past, matching the wistful acoustic compositions with vividly constructed language, doubly painting out each painstaking detail with guitar strums and precise lyrics alike. Then others, it’s painfully personal journal entries of more abstract concepts of love, loss and hurt. All of it, though, seems to be grasping at a sense of warmth out in the cold — a ray of sun in the dark.
“It tends to lead to some social isolation and opportunities for reflection,” Porterfield said of his home state. “Historically, we’re not that cool up here, either. Anything that’s hip comes later, so we are kind of drawn to the tried and true form of telling stories with your voice and guitar. It’s the oldest and most human thing we have. It’s how we learn about the world around us. It’s meant to be shared, and there’s a propensity to do that here. The people, the culture and the typography all play a part in how that comes out.”
It’s certainly not just Porterfield. Milwaukee, Madison and much of the rest of the Badger State is something of a hotbed for fittingly wintery folk music. It so happens that Porterfield got his start playing with some of the very best purveyors of such: He’d performed in DeYarmond Edison, an Eau Claire-based band that featured Justin Vernon, Joe Westerlund and Brad & Phil Cook. Vernon took to that notorious log cabin seclusion to record his famed Bon Iver debut, For Emma, Forever Ago, shortly after the band’s breakup in 2006, while Westerlund and the Cook brothers formed freak-folk act Megafaun.
“It’s so clear that the community we came up in really did have something special going on there. It’s super satisfying to see that everyone has not only found a way to communicate the ideas they wanted to, but also the force of will to see that through and believe in it strongly enough to make it happen,” Porterfield said. “It doesn’t surprise me that those guys are making their living in music. I could tell back then that they had ‘it’ — the ability and the things to say.”
Porterfield admits it took him longer to find his songwriter legs than it did his old bandmates, but he certainly has now. The success of his 2012 self-titled debut — especially lauded for its lyrical prowess —had Porterfield and Co. spending as much time out on the road thousands of miles removed from his ZIP code as they did inside it. There were new landscapes — often in stark contrast to that which composed his beloved Wisconsin — that ruffled the persistent sonic mood of the comparatively somber first outing. New places, new people and new distances created between the old ones made his 2014 follow-up, Marigolden (Partisan Records), an album about wondering what exactly makes home home.
“The first record was written at home. Marigolden was written on the road. There was this displacement and this coming to terms with what home is while you are away from it,” Porterfield explained. “It’s a sort of short film in which the focus is in and out and blurry and clear and back and forth. It doesn’t resolve in a nice tidy ending, but I like that. There’s unanswered questions, and that’s the most important part.”
The changing bodies and scenes around him were more than hollow, moving pictures. It was a new, often demanding sort of existence, begging the sort of introspection that leaves you wondering if you were a different person coming out of that time or not.
“I was drinking quite a bit. Right before we went into the studio, I had a shift in my relationship with alcohol, so half the album was written before then and half was written after,” Porterfield said of sobering up. “It seems to me that it’s a snapshot of not a confused mind but a questioning mind as far as what all this is and what’s going on here. Is this what I want to be? Is this my best self?”
The result is a record of diverse moods and sonic scenery to chew on, moving from quiet, guitar-driven ditties (“Decision Day”) to more upbeat, fleshed out productions (“Home [Leave the Lights On]”) that play equally well with the full band behind him or just Porterfield by his lonesome with little more than a mic, guitar and his voice, as he will be seen and heard during this national tour with Joe Pug.
“What I love about this project is can go both ways, and they both inform each other,” Porterfield said. “I like playing with the guys and having these fully realized arrangements of these songs, but the solo tours are really fun, too. You can get some fresh air with the songs and convey them in new ways.”
—
Doors open at 8 p.m., and the show begins at 10 p.m. at Opolis, 113 N. Crawford Ave. in Norman. Tickets are available for $12 in advance, $15 day of show.
