Porter Robinson on rejecting nostalgia and crafting Nurture

Porter Robinson on rejecting nostalgia and crafting Nurture

In the first episode of The FADER Interview podcast, Porter Robinson talks about the long road to his new album Nurture.

By Jordan Darville

Porter Robinson on rejecting nostalgia and crafting <i>Nurture</i>

The FADER Interview is a brand new podcast series in which the world’s most exciting musicians talk with the staff of The FADER about their latest projects. We’ll hear from emerging pop artists on the verge of mainstream breakthroughs, underground rappers pushing boundaries, and icons from across the world who laid the foundations for today’s thriving scenes. Listen to this week’s episode of the podcast below, read a full transcript of this week’s episode after the jump, and follow The FADER Interview wherever you listen to podcasts.

When Porter Robinson released his debut EP Spitfire on Skrillex’s label Owsla in 2011, he was heralded as a dubstep artist looking beyond the high-intensity trappings of the genre with a compositional skill that matched his ambitions. His debut album Worlds, released in 2014, fulfilled that promise. There was a strong sense of sci-fi fantasy lore to each of the songs, as if they were movie themes made in the furthest reaches of our solar system. It seemed like Porter Robinson knew exactly what he was doing and how to do it, which is why what came next was so surprising: he got stuck.

Nearly seven years after releasing Worlds, Porter Robinson is back with his sophomore project Nurture. It’s a beautiful album, filled with little moments of joy and wonder, and it serves as an introduction to Porter Robinson the pop artist. Just before the album’s release, The FADER’s Jordan Darville spoke with Robinson about how he got himself on the road to Nurture by meeting his heroes in Japan, making the writing process a key part of the album’s sound, and how the global pandemic affected the record.

The FADER: I listened to an old interview of yours from February. You were talking about Nurture, and you said that one of the "a-ha" moments for you was watching an animated film called Wolf Children. So I checked that out. Man, that was a very sad film.

Porter Robinson: It's beautiful and very, very melancholic. The influence of Wolf Children on this album is just so present. I think I mentioned this in the last FADER interview I did, but the way that that movie struck me was it just changed my sense of what could be considered beautiful. And once I had that shift from seeing that sense of emotion and beauty and music from being this far away thing to being this thing that felt very nearby, it kind of opened up the world for me. Something that was so revelatory for me was hearing the soundtrack for that movie, which is by Takagi Masakatsu, who since seeing that movie became one of my top four all time musical heroes. And the amazing little circle-of-life aspect of this whole thing was that I actually had the chance to work with Takagi, had the opportunity to spend a few months in Japan and just write music.

That was probably the time that I turned the corner, because so much of my creative rut came from depriving myself of new experiences and of just putting pressure and expectations on myself to work, where the purpose of this trip was more just to explore and meet new people. And I had the chance to work with Takagi where I was like, "Maybe he can come visit the studio I've been working at in Tokyo." I got a message from him suddenly, which was like, "Would you be able to come to my little town?" Which is really more like a village, like eight people live there. I rolled up to his house and I'm incredibly nervous. I'm a little younger than him and he's just such a talented pianist. And we got there and his house is just decorated with pianos. There's pianos everywhere. He has four in his studio. They're just everywhere in the home.

We're sort of getting to know each other, sitting down at the table. And I was just telling them about how that music had changed my worldview. Just sort of doing a get-to-know-you. And he was making this point about how one of his first ideas for that soundtrack was that he wanted the music to feel like being cradled. He wanted this swinging motion back and forth, like if you imagine a mother cradling a baby with both arms and swinging the baby back and forth.

And then as he's illustrating this point, he turns around to the piano that's right behind him because there's a piano everywhere in the house, and plays my favorite section from my favorite song on the entire soundtrack, which is "Circulation" and its main sort of leitmotif. I was trying to continue the conversation with him, but I was on the verge of tears trying to talk to this guy. I very nervously played him the music I had been working on, and he gave me his feedback. And I remember he really liked "Get Your Wish."

He said he felt like the synthesis between the pitched-up vocals and the dance music and the J-pop elements... I could tell that got him excited. People talk about a dream collaboration, but it was almost like a dream teacher. I played for him a lot. I played a lot of piano in front of him, which was scary but fun. And it was just a real time of growth, I think, getting to meet one of my heroes and play him my music, and it was amazing.

When Porter Robinson released his debut EP Spitfire on Skrillex’s label Owsla in 2011, he was heralded as a dubstep artist looking beyond the high-intensity trappings of the genre with a compositional skill that matched his ambitions. His debut album Worlds , released in 2014, fulfilled that promise. There was a strong sense of sci-fi fantasy lore to each of the songs, as if they were movie themes made in the furthest reaches of our solar system. It seemed like Porter Robinson knew exactly what he was doing and how to do it, which is why what came next was so surprising: he got stuck.

Nearly seven years after releasing Worlds, Porter Robinson is back with his sophomore project Nurture. It’s a beautiful album, filled with little moments of joy and wonder, and it serves as an introduction to Porter Robinson the pop artist. Just before the album’s release, The FADER’s Jordan Darville spoke with Robinson about how he got himself on the road to Nurture by meeting his heroes in Japan, making the writing process a key part of the album’s sound, and how the global pandemic affected the record.

The FADER: I listened to an old interview of yours from February. You were talking about Nurture, and you said that one of the aha moments for you was watching an animated film called Wolf Children. So I checked that out. Man, that was a very sad film.

Porter Robinson: It's beautiful and very, very melancholic. The influence of Wolf Children on this album is just so present. I think I mentioned this in the last FADER interview I did, but the way that that movie struck me was it just changed my sense of what could be considered beautiful. And once I had that shift from seeing that sense of emotion and beauty and music from being this far away thing to being this thing that felt very nearby, it kind of opened up the world for me. Something that was so revelatory for me was hearing the soundtrack for that movie, which is by a Takagi Masakatsu, who since seeing that movie became one of my top four all time musical heroes. And the amazing little circle-of-life aspect of this whole thing was that I actually had the chance to work with Takagi, had the opportunity to spend a few months in Japan and just write music.

That was probably the time that I turned the corner, because so much of my creative rut came from depriving myself of new experiences and of just putting pressure and expectations on myself to work, where the purpose of this trip was more just to explore and meet new people. And I had the chance to work with Takagi where I was like, "Maybe he can come visit the studio I've been working at in Tokyo." I got a message from him suddenly, which was like, "Would you be able to come to my little town?" Which is really more like a village, like eight people live there. I rolled up to his house and I'm incredibly nervous. I'm a little younger than him and he's just such a talented pianist. And we got there and his house is just decorated with pianos. There's pianos everywhere. He has four in his studio. They're just everywhere in the home.

We're sort of getting to know each other, sitting down at the table. And I was just telling them about how that music had changed my worldview. Just sort of doing a get-to-know-you. And he was making this point about how one of his first ideas for that soundtrack was that he wanted the music to feel like being cradled. He wanted this swinging motion back and forth, like if you imagine a mother cradling a baby with both arms and swinging the baby back and forth.

And then as he's illustrating this point, he turns around to the piano that's right behind him because there's a piano everywhere in the house, and plays my favorite section from my favorite song on the entire soundtrack, which is "Circulation" and its main sort of leitmotif. I was trying to continue the conversation with him, but I was on the verge of tears trying to talk to this guy. I very nervously played him the music I had been working on, and he gave me his feedback. And I remember he really liked "Get Your Wish."

He said he felt like the synthesis between the pitched up vocals and the dance music and the J-pop elements... I could tell that got him excited. People talk about a dream collaboration, but it was almost like a dream teacher. I played for him a lot. I played a lot of piano in front of him, which was scary but fun. And it was just a real time of growth, I think, getting to meet one of my heroes and play him my music, and it was amazing.

I've listened to Nurture a couple of times now. I listened on headphones for the first time the other day, and it just opened up the album to an incredible degree. I got these mouse-clicking noises in "Wind Tempos," that's just one example. There are all these lovely little details that you get from the album if you listen to it really closely, and it's a really rewarding listen.

Thank you. So that's the one, that's the bit of ambient music that was inspired by the stuff Takagi showed me and also his piano playing style. But yeah, I wanted to include those mouse clicking sounds because I wanted to paint a picture of myself in the studio. So much of this music is about making music. I was like, "Let's embrace this." And so I started doing things like naming songs Do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do and then including literally the sound of myself producing. So one of the things that you hear in "Wind Tempos," there's this vocal that's like, "It's so lonely, it's so lonely." And what you hear is that sound, it keeps changing. And that's literally the sound of me recording the room while I'm just clicking through different effects chain presets.

I was like, "Let's show the sound of me exploring and experimenting," because I don't know. I'm just trying to, I guess, paint a picture of what this process is like. It's a love letter to creativity. I guess I wanted to lift the veil in some sense there, but it's also like when you talk about intentions about what you wanted to do so much of that is after the fact. You're working on intuition for the most part, and I just put that in there because it felt right and sounded cool. And then later I'm able to think critically about it and be like, "Why did that resonate with me?" And I think the answer is because I wanted to show that raw moment of exploration and of uncertainty. I didn't know what the next sound was going to be as I was scrolling through those presets. But somehow the fact that I'm recording the room and just showing the process kind of gels it together, I guess.

One of the things that makes the creation of this album so inspiring is that for a lot of other artists who might've went through what you went through, your struggles with writer's block, it would have been enough to go back and do another album like Worlds. But Nurture, to me, almost feels like a debut album. It feels so different to all this stuff that you've put out.

That's the best thing you could say to me. Oh my God, I'm peaking right now, calling it a debut album. That makes me feel amazing.

How did you get to a place where you felt comfortable doing all of this experimenting again?

I felt like with Worlds, I'd figured out my style and I'd figured out what I was supposed to do. And so I tried to do that same thing again, but the reality is that you can never really go home. And I don't think that you can authentically do the same thing twice because once I have this meta-awareness of what Worlds is, it gets a little bit diluted every time you go back to the well. Every time I would try to make something that sounds like Worlds, it became more and more of a caricature and less and less of an exploration. I think the thing that made Worlds good was the excitement that I felt about this new idea — of having this shift in the sound from this EDM party music into something that was a little more synth-pop. I can never feel that way again. I'm a different age. I've had different life experiences since then.

And so it's funny, there's a quite a few lyrics on Nurture that talk about nostalgia as being a bit of a problem, which is funny because I'm a naturally very nostalgic person. But on "Unfold," there's the lyric it's like, "I wish I could go home." And then in quotes: "You're just nostalgic." And then in "Musician" I also say, "I was so nostalgic, but I'm fine without it. You don't really want what you think you want." Part of that's addressed to myself, part of it's addressed to my audience. I think I can make an album really similar to Worlds, and the people who like the sounds, I think they would like it at first. I don't believe it would stick with them because I think Worlds hit them at a specific time in their life where those ideas felt fresh and exciting relative to the other things they were listening to. You just can't, it's sad, but you can't really go home. And as I've gotten older, I've realized that it's so much better for me to try to form new memories than to try to recreate the nostalgia I felt.

And form new ideas of what home is, which is more challenging.

If you try to go back to a technique that you know all too well... if I was to sit down and try to write a hook for the beginning of the song and then inverse from there, I know I can do that. So as soon as I start writing, it's almost like I'm racing my own shadow where I'm like, "I know what I've done here. And I have a certain expectation of how well I should do it." But if instead I decide to start a song by first recording the sound of me tapping on an aluminum can — I'm saying this because I'm drinking LaCroix right now — and then reversing that and pitching it way down and then putting it through a sampler I'm just fucking around. There's no expectation of making anything good from that.

And so it totally disarms you creatively to try to do something that you don't have an expectation will pan out. So that's why I'm like, "What am I going to do next? Am I going to start rapping?" I have no idea of what is the future of my music going to hold. I actually really wish that I could know what that would be now. But now that I've finished Nurture, I'm looking to the future of being like, "What's the next thing that's going to excite me?"

That sounds exciting in itself.

It is, but it's also daunting. And I mean, I'd say the biggest mistakes I made pre-Nurture were — and I've characterized this many times — but the first mistake that I made was going into the studio with the intention of proving myself. Going in thinking, "I'm worried I can't make music anymore." This was all after I had this panicky episode about not being able to make music anymore. So I'd come into the studio thinking I have to prove I can still do this. I have to show myself that I'm still capable of making music, which is a pretty anxious place to begin from and not super conducive to creativity. That was step one of going into hell, basically, was trying to prove myself and my own abilities. And then the second mistake was I cut out too many other aspects of life.

I thought I wasn't making music because I wasn't working hard enough. So I increased my hours working and cut out all of the stuff that ultimately becomes fertilizer for creativity, like going out and falling in love, and watching new movies, and exploring, and trying an instrument that you haven't played before or trying a new technique. It was like I was too scared, and I had this white knuckle grip on my own sense of myself that... I couldn't try messing around with a musical idea that didn't seem like it would work, something truly creative and exploratory, because I needed results now. That was the biggest mistake. And it's certainly, I'm sure I'll learn new lessons in the future, but I feel like now that I'm looking towards the future of my music, my first thought is I need to go have some new experiences and have new things to write about and try things I've never tried before because otherwise I'm going to fall into the same patterns.

Do you have a list of those things?

I definitely want to learn to dance, that's something that feels like it's on my list. It's a new perspective on music and rhythm. I got my first little taste of what dance might feel like working with a choreographer a few weeks ago, trying to figure out a stage presence for the live version of this album. And it's all really simple. And if you watch what I do, it literally just looks like I'm walking around the stage and stuff like that. A lot of choreography is like, "Just make sure you have a microphone at this station when you get over here." Simple stuff like that.

But once I started tapping into the idea of choreography and movement, it became so clear to me that it's like you're on an airplane and all the windows are closed and everyone's sleeping. But the airplane is actually above the clouds and it's daytime because you're changing time zones, and you open the airplane window just slightly and it blinds everybody. That's how big the world of movement feels to me right now where I'm like, "I feel like I just barely looked through the tiniest crack in the window and realized how expansive it is and how much growth is possible in that department." And every skill is like that, you know? So I'm just excited to find another thing to improve that and find another form of self-expression. Whereas I think a few years ago it would have been like, "Dude, dance? What the fuck you talking about? You have to make music." Those kinds of things lead to creativity in unexpected ways.

It's funny that you're saying that it's a relatively new revelation for you because these are the sorts of things that I gathered from Nurture, especially the song "Musician." If somebody asks me to summarize this album and why Porter Robinson makes music, it would be the lyric, "Sincerely can't you feel what I'm feeling?"

Exactly. That is exactly it. That's how I've always felt. I've always been trying to be understood. I've always been trying to make people feel the same thing that I'm feeling. When I'm in awe of my favorite music or even when I'm in awe of those rare moments where I've made something that moves me, which is not that often surprisingly, I'm just like, "God, I have to share this with somebody." That's how I feel. It's like I need someone to understand what's going on in my head right now, because this is incredible. And I feel like everything I've ever done in music has basically been a love letter and a way of me trying to take some little thing that I've gotten obsessed with — whether it was electro house back in 2010 or J-pop and ambient music in the case of Nurture, those were some of the big driving inspirations also.

When I hear something and I just love it, I feel like I have to get closer to it. And the way for me to get closer to something I love is to try and embody it and live it for a fleeting second. And it's like, that's what takes me from place to place, I think, with creativity is just loving things so much and wanting to drink from the fountain of whatever that person who made it felt. And then I'm just imploring people: Don't you want part of this as well?

To me "Musician," it's funny. In one sense kind of falls outside of the record because the palette and the ethos feel very, very different, but then the lyrics are still so much about making music and about creativity and about passion. It's just the other side of all this angst that I think Nurture sets up, where Nurture has so many questions on its mind. There's almost no questions in the mind of a song like Musician. It's just pure blissing out. And then there's that little touch of self-awareness in the chorus where it's like, "Oh, whoa, slow down buddy." But also, that's my favorite song on the album. So you definitely earn points by me by mentioning "Musician."

I wanted to talk a little bit about how the pandemic influenced the album as well. The project was announced, I believe, in early 2020. It wasn't a definitive release date attached to it, but I think people assumed it was coming that year. Now, of course it's coming in April 2021. Did it change at all over the course of the pandemic or was it pretty much set in stone?

Nurture changed so much throughout 2020, and strictly for the better. I added three extra songs and I got rid of some songs that I felt like weren't all the way there for me or stuff I had settled on. It was really hard though, because I think it was a Wednesday, the day that everyone realized that this was really serious. I think I had maybe only put it together the Monday before that like, "Oh, things are really going to change." But that Wednesday was the day that Tom Hanks and the entire NBA got COVID. This was like two days, I think, after the second single "Something Comforting" had come out, and the six months leading up to that, I was living in this world of filming music videos and gearing up and working on the art direction together with SBJ [Samuel Burgess-Johnson] every day. It was a fun, fun time.

And then all of a sudden, I released the song and it's like the next week I'm getting these calls from my manager being like, "Streaming, not just your music, all music streaming has tanked. People aren't... I think it's because people aren't driving or people are just too anxious. Now is the worst possible time to be releasing music." And at that time it was kind of in the stage of quarantine — two weeks to flatten the curve or whatever. And so there wasn't that much certainty about how this was all going to change. I probably would've shit myself if I knew that the album was going to get delayed by over a year. But in the end, it's funny how that kind of hardship and anxiety can sort of blossom into something that's an opportunity and something really beautiful, because I was able to take that time to write some new songs and get a bit of a new lease on and a new perspective on the album and resuscitate some songs that had fallen by the wayside.

"Mother" was written when I was in Japan in 2018, but it was just a demo and it was just a hook and it had this totally different chorus. And being able to write "Musician," that was written in 2020' "Trying to Feel Alive," the last song, was also written very, very, very late in the process. In my opinion, the album got 25 percent better during that time. And the way I described it to people was almost like you go to turn in your Master's thesis, and then the professor hands it back to you and says, "Yeah, you actually have another year to work on this." You thought you were done, and at first you're like, "I was planning on being done with this, what the hell?" But then you grow and you spend some more time and you research a bit more and you're like, "Oh, here's an interesting new angle on this."

And so ultimately I'm really, really glad. One big question I think I was left with, with all this extra time, was this whole album is trying to answer this question of whether or not all this stuff I'm doing is meaningful and whether it is helpful and whether I've truly improved and gotten better, and whether I've learned anything. And the biggest point of anxiety for me was the last song. I had this other outro in the past that was called "Pass Your Light Along," it was this ballad. I remember feeling like it just felt a bit lecture-y, it was almost like a list of things I wish I had told myself and I just didn't buy it. I was just like, "Yeah, this is cool, but it's too concrete of an ending."

It's like, I don't feel like I've actually transcended all these problems, and I know the answers now. So I ended up bailing on that song and I wrote another song called "Trying to Feel Alive." That song is almost like the sequel to "Get Your Wish" in some ways, because the question that's posed by "Get Your Wish" is: You're struggling so hard to make this music. This is coming. This is really difficult to you. And clearly in some ways, all the attention that you've gotten has been kind of bad for your brain. So what is it that we're really wanting here? You've already played Coachella three times. Are you really hoping that at this next level of success or whatever, that that's going to be the thing that fixes you? And the answer to that is an obvious no.

So "Get Your Wish" in it's first verse is like, "Why do I need this so badly?" And then the answer that's in the second verse something like, "This is extremely difficult and doing music might not be the thing that makes me happy or quote unquote fixes me." But in the same way that my favorite artists, the existence of my favorite artists like Daft Punk or Bon Iver, Takagi Masakatsu, Kanye West, the existence of an album like Discovery or Graduation, or 22, A Million makes me feel that the world is three shades brighter. My music can have that role in someone else's life. And so it's not necessarily to say that like, "Oh, I'm doing all this out of charity," because that's clearly not it. Like I'm really self-sacrificing.

But that does enable me to kind of forget for the moment this question of, why am I doing this? Which is something that's pretty paralyzing. And instead just move forward, which feels free. So I'm like, Well, this is helpful to other people. So even if releasing music doesn't "fix me," at least I have something to work towards and at least there's some broader purpose for this. And then the final song on the album, "Trying to Feel Alive," was the last song written for the album. It's like, Alright, you did it, you wrote an album. Let's check in here, how are we doing? And that was a terrifying prospect, because I was really questioning whether I had grown at all and really doubting the progress I had made.

I was struggling with that song too, being like, See, I haven't gotten better at addressing writer's block. And that song was the hardest one, one of the hardest ones to finish, because I felt like I couldn't end the album until I had a satisfying answer for the question of, what was this all for? And the answer that I set up in the lyrics of "Trying to Feel Alive," the last lyrics of the album are," "Maybe it's a gift that I couldn't recognize / Trying to feel alive." The idea is this struggle that I feel and that I think every artist feels, of constantly feeling like you're not quite good enough, and that you have more to say and more to do, and not being satisfied is the thing that keeps you going and keeps you moving forward.

It's better to be moving forward than, I think, to be perfectly content. I don't want to write an album where, when it's done, I feel like I never have to write music again. The end of the album [says] life is basically a series of problems, in a weird way. There's a series of things that you have to address to move forward. So you might as well enjoy those problems, because that's the process. That almost feels like a negative way of putting it. But the question of "Trying to Feel Alive" is like, Wait, why don't I feel done yet? And the answer is, Thank God, I don't feel done. It's a gift I can recognize, trying to feel alive is. That was satisfying to me, at least for the album. And that was another part of the worldview, being able to do this self-check-in and be two years later, after writing "Get Your Wish," ask, how are we? The question is as insatiable as ever, but at least I'm enjoying the process now.