B-Side Guys

Chris Portka built The Album Everyone Wants from someone else’s blueprints, then decorated the rooms his own way. Seven of the eleven tracks are covers—Syd Barrett, Skip Spence, George Jones, even a song from co-producer Jasper Leach’s former band Brasil—but Portka treats them less like tributes and more like raw materials. What emerges isn’t a covers album in any traditional sense. It’s a full-band statement that uses other people’s songs to articulate something specific about American music’s weird inheritance, where psychedelia bleeds into country and indie rock shares space with honky-tonk sincerity.

The recording split between New York’s legendary Sear Sound and Oakland’s Brothers (Chinese) Recording creates geographic tension that serves the material. These studios represent different musical histories—East Coast indie credibility versus West Coast sprawl—and Portka mines both without pledging allegiance to either. The production, handled by Portka and indie veteran Jasper Leach (Burner Herzog, Brasil, The Symbolick Jews), balances noise with clarity, letting instruments occupy their own sonic territory while maintaining cohesion. Kyle Carlson’s pedal steel weaves through tracks that also feature Mike “Bonecrusher” Vattuone’s drums and Tom Meagher’s guitar work under his Beardwail alias. The full-band approach gives everything weight without sacrificing the intimacy Portka’s previous work established.

“She Looks So Good Tonight” opens with windswept romanticism that immediately establishes Portka’s sensibility. The lyrics move through relationship stages—Shakespeare and cocktails and LSD, marriage proposals under dark skies, eventual dissolution—with the kind of detail that feels both specific and universal. That line about grace in her eyes being “knives to my spine” captures the physical impact of attraction without sentimentalizing it. The production turns everything up, as advertised in the press materials’ Nick Drake comparison, but the intensity serves the emotional stakes rather than obscuring them. When she finally says she loves him but he’s “the darkness, nobody,” the contradiction doesn’t resolve—it just hangs there, unresolved longing set against self-awareness.

“Fun in the Summer” transforms heatwave disorientation into motorik momentum. The lyrics document a 101 highway drive that doubles as existential crisis—skin melting off faces, killing time, erasing identity. That phrase “purple wine by my side / flying green into the royal blue” paints the California landscape in psychedelic primary colors without losing the concrete reality of actually driving this road. The track channels Lou Reed relocated to San Francisco burnout territory, West Coast sunshine poisoning replacing East Coast heroin cool. Portka’s vocal delivery stays calm even as the instrumental arrangement builds heat, creating productive tension between content and presentation.

The cover selections reveal careful curation. Including a Brasil song—one of Leach’s former projects—creates meta-textual layers about collaboration and musical lineage. Covering Syd Barrett and Skip Spence positions Portka within a specific psychedelic tradition, one that values fragility and strangeness over polish. The George Jones cover suggests comfort with traditional country’s emotional directness. These aren’t random choices or padding—they’re deliberate mappings of influence and aesthetic affinity.

“Song for Carol” strips down to essentials, documenting aging and loss with uncommon plainness. Those opening lines about all days being lost and free, living a perpetual dream, could scan as hippie platitude but get grounded immediately by concrete images—rivers running dry, tears turning inside, feet planted on the ground. The request for someone’s hand “about now” and the wish for them to be “in my town” locates vast longing in specific geography. This is American roots music gone existential, the promised Jackson Browne and Silver Jews territory where personal narrative expands into something larger without losing its particular details.

“The Observer” closes the album with remarkable maturity for an artist still building his catalog. The opening image of wax casting shadows on Christmas memories establishes both warmth and distance—remembering while acknowledging the act of remembering. That shift from personal history (dancing to “Born to Be Wild,” college dreams aging) to cosmic perspective (heat death, eventual equal equations) shouldn’t work but does. When Portka sings “I’m just an observer / I won’t be here forever,” it functions as both acceptance and invitation—acknowledging mortality while advocating for presence. The final verse’s domestic scene (breakfast, fried eggs, grilled tortillas) grounds all the existential questioning in daily life’s actual texture.

The “Tennessee Whiskey” reimagining deserves specific attention. Taking the Dean Dillon and Linda Hargrove country standard and filtering it through krautrock rhythms and pedal steel shouldn’t function, but Portka makes it inevitable. The arrangement respects the original’s emotional core while completely recontextualizing the delivery. Alison Niedbalski’s additional vocals add dimension without overwhelming Portka’s lead, and the production choices emphasize groove over twang without abandoning country music’s fundamental DNA.

Portka performs monthly at Berkeley’s Vintage Elmwood Wine Bar, and that regular residency likely informed this album’s confidence. These aren’t songs designed for viral moments or playlist insertion—they’re built for repeated listening in specific spaces, music that rewards attention and functions as genuine company. The vinyl release through Seek Collective positions the album within underground independent infrastructure, appealing to listeners who still value physical objects and intentional listening experiences.

The Album Everyone Wants earns its title through accumulation rather than declaration. Portka doesn’t grandstand or demand attention—he just builds a record that occupies strange intersections of American music with enough skill that the seams barely show. The covers integrate so completely with the originals that distinguishing between them requires checking credits. That seamlessness reflects artistic vision functioning at high level, understanding not just what songs mean individually but how they converse when sequenced thoughtfully. Portka proves you can honor tradition while bending it sideways, respecting source material while making it unmistakably your own.