Record of the Week: Porridge Radio’s ‘Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me’

Porridge Radio‘s Dana Margolin said she wrote much of the band’s new LP Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me in a period of disorienting stillness that she experienced in the wake of an aggressive touring schedule. The Brighton, UK band had been fairly nonstop gigging after their last release, Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky, in 2022. Once stopped, back at home in London, it was clear that Margolin could not outrun nor out-perform her sadness. The emotions and questions and self-analysis came pouring forth, mostly as poems.

“It was a very confusing and open-ended time,” she said of early last year. And then she added, in a way highly relatable though also contradictory, “There’s some hopelessness and optimism to it, of just not knowing and giving in.”

Spanning identity and healing from the end of relationships, some of Margolin’s rawest, most revelatory songs to-date make up Porridge Radio’s fourth album, which is WNXP’s Record of the Week.

Learn about the inspirations for Clouds in the Sky… and songs from the record here. The full conversation I shared with Margolin can also be found on WNXP’s podcast channel.

What’s up with the title?

Celia Gregory: You guys certainly have a penchant for long album titles. I’m here for it. Start with the inspiration behind that, about titling the album that way.

Dana Margolin: I mean, I really wanted to choose like a 30-word phrase or poem for the album title, and obviously nobody else thought that was a good idea. [Laughs.] So I kind of whittled it down…but I think it made sense. It really reflected the journey of writing that album and what it’s all about. It came out of a long period of traveling and feeling confused and burnt out, and it felt like the right sentiment.

CG: I’m inferring here that the clouds in the sky, that’s the constant – to look up, that’s sort of grounding, ironically.

DM: Exactly. No matter where I am, I look up and I see the sky around me and I see the birds and I see the trees and I see there are some constant things. Even though everything else changes and feels like it’s constantly out of my grasp. At least, at least I have the sky. And that is the kind of theme of across quite a few of the songs and something that kept coming up I liked, including it in the title.

On band chemistry and capturing that by recording live

Image by Steve Gullick

CG: What about your chemistry as a band and can you share in some of the tougher stuff on the road? Do you feel sort of alone together in that you’re exhausted but you’re still, like, “living the dream”? And how does that how does that dovetail into the music you’re making together as a band? I mean, you’re people first, right? You’re individuals before you’re a unit.

DM: Exactly. And I think when you’re touring together, you become a unit and you function as an organism and everyone is a different organ or a different limb. And it’s kind of like a family. You are no longer just an individual person. Your needs are all tied to each other and your routines and your everything gets tied together. Then you’re on stage together and you share this hour and a half every day of just complete chemistry and being completely locked in. And we became much better musicians.

There was a real sense of, like, becoming so tight and so intuitive to how to play music together that when we came to arrange this record — and we spent about six to nine months, we had a studio space in Brighton. Me and Georgie live in London and we would drive down to Sam’s house in Brighton and we’d sleep over every week, we spent a few days and we would work on all of these songs that I’d brought in. I think because we toured so much together, we functioned so much more like an organism than we ever had before.

It became strange, being apart from them after we’d basically lived together for a year and a half – lived together, worked together, eaten together, sat in the same room. And then suddenly we were all in our separate spaces and we came together to make this album and kind of fell back into it. Musically, it just felt so satisfying.

The use of repetition and “You Will Come Home”

CG: What keeps striking me is your use of – and this is over multiple records, but it’s so impactful to me — your repetition. Sometimes it’s like it’s growing in intensity and emotion, but it feels like with every utterance of a statement, it becomes truer when I hear it. I wonder if it’s the same thing for you. The lyric I’m thinking of that really got me is “I would do anything to see what I’m waiting for” [in the song “You Will Come Home”].

DM: Yeah, damn. [Laughs.] I was trying really hard with this record to actually stray away from repetition in my lyrics because I think I’ve always moved towards writing in a way that is taking a sentiment and repeating it to kind of make sense of it. The more you it say out loud, the more you understand what it means and the more it takes you to a new place and the more you can create a spell or break the spell or whatever it is. With this record, I was really trying to write in the way I didn’t use repetition as much. And so in times it does come in, I feel very particular…they were chosen on purpose.

I mean, with that [lyric: “I would do anything to see what I’m waiting for”] it’s kind of the bridge between two sections of “You Will Come Home.” I remember coming home from this tour and I didn’t really understand where I was or what I was doing or where I got to or how I got there or what the future looked like. And I thought it was a really confusing and open-ended time where there’s that kind of hopelessness and optimism to it of just not knowing and giving in. And I think something that really got me through long periods of exhaustion whilst being on tour was letting go of my resistance to those difficult things — like just open up, let go, stop resisting. Just exist in the thing that you’re doing and be exhausted and play the show and then just go and sit under a tree and stare up at the sky and just ground yourself. “You Will Come Home” came out of that state.

I remember it was really early in 2023…my then boyfriend had gone on tour and I was kind of left at home and I was just writing and writing because I didn’t know what else to do with myself. I didn’t have any kind of context for how to exist outside of playing shows and writing. So I just kind of got home and kept writing. I was trying to imagine the future, but I didn’t know what the future was, where I could find myself again, trying to world-build and trying to imagine a future that actually is constantly slipping out of my grasp. Constantly trying to create and just not having enough strength to actually be able to see what it is.

“Sick of the Blues”

CG: I love that we got [the album’s lead single] “Sick of the Blues” first and that’s how the record ends. I wondered like sequentially from all that you’ve told me, when that song came to you, were you in that sort of “dark night of the soul” post-tour, alone, and then you just had to like pick yourself out of it? Tell me about that sentiment there. It’s very triumphant.

DM: It was a breakup song. And it was just over a year ago that I wrote it, actually. I just kind of been broken up with and messed around by somebody for a really long time. I was sitting in my room and started playing around and kind of came up with it. I thought it was really stupid. And I showed it to Sam and I showed it to the rest of the band and they convinced me that we should jam it out and see where it went. And we did. And it was fun. But it took me a really, really long time to figure out how to perform it because it was really, really painful. I was lying that I was sick of the blues. I really I wasn’t sick of the blues by that point. [Laughs.] I still I still had a lot more healing to do and a lot more learning.

CG: Sounds like it was aspirational. You’re like, “I’m out of this. If I write it down in my journal, I’m going to be out of it.”

DM: Exactly that. It was completely aspirational and I kind of hated it for that. But also it was kind of fun. And the reason we put it at the end was because the whole album is this journey that you’re taken on, and at the end of it it says, “I’m going to just throw this off and I’m just going to keep trying. I’m going to try and be better and feel better and and do better and learn from this and get on with it.” But yeah, at the time it was purely written as a kind of “one day this will be true and so I’m going to write it now.”

“God of Everything Else”

CG: So the song “God of Everything Else,” can I infer that it’s also a breakup song? Because wow, wow, wow, “You’re the god of losing me,” yikes. He knows you’re talking about him.

DM: That was actually one I wrote quite a few years ago around when we were recording the last record Waterslide. I was going through another terrible breakup and this was one [song] that nearly didn’t make it. I phoned Sam up, who plays drums in the band, and I played them the chorus that I had just written on guitar and I said, “I don’t have the energy to turn this into a song. Here’s some chords, here’s my ideas for the verses. I like this thing, but I just am so broken and I don’t know how to even sit down and start writing.” But I’m very lucky because Sam’s a very good friend and collaborator and they really liked it, so they just kind of laid it all out in Logic and sent me a rough skeleton of the song. They added bass and drums and other parts to it. And then I wrote the lyrics. So it was really a collaborative process.

It was another one, which was like, “I don’t feel this yet, but eventually I will feel this and it will get better, even though it doesn’t feel like it will get better.” I mean, it might take years for me to feel better because, again, it was quite a horrendous breakup. But eventually I did. I did feel better and I did move out of it. I think writing songs like that is a small way of finding revenge and also of healing myself and of letting go of something. And it feels good to sing.

CG: Yeah. And if I think that one was a couple of years ago, you had to be ready to put it on this record, to even be able to lay it down, to sing it on a tour upcoming, you know?

DM: Yeah, exactly. Although, you know, by the time that was recorded, it was it was one of the easiest ones to sing.

CG: Because you’re the furthest away from it. But when you’re in it, though, it feels like the pain will never not be sharp.

DM: Exactly. And it feels like there is no way out of it. And you were just lying through your teeth saying you’re okay and you’re over it and you just have to push through and and just keep trying. And I think maybe that’s the message, you have to keep trying. You just have to keep opening your heart up and being vulnerable and being seen and seeing. And that’s kind of all you have when you are heartbroken — which, I guess, is one of the most universal experiences.

Listen to our conversation and bits of songs here and on WNXP’s podcast channel.