Porridge Radio: “I was so miserable, and I sat on my bed and wrote this stupid song”

After a non-stop few years resulted in something of a burnout, Dana Margolin finds stability within the chaos for Porridge Radio’s new album, ‘Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me’.

Words: Jack Press.
Photos: Steve Gullick.

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A Mercury Prize nomination. Charting in the UK Top 40. Being broadcast on the telly while playing a stage at Glastonbury. If you’re a musician claiming to have not dreamt of these things, you’re lying to yourself.

But for Porridge Radio’s Dana Margolin, the touring that came with achieving those dreams and the critical and commercial success of 2020’s ‘Every Bad’ and 2022’s ‘Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky’ left her broken like a biscuit forgotten in the barrel.

“I don’t think we’re ever going to do what we did last time again,” says Margolin, comfortably perched at her sister’s – a convenient pitstop on her daily travels for our call. “It made me feel like I’d completely disintegrated, and I had to build myself up again completely from that.”

Rather than let burnout boil up Porridge Radio into a stodgy bowl of oats, Dana dug through the cave of physical and mental pain, writing song after song to make sense of it all. “Throughout that year of touring, I was constantly writing because I was trying to figure out what was happening and how to get through it, how to get to the other side, how to deal with heartbreaks from before, and how to deal with what it feels like to just be on the road constantly with your friends.”

Once touring stopped, she decided to down tools only to find that creativity doesn’t take a break; it doesn’t book a last-minute trip to Costa Brava; it just carries on. “It’s not a linear thing,” she explains matter-of-factly. “There are all these different pieces that are flying at you constantly, and you kind of catch them, and you put them down.”

Clutching to creativity like a toddler to the limbs of a parent – “Creativity is always something that I’ve held onto as a kind of lifeline” – Dana dug into her burnout to unearth the bones of Porridge Radio’s latest album, ‘Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me’.

Its 11 tracks sound less like an album and more like a collage of a year’s worth of breakups and breakdowns. Opener ‘Anybody”s glimmering guitar and glacial keys simmer before its clattering drums and distorted riffs reach boiling point; ‘Lavender, Raspberries’ details dealing with dissociation by lighting up sparse grey cloud percussion with every instrument in their arsenal, like fireworks exploding in the night sky; and ‘In A Dream I’m A Painting’ lingers in the ethereal space of longing, like a field recording forgotten in the mix.

Its musical tapestry, woven by Margolin, bassist Dan Hutchins, drummer Sam Yardley, and keyboardist Georgie Stott, comes from the lyrical fabric stitched together by the album’s title.

“We were going to so many places and were on the road for so long, and I was so tired for so much of it and just confused and heartbroken and felt so bewildered by it all and what I was doing, and yet wherever we ended up, I’d look up in the sky, and the clouds are still there, and that is one constant,” she explains, always in a state of poetic reflection. “I think that the roofs, the trees, and the clouds in the sky, and these comforting, grounding moments are things you can hold onto as you accept the world as it is just rushing at you, and that’s what I was trying to take hold of with this album title.”

“I was trying to figure out what was happening and how to get through it, how to get to the other side”

Between burnout and a breakup, the roofs of the trees and the clouds in the sky were the things that kept her alive, and slowly but surely, the puzzle pieces slotted into place. Concepts inspired by her experiences flew their way into songs, making nests throughout the album. One such motif is a swallow, which also accompanies Margolin on the album art.

“It came from the idea of something that goes away and comes back,” she explains, succinct sentences sprawling into streams of consciousness. “Something or someone that is constantly leaving and constantly returning and constantly travelling and constantly coming back home, and the disruption of that and the hope that you have to maintain when you are left behind, but also what it means to be that travelling thing.”

You’ll find swallows flying in and out of songs, laying the easter eggs that contain the album’s deeper meanings. If swallows feel poetic in nature, then it lends itself well to the way the lyrics were written. Inspired by a deep dive into Leonard Cohen’s discography, Margolin took poetry as a songwriting format more seriously than on previous albums.

“With this album, it’s got a lot of words in it and I really wanted to focus on the words more than whatever else it is,” she says, suddenly lost in her own thoughts before snapping back into the conversation. “I don’t know, it’s all very confusing. It feels like a big mess, like a jumble of the last few years that happened, and you go and look to explain it, but I think it was exciting to just be writing loads and loads of poems and really getting into writing words and then putting those into songs.”

Having attended a few poetry readings put on by friends and discovering that “a poem isn’t necessarily a thing that takes itself too seriously”, Margolin began to play with poetic form. “People, I think, play around with form a lot, and they play around with the way that words feel as they come out of your mouth, and there’s humour in it, and that humour is often subtle, or it’s inside something often much darker, and I thought that that is quite inspiring.”

“It was post-burnout, post-touring and music industry misery, post-breakup”

If it sounds like Margolin’s pen flooded paper like a waterfall, apologies are in order. Held down by the weight of the world, imposter syndrome settled into her bones. If it wasn’t for her bandmates’ encouragement, explosions of euphoria like single ‘Sick Of The Blues’ wouldn’t exist.

“I wrote ‘Sick Of The Blues’ a week or two after I’d been dumped. I was so miserable and feeling so uncreative, and I sat on my bed and wrote this stupid song. I showed my bandmates thinking that they’d say it was stupid as well,” she says, setting up a predictable punchline. “Instead, they said, ‘Oh, it’s really awesome, we should just jam it out and see what comes of it’. I was like, ‘This is so stupid; I don’t even have the energy or the joy in my heart to do this’. And yet it was this thing that was really full of reckless abandon and joy and noise, and that was really great.”

A sense of uncertainty permeated the creative process Porridge Radio experienced. Rather than run away from it, they embraced it. Inspired by a songwriter whose creative craft is long in the tooth, Margolin leaned into what she couldn’t control.

“I’m reading Nick Cave’s book Faith, Hope and Carnage at the moment, and there’s a lot in it where he’s talking about how a song will write itself; it’s almost a transcendent experience where you create space for it, and it flows through you, and sometimes something comes out, and you don’t know where it’s come from.”

Those experiences, however fleeting, led to some of the album’s key components. Take ‘Lavender, Raspberries’, the track in which the album’s title is most prominent.

“It’s like a song that I wouldn’t write that I wrote that I’m confused about how I even chose those chords and ended up playing them,” she admits, pausing once again to consider her thoughts as if a grandmaster playing a game of chess. “It’s the one that my mum listened to and said, ‘Oh, I love the album, but the only one I don’t really like is ‘Lavender, Raspberries’.’ Because actually, what it’s doing is completely hitting in the way that it’s supposed to hit, which is how it feels to be disassociating and quite depressed, and I think that it hit that in a way that I’m so proud of.”

In those words, Margolin hits on the very essence of ‘Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me’; it’s the healing process of an album documenting a difficult time made possible by the uncertainty of both creativity and life.

“I think it’s where it becomes healing and where it becomes magical and where you lose track of yourself and you just allow something else to take over you,” she says glowingly. “It feels like you’re kind of touching something that is almost unexplainable and ineffable, and you just follow it where it takes you. If you don’t let it take hold, then it won’t.”

“I’m always trying to step through that extreme discomfort into something else”

You might think that Margolin put on a brave face and soldiered on through the frontlines of Frome to record with Grammy-nominated producer Dom Monks (Big Thief, Laura Marling). But honestly, all acts were dropped as her bandmates created a safe space to sing into the void.

“I was just such a mess when we were making it,” she reflects, laughing subtly as if it’s funny now. “I was feeling everything all the time. It was post-burnout, post-touring and music industry misery, post-breakup. It was British winter; it was a really bleak time and really hard, but it was also incredibly healing because I got so close to the very edge of where I thought I could emotionally go, and I was surrounded by all these people who were just okay with that.”

“Sometimes you go into the studio, and I have to keep it all together, and it has to be all good, and I have to keep laughing. This was just like, no, you can just exist how you need to exist. It was very lucky for me because I did really need that healing experience and even writing a song in the studio and the next day recording it was one of the most profoundly exciting and healing things that I just felt incredible.”

Healing creatively has helped Margolin move on from the post-record states she’s inhabited previously. Accepting the vulnerability that ties together every Porridge Radio release doesn’t get easier, but it’s something less foreign for her to deal with.

“The thing that I’m always trying to do is step through that extreme discomfort into something else, which is that I’m sharing this thing, and I really hope people will hear it for what it is and not be scared away by it because it’s very intense and very raw.”

Having given everything she possibly has to the project known as Porridge Radio, it all boils down to one essential hope: that listeners understand the duality of feeling everything at once.

“They are the rawest lyrics that I’ve written, and part of me is like, well, that’s not all that this is. You can inhabit that and also have a deep joy and love and experience everything and understand that everything is also quite funny and nice and silly as well as being deeply painful and difficult and intense. That’s the thing I hope people hear through this.”

Taken from the November 2024 issue of Dork. Porridge Radio’s album ‘Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me’ is out 18th October.