Music

Field Work

Chris Porterfield’s new band Field Report tours with the big wigs

Eric Christenson |

HAVE SUIT WILL CROON. Former local Chris Porterfield (frontman of the defunct Conrad Plymouth) has a new band with a new record, and they’re touring with the likes of Counting Crows and Aimee Mann.
HAVE SUIT WILL CROON. Former local Chris Porterfield (frontman of the defunct Conrad Plymouth) has a new band with a new record, and they’re touring with the likes of
Counting Crows and Aimee Mann.

Chris Porterfield is just trying to take it one day at a time – which is probably the right thing to do if one day you’re working at Marquette University in Milwaukee and the next day you’re playing a SXSW showcase curated by Adam Duritz (lead singer of the Counting Crows, as anyone who was a high schooler in 1993 would tell you) with Duritz in the front row, singing along to songs you wrote.

Porterfield’s new band, Field Report (can you figure out the jumble?) has had somewhat of a strange journey to become a blog-hold name over the past few months and the Eau Claire- dude-turned-Milwaukee-dude, is getting pretty adaptable.

“We are not cool. ...We’re avoiding cool like the plague because cool disappears so fast and bodies of work stand the test of time.” – Chris Porterfield, on his newest project, Field Report

“It is weird,” he admits. “I had to leave my job that I’ve been at for six years in order to accommodate touring – it’s a whole recalibration of life in general I guess.”

Porterfield’s “weird little anomaly” has garnered serious accolades from some heavy-hitting publications like Stereogum (“awfully pretty”), NPR (“expansive sound, which can be melancholy, uplifting or somber”) and a charming little NYC upstart called Rolling Stone (“finally on the verge of making his own impression”). All three hasten to include Porterfield in the same breath as his buddy Justin Vernon, a fellow DeYarmond Edison-ite who has swiftly driven the proverbial nail into “cool”.

But Porterfield insists that despite the intense “cool” vibe emanating from many of the blogs and publications that have praised Field Report’s songs, they’re trying to avoid “cool” as much as they can.

“We are not cool. We are never going to be cool, so we are avoiding all things cool,” he puts it bluntly. “We’re avoiding cool like the plague because cool disappears so fast and bodies of work stand the test of time and that’s what we want to be a part of.”

That exact sentiment is what draws Field Report to acts like Counting Crows (they just finished a tour with them) and Aimee Mann (they are about to embark on a three-week leg with her). There’s no trace of irony in Porterfield’s voice when he tells me that he doesn’t feel pigeonholed to perform with only 90s alternative legends.

“It’s 100 percent by design,” he says.

Porterfield’s just trying to drink it all in — from playing Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado and playing for thousands and thousands of people to just doing more traveling and seeing more of the country.

The buzz surrounding Field Report is a bit more than palpable, even though they haven’t even released an album. So one can imagine the notoriety of their upcoming self-titled full length album, which will be released on Sept. 11 via Partisan Records, a Brooklyn label that houses other gruff folk-folks like Deer Tick and Middle Brother.

Porterfield’s the first to admit that this level of exposure is kind of weird (especially coming from someone who was playing our very own Sounds Like Summer concert series two years ago as Conrad Plymouth), but he humbly admits that he’s getting more and more familiar with it.

“It’s not like we deserved it or earned it somehow; it’s just less and less surprising,” he said.  

It’s something that definitely takes getting used to, and there’s really no end in sight, especially for Porterfield, a strong proponent of the one-day-at-a-time mantra.

“There’s no point in expecting anything or even looking forward to anything,” he puts it.  “You’ve got to take every day as whatever it is and looking forward is just a way to be disappointed or to be pleasantly surprised, but I’d rather be neither. I’d rather just let it happen.”