Aaron Maine and Porches: It feels right

 Based around New York native, Aaron Maine, Porches is an alternative musical group that experiments with synth-pop, rock, and indie elements to produce music.

I started listening to Porches in April when my boyfriend played me a song from their latest release on Spotify, Scraps and Love Songs Revisited. 

At the time, the world felt like it was moving unrelentingly fast. With finals approaching and the list of things to do expanding, it felt like there was never a moment to truly rest. Each day regenerated itself with more tasks to do, no matter how many got done the day before. 

I find myself unwillingly brought back to this feeling as the current school year progresses, I think a lot of this feeling comes from anticipation of the future. College is one of the last periods in life where the individual is able to be an individual–what they do and create is somewhat inconsequential in the grand scheme of life. And yet, it is hard to ignore the anticipation of the day when life will ultimately transition from inconsequential to unforgiving. I don’t think it gets past most college students that eventually their role in this world will no longer be “explorer” or “discoverer,” it will be consumer and producer. It is not lost on most of us that the noise of life is not going away anytime soon, and we are likely going to get more lost in it as we exit the mindset of a college student and enter the one of an adult. 

In the midst of all of these thoughts and anxieties, finding this EP was like a breath of fresh air. The music is gentle with an edge. Acoustic and electric guitar paired with piano and raw vocals are the prominently used instruments and they create a mood that reflects the mundanity of everyday life while highlighting how consequential it all feels to the individual. There are many strange and borderline erratic instrumentals featuring banging of random notes on the piano and guitar scratches, and you can hear the imperfections in Maine’s voice come through- it all screams of uncertain anticipation for the future, and it lacks the polished feel of modern day music production. It doesn’t sound like it was created in 2025. In all fairness, despite its release date on streaming, this EP was originally created and produced in November of 2011.

In an attempt to discover Maine’s intent, I turned to some interviews about his creative process. They didn’t yield direct answers as many of his comments are vague and ambiguous, but they did give me some insight to base inferences off of. 

A 15 Questions interview with the band’s center member reveals that Maine describes his process as practice. He doesn’t “wait for inspiration to hit,” he has a routine and is intentionally structured in his practice. Still, when he does sit down to create, he starts from random lines or lyrics that “feel right” to him. His creative process is a really neat mix between Rick Rubin’s ideas of seeds and artistic discipline that he expands upon in his book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. 

These insights lead me to believe that maybe this belated release to streaming just felt right to Maine. And, truthfully, that would not at all surprise me given the current climate of the nation and how it feels to be an individual in it in this day. Maybe Maine’s response to this feeling was to release music that brings the listener back to a true feeling of individuality, one that acknowledges uncertainty and slows the world down. 

Whatever his true impetus was, I’m glad to have the music. It screams of authenticity and desire for connection through acknowledgment of the feeling of senseless existence. The EP recognizes the humanness in all of us, and gives voice to the parts of us that feel suffocated, and in the current climate we live in, where individuality is constantly lost between patterns of production and consumption, this feeling becomes more and more invaluable every single day.