Chris Portka’s “The Album Everyone Wants” is a Memoir to the Strange, Unnoticed Edges of the American Songbook

Chris Portka truly understands what makes music great and timeless. You won’t get anything half-baked, or a contrived attempt to be familiar. The Album Everyone Wants is true to its name, not because it’s anchored in mainstream trends but because it’s completely its own, honest and intentional.

The Album Everyone Wants is Chris Portka’s most collaborative work, co-produced by indie legend Jasper Leach (Burner Herzog, Brasil, The Symbolick Jews) and backed by members of the Al Harper Band. He currently performs monthly at Vintage Elmwood Wine Bar (Berkeley, CA) and will appear at select record stores and venues in support of the album. With 11 tracks interlacing four originals and seven covers (Syd Barrett, Skip Spence, George Jones & more), Portka created a love letter to the unnoticed, hidden edges of the American songbook.

What you’ll get from Fun in the Summer isn’t the usual pop gloss and repetitive hooks. The whistles, jangly textures, and energetic rhythmic pulse feels like West Coast highway drives, windows down while the sun attempts to kiss your skin until it melts. The psychedelic, messy, and intoxicating thoughts of temporary escape are drowned in a lively, carefree pulse that’s too fun to even forget.

Forget the loud, polished, big choruses, She Looks So Good Tonight is peak yearning. Portka strips away all the unnecessary layers. What’s left is the acoustic strokes, pounding rhythm, and almost trembling vocals to capture that romantic ache in its rawest form. Its poetic, dreamy, and windswept textures almost covers up the desperation and longing. As soon as you lean in, you’ll realize it’s not a storybook kind of love song but a heartbreaking, melancholic one. It’s the one that burns all of you the longer you embrace, yet doing it willingly and lovingly without any question.

You don’t know romance until you hear the Dean Dillon and Linda Hargrove classic, Tennessee Whiskey. Except what you’ll witness from Portka isn’t a simple cover of that tender, worship-like devotion. You won’t walk inside the main barroom and hear clinking glasses, you’ll be in a freeway, riding over the car with a krautrock, pedal-steel-laced groove all throughout. It’s strangely familiar, yet the soul and warmth of the original is still present. Only this time, it’s twisted and reimagined.

If you like your music achingly tender and reflective, The Observer is for you. Think of Jackson Brown’s “The Pretender” or The Silver Jews’ “Inside the Golden Days of Missing You”. This track floats in between, with a slightly more fragile and vulnerable bite at its core that isn’t meant for casual listen. It’ll make you stand in the middle to watch the present fade into the past. You’ll feel everything all at once before it slips, all while holding this warm, tender love in a little corner to keep yourself together.

So what makes this album great when it’s not something you’ve never heard? It’s the way it feels owned and personal. Every track breathes and you’re allowed to fully feel it in your bones. It’s like Portka decided it’s time to dilute the oversupply of superficial, formulaic songs in the scene with his own little world. At the same time, the touch of each person invited to take part in this album leaves a bit of their mark, making it more rich and accessible. It’s the type you’ll play in a standalone analog turntable to give it justice.

While his originals are such a stand-out, his rendition of the classics through his “calm-steady-beautiful-noise” lens deserves a whole spotlight too. Maybe it’s the indie rock noise with pedal steel twang, sincere balladry with off-kilter psychedelia or the depth in his lyricism, but either way, it works and it’s meant to be shared and remembered.

Overall, The Album Everyone Wants is carefully hemmed together to make a statement: this album is a whole experience and you’re already a part of it.

Don’t miss release day — stream it on Bandcamp and secure the exclusive vinyl only at Seek Collective.