Enoch Porch is a child of the 1980s, his parents still had their leftover vinyl collection of classical music, strange church songs recorded in the 70s, and Sousa marches. Enoch Porch loved the rhythm and excitement of Sousa marches, the hypnotic repetition of Ravel’s 'Bolero', and the drama and emotion of The Nutcracker. Many of his creative choices are still heavily influenced by that early musical diet. At age 7, his grandma gave him a ukelele for christmas and taught him to play a couple songs on it. He was hooked.
By Kamil Bobin
Discovered via Musosoup
Kamil) Hey Enoch Porch, super nice to have the chance to chat with you. What first got you into music?
It’s a pleasure to get to answer some questions. In a weird sneaky way, I come from a somewhat musical family. Nobody in my family identified as musicians but at extended family gatherings we’d end up learning a hymn in 4-part harmony. My grandparents gave me a ukulele when I was about 5 or 6 and grandma taught me to play a couple tunes on it, one of which I performed at the church talent show. So I had some musical background. My dad would sometimes challenge me to sing a simple tune that everybody knows but to make it minor. There are some technical steps involved there, but neither dad or I knew what they were; he’d just say “sing Mary Had a Little Lamb but make it sound sad.” This was great ear training. He also introduced me to the idea of harmony. Again, there was nothing technical about it, just finding complimentary notes.
But it was later, when I was about 11—in 1993, that I decided to really be a musician. I had turned on the TV and there was some brief footage of Nirvana playing at a festival. A light bulb went off: “you can do that with your life?!”, and suddenly my dreams existed.
How do you balance your time in the studio with other commitments such as a part-time job, family, admin?
Not well, honestly. I do custom woodworking; designing and building furniture in a small workshop a couple blocks from my Brooklyn home. I’m grateful for the income and sometimes I find myself in a flow state with a big piece of oak, but it takes a lot of time and I’ll go through stretches where I’m just aching to get into the studio. But song ideas are always arriving and I capture them on my phone’s voice recorder. Most of them I don’t use, but among them are gems. I’m hoping that those long stints doing anything but music acts as some kind of living breathing filter so then what I bring into the studio is my best.
Knowing what you feel takes a lot of living, and I’ve done that. Living.
Water finds its level, and my attention, time, and energy flows to whatever is at the top of the heap. I’ve been reserving more time for myself in the mornings. Maybe, at some point, that turns into a higher music-to-other-stuff-in-life ratio, but for now, I find it leads to me reading more, journaling regularly, eating a legit breakfast, and having a comforting beverage. This doesn’t square entirely well with the hyper-productive ideal of this country, but ultimately we’re all going to pass on and what we produced will be forgotten. I deal in the medium of feeling, and so how I’m feeling takes precedence.
Your latest song is 'Change'. Can you tell us more about the making of it and if there were any unusual things happening during the process?
This song’s process was an odd one. I started it during 2020. The first two verses took about 2 minutes to write. What I was feeling was this uncertainty.
See, I’d been in therapy for several years at that point (still am) and the whole experience has been this ruthless process of becoming more and more aware of what I’m doing. Some therapy is about putting out fires in your life. That’s all well and good, but I have a therapist that really facilitates a process of me getting to the root of why I start the fires in the first place. I kept seeing the patterns emerge in my inner states and relationships with others, become a little more conscious of why but repeating the pattern. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to cross whatever threshold would need to be crossed to transcend these patterns.
So that’s what the first two verses are about. I just found some chords on the keyboard that I liked one day and really, without trying to write a song, just sang my questions. But I didn’t have a resolve to the song. It was just this unanswered thing. Because it was still a question in my life.
Have you ever been singing along with a song and then realize you’ve been singing the wrong lyrics for years? You don’t go home and put the song on and start rehearsing it over and over until you’ve drilled the new lyric into your head; you just make note of it. And you’ll probably sing the wrong lyric again the next time the song comes on, but the amount of time that elapses before you remember that those aren’t the lyrics becomes shorter and shorter each time—Like, “oh yeah I remember, that’s not the word; it’s this other word”—until one day, maybe after singing the song wrong 9 more times, you see it coming and sing the right lyric…and maybe after some more time it becomes native to you and even changes your understanding of the meaning of the song and then you’re just singing the right lyrics because that’s the truth in your heart.
Later in 2020 I had a painful break-up, and a couple months later my mom died. I was really thrown and it rattled a lot of things loose. As painful as it was, it accelerated my growth—nobody ever changed as a result of being comfortable. I started to witness myself more swiftly and some of the patterns I had been repeating for years began to fall away. To use the lyric analogy, I wasn’t fully nailing the words all the time but occasionally I’d sing a line right.
So I started to get this glimpse, like a preview of what it might be like to be free of my defenses and fears. So I could write about it. That was when the final verse of ‘Change’ could emerge.
I still didn’t release the song for a long time. I was way too concerned with the sonics of it and chipped away at it until it was nearly dust. And finally I realized that this is one of my most pressing frontiers: the defense of perfectionism. So the final step in this particular chapter of change, for me was to release, quite literally and on every level.
So I released Change.
What is one message you would give to your fans?
Ground yourself and get heart centered. Do it as often as possible. Stop and feel your connection to earth and to your heart. Even if you must set an alarm to remind you every 15 minutes.
What would you be doing right now, if it wasn’t for your music career?
Acting and maybe some kind of comedy.
How do you know when a work is finished?
I’m still answering this question for myself. My suspicion is that at some point in the future my answer might be; it’s 5:30 pm. I have a mentor who used to engineer/mix for Leon Russel and they’d just write and record and mix a song each day from 10-6 and wherever it ended up at 5:30, they’d print it and go to dinner.
Nothing about this is where I’m at right now, save for my appetite for the theory. We’ll see.
Leonardo da Vinci said “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”
He might have also said some dumb stuff so I’m not claiming he’s gospel, but it’s one perspective.
Can you write what was your best performance in your career? How do you remember it?
Yes. It was at a (long-gone) venue called blue sky court in Nashville. The spirit was there. Each moment was stretched out into an eternity and we, the band, the sound engineer, and each member of the audience were present and collaborating. The set ended and the room was silent for probably about 10 seconds; you could hear a pin drop. Then someone in the back said, “Yeah!” And the room erupted in joyous applause. What a special moment I’ll never forget.
Do you have a mentor or coach?
A few.
My Therapist. I wouldn’t be doing half of what I’m doing now if it were not for her coaching.
Kevin James Thornton is a story-telling/comedy Tiktok star but he and I started a band decades ago when I was 18. He was very much a songwriter and I very much was not. I had the pleasure of witnessing Kevin writing song after song, touring, recording, and releasing albums. We later wrote a musical together and we still talk frequently about the creative process. We’re both trained actors and photographers and all of the art forms intersect so whatever we’re talking about always contributes to everything I create. We’re currently collaborating on a story-telling event in the Metaverse.
A beautiful soul named John Mahoney has been my audio mentor for 20 years. We met when I was 19 and had just moved to Nashville. We were both sitting at the bar of this little 24-hour cafe. He was pointing out the Labatts blue ribbon beer on tap and comedically carrying on about the ‘Canadian invasion’. John is one the old guard engineers who understands the physics of sound, the science of gear, and the magic of the electron. He was generous enough to take me under his wing and steer me in the direction of capturing sound in the most natural ways available.
Who is your favourite musician?
This changes so much and I’m more of an albums guy than artist loyalist. My Favorite things recently have been the Blake Mills album Mutable Set, Dawes Misadventures Of Doomscroller, and just two days ago I found Cornelius 2006 album Sensuous, which pretty much blew my mind.
Sensuous is a sonic masterpiece and something I would say is pure essence of music. I would say the same of Mutable Set and add amazing melodies and lyrics to the recipe. Misadventures Of Doomscroller is really an example when great songwriting meets a real band. By real band what I mean is a group of extremely proficient musicians who’ve been playing with each other enough to have a energetic connection. Grant Millikin and Jonathan Wilson really nailed capturing a natural sounding performance where you can almost feel the sweat coming off the band if a fantastic club
What are your plans for the future?
The music video for Change is finished and releasing in the coming weeks. My video director (Gabriel Kurzlop) and I collaborated with an extraordinarily talented dancer named Cristy Martinez from Monterrey, Mexico. I’m so pleased and grateful to everyone involved and can’t wait to share it.
I have some tentative plans for a move in the near future. One intention is to live within walking distance of the ocean.
Life is what happens when you’re making other plans. I’m looking forward to the story unfolding like a flower opening up to the sunlight.