Porter Robinson
Fellow Feeling - Commentary
""Fellow Feeling" was one of the first songs that I wrote for the album. And back then I was really into this idea of orchestral instrumentation, it was very beautiful to me. And I think as time went on, I got a little bit more into other sounds that were, y'know, a little bit grandiose - how do you pronounce that? Grand-waiose? Fuck! I’ve lived my whole lived on the internet so there’s so many words I know, but I don’t know how to pronounce. But anyway, that aside; yeah, I wanted it to be a very pretty thing that somehow, it turned into this vеry hateful, violent... like, ugly thing. Likе, I was... I don't know, to me "Fellow Feeling" stands for- I wanted people to kind of feel what I felt when it came to aggressive, electronic beats. And where my head was at at that time, how that music was making me feel, I was really frustrated with heavy, heavy 128 BPM stuff. And so I turned it into this like ugly, evil, chugging, techno monster, um, that doesn’t have a really danceable meter to it, and it glitches and moves in and out of quarter notes, and it’s not in the right key, and it's just this, I don't know- to me, this song was meant to help people understand where my head was at with dance music. But, one of my fears with renouncing dance music was that people were going to take it as, y'know, me also renouncing all of my old music. And that’s not what I ever wanted, you know that music stood for something to me at the time and I wrote it for a reason. And, to me the second half of the song is a reference to like "Language" and "Easy", earlier songs of mine that I still very much love, and I wanted to show that I could write this like big, loud, melodic music at 128 BPM, that that was still who I was, and that that fit with my new vision. But this idea of writing aggressive, heavy beats for the sake of it, was- y'know, I feel like I was expressing some violence towards that idea. And I think the vocal makes it pretty literal."