Port O’Brien

“Port O’Brien is the name of the site of a port on Kodiak Island in Alaska. There used to be a salmon cannery there. It’s where my parents met in the late 60s. Since then, it’s been abandoned, bought out and boarded up probably never to be used again. I liked the image: a once-bustling community where people from all over the world would come, and now it’s been taken over by trees and it’s dissolving into the bay. Kind of beautiful.”

Van Pierszalowski has a knack for writing beautiful songs about the sea. The difference between Van and the myriad others who invoke nautical themes in indie rock, is that Van is actually a fisherman. Every summer, he goes to Kodiak Island to work on his father’s commercial salmon fishing boat. He brings his guitar. A couple of times over the course of the fishing season, he comes ashore and meets up with Cambria Goodwin, head baker at the cannery at Larsen Bay, where they put the musical fruits of their solitude together. This is largely how their album, All We Could Do Was Sing was written.

They’re both Californians by origin. The contrast is stark, but inspirational. “I think that just being so isolated up there all the time just makes you focus on feelings or emotions that you wouldn’t really focus on otherwise. The dichotomy between between being away from everything, and then being in the city the rest of the year is really interesting. I think most of the inspiration comes from that, the difference there. Not just being in Alaska or being at sea, but the transition periods.”

The feeling of being torn between Oakland and Alaska is something that comes across strongly on All We Could Do Was Sing. ‘Fisherman’s Son’ in particular deals with Van’s interior monologue telling him to quit fishing and find a regular job where he doesn’t have to deal with the sea. Being a fisherman’s son is more than just a job, though. You can’t just quit. It can be hard to digest this sort of earnestness when you’re used to heavily ironic or at least distanced nautical metaphors in your indie rock. Using the sea to stand in for everyday tribulations is a level of insulation for a lot of songwriters. There is no insulation with Port O’Brien. There is no literary aspect. It is basically one man’s fears in solitude.

“I understand it definitely, because the sea and the ocean and ships and sailing are pretty easy metaphors to use. And have been used probably more than anything in the history of literature and music and films. I think how we’re different is maybe that we’ve actually been on boats, and been out at sea, and know how to tie knots and navigate with charts. Not saying that we’re better than them or anything, it’s just a different way, writing songs from a more literal standpoint.”

But are they bothered by how affected it can be, in the sense of using it as an image? “It’s kind of annoying, I can’t really lie. So many bands, especially where we’re from, their press photos are them on a boat,” Van says, before Cambria contributes in a dismissive tone: “In sailor costumes.” “Yeah, what the fuck.” “The sea-faring thing is so trendy. If you go into Urban Outfitters, everything has anchors on it, and all kinds of sea-faring things. It’s just funny when you come from the authentic Alaskan bullshit. It’s like… that’s not really what it’s about”. “It’s a bunch of fat, macho, sexist, drunk people on boats. That’s the real situation”.

What about a favourite sea-themed song? “Oh I can think of it. ‘Madeleine-Mary’, by Bonnie Prince Billy. That song is so beautiful. It’s the most haunting thing…” Cambria drifts off. The dynamics between the two, even in conversation, are interesting. They finish each others sentences all the time, but they are different. She tends to speak elusively, with a grain of feeling and three dots at the end of every sentence. Van, on the other hand, deals in definites. “‘Riders On The Storm’ by The Doors. That song kicks ass.”

Chances are, if you’ve heard one Port O’Brien song, it was ‘I Woke Up Today’. It featured on their debut album, as well as All We Could Do Was Sing, and they performed it as part of a Takeaway Show in a karaoke bar in Chinatown a few months ago. It is one of those songs, brimming with the same sort of communal energy as Funeral was a few years ago, and catchier than anything bubblegum pop could throw up. There doesn’t seem to be any secret recipe, however. “It just happened to be the one we wrote that had the most potential to be that way. In the future, maybe there’ll be more like that. That song was like two chords, and so is ‘Pigeonhold’, and ‘Rooftop Song’ is three chords. We like to keep it simple.”

That song’s adoption by the blogging community, along with the strength of their live show, has led to a Port O’Brien’s reputation snowballing. Playing to a fairly empty Tripod as first support for Tapes ‘n’ Tapes made it difficult to imbue their usual bustling energy. “We usually rely pretty heavily on audience participation, teaching people the lyrics to the songs and having them sing with us. This kind of separation between the audience and the band is kinda hard to do. At home we have big crowds all across the West Coast, but in the middle of the country it’s alway like this. It’s fun though.”

One result of their reputation as a live band was their UK tour supporting Modest Mouse last year. “Most of the shows we played in England it seemed like most of the people were just there for Johnny Marr and they didn’t really care that much about the music. But in the US they’re like the top band.” “I kind of fell in love with him”, Cambria adds. “Yeah, I totally fell in love with him. He fell a little bit in love with Cambria too, I didn’t like that too much. We smoked his wife’s pot though, that was amazing.”

That’s a pretty good rock star story. “That’s like our only rock star story. The rest of the time is just reading Star Wars books and listening to Mariah Carey in the van.” “One day on tour, we had a Mariah Carey day, and Van made us listen to E=MC2 on repeat all day.” “It was the longest drive, from San Francisco to Portland, like 13 hours. It was awesome.”