MUSIC INTERVIEW: PORT O' BRIEN
Baking, Fishing & Making Beautiful Tunes with the Alaskan Folksters
With wailing chords and songs of the sea, Port O’Brien has toured with the likes of Modest Mouse, Bright Eyes, and Nada Surf. With their first summer not spent fishing in Alaska, the band has been touring heavily, preparing to head back to the studio. Buzzine spent a little time with them to talk about fishing, baking, and making beautiful music.
Louis Elfman: Where did you all meet?
Van Pierszalowski: Cambria [Goodwin] and I grew up in the town of Cambria, on the central Californian coast. We went to high school with Zeb [Zaltz]. Josh [Barnhart] we met playing music in San Luis Obispo, and Ryan [Sitvely] we met when we were in the bay area after high school.
LE: Cambria, what kind of effects do you put on your banjo?
Cambria Goodwin: Nothing. It’s actually all about the cheap pickup that I use. It’s actually nice to hear someone say that it sounds good, because even the sound guy was saying he could put effects on it to make it sound like a “real” banjo. How lame is that?
LE: Where does the Port O’Brien, Alaska connection come in?
VP: Well, my dad is a commercail salmon fisherman. He’s got a boat up there and he’s been going up every summer of my life. I’ve worked almost every summer of my adult life, except for this one. I work on the boat, and Cambria works in the cannery as a baker. That’s just how we make our money.
LE: What is it like on the fishing boat?
VP: It totally sucks. You basically have to work whenever they’re swimming around, and that’s whenever it’s light out, and it’s Alaska. You wake up every morning around 3:00 and you work till about midnight and you get your cat-naps here and there. Some nights, you don’t actually stop, so that’s probably the hardest part. Add to that it’s a little boat — no showers, no toilet — and you’re out at sea for up to seven weeks without a shower.
[Cambria laughs]
LE: Seven weeks? That’s insane. And you don’t even have a toilet?
VP: There’s a bucket. That makes it harsh. And of course no phone or Internet. I become a completely different person, just obsessed with fishing — new strategies for catching, getting stressed out of our minds. You talk to other boats, but some are competitive and some are allies, talking in code on secret channels… But it’s very cut-throat. And then there’s also the weather, which can get pretty bad.
LE: How many people are on the boat?
VP: Me, my dad, and two other guys -- just the four of us. You gotta get along, although there are always about two or three fights per trip -- not actual fist-fights. Fortunately, my dad is a very responsible skipper and he keeps things under control, you know, limit of one beer a night…
LE: And Cambria, you’re in the cannery?
CG: It sucks and it’s dirty. Fortunately, I’m just a baker, and I’m just supposed to have baked goods for the people on breaks, which are every three hours around the clock, so sometimes I don’t even bother to go back to my bunk. I just fall asleep on the flour sacks. It’s really different, like any Alaskan job, I guess… Of course, I’m this tiny little thing and I have to deal with these fishermen coming in -- real classy gentlemen -- saying things like, “Anything in this bakery taste as good as you look?” And of course, I’m a totally different person in Alaska as well; I’ve got a mouth like a sailor, so I tell them off.
VP: Yeah, it takes her a while to get out of it. It’s awesome.
CG: No, it’s not. But I have to shove these guys and kick them out sometimes. And I’m so tiny.
LE: Do you miss it at all?
VP: Yeah, in some ways.
CG: Well, at first, when you’re saying goodbye to everyone, like his parents, that’s one of the hardest things ever. Crying. At first, when you get there, you’re like “Oh my god, why am I here?” But you really get used to it.
LE: Are you going back next year?
CG: I don’t want to anymore. [Laughs]
VP: It depends. If we get some offers to tour and make money, as long as we’re doing all right, it’s hard to turn down. But with the music industry, you never know what you’re gonna get. But with the fishing thing, it’s much more regular — you know what’s coming.
LE: But money aside, it seems to play a fairly thematic role in your music and at least serves partly as inspiration.
VP: Well, I suppose that’s true. I mean, there’s not a lot of down-time on the boat to think about music, but what little there is, I guess I’m thinking about it. There’s nothing really going on and you’re in the middle of nowhere…
CG: It’s very emotional and hard.
LE: It seems like it would be the ideal setting to work on new material…
CG: That’s pretty much how it is.
VP: Well, we haven’t been up there for over a year now, so we’re writing songs differently. It’s not like we only ever wrote songs up there or anything, but they’re a little bit different, and on this next album I think we’ll be a little less focused on that.
LE: Do you see yourself moving in a different direction?
VP: It will always be a very big part of who we are and our sound, but it’s really hard to write about it in any other way than literally. We’ve been spending our time on our tour van taking a journey, and so we definitely have a different story to tell right now.
LE: Has your songwriting process changed at all?
VP: Before, we were apart when we were in Alaska because I was out on the boat for weeks, so we would both write parts and then merge them together when we got back together. But since then, we’re together much more often, and we get to collaborate instantly, what with being a room away from each other rather than hundreds of miles, so it’s become really easy.
LE: Has that actually helped the creative process at all?
VP: In a different way. It hasn’t hurt it, which is something we were worried about.
LE: You got a ringing endorsement from M. Ward last year. He called you his “favorite new band.” That must have been pretty gratifying, no?
VP: We love that guy. We were always bigs fans of his music, and we were just playing local shows, bars and whatnot in San Francisco. It’s really hard to make a name for yourself in a big city like that, when suddenly, at one show, this dingy little bar, Cambria thought she spotted him in the audience. We got a chance to talk to him afterwards and we didn’t think anything of it until suddenly, one day, we saw what he said about us. It was a great surprise. After that, everything got a little easier. He hooked us up with the Bright Eyes crew and we kept in touch a lot. He’s an amazingly sweet guy -- really genuine and just amazing. Ironically, we were just up at Music Fest in Portland, and we went hiking about a half hour north at this beautiful waterfall, when suddenly, at the bottom of it, we just happened to bump into him.
LE: What’s next for you guys? Are you working on a new album?
CG: We’re touring non-stop until mid-November, and then maybe taking a couple weeks off, and then, come January, we’ll head back into the studio and dedicate some time to it.
Port O’Brien is currently touring Europe, and will be playing a number of western states in November Check their website for dates and locations. Their albums, All We Could Do Was Sing, and The Wind and the Swell, are both available on iTunes.
Featured content
Related content
You may also like
Recent comments
