The FADER Magazine F2 Issue 2 May 2008

Into The Wild
The songwriting survivalism of Port O’Brien

It’s the type of story you’d find in a book you love, which Hollywood would then turn into a film you hate. Nearly every summer Van Piersalowski and his girlfriend Cambria Goodwin leave their Oakland home for Kodiak Island in Alaska. Piersalowski has been making the trip since he was a teen, heading north with his brother and father to work the surrounding salmon waters, the same waters that the elder Piersalowski has been fishing since the 1960s.

But these trips have become more than just a tradition in Piersalowski and Goodwin’s relationship. They’ve also become both the lyrical focus and the starting point of their songs for Port O’Brien—a folk rock five-piece whose combustibility and gnarliness counteracts any twee implication of their genre tag. While Piersalowski is away at sea, Goodwin stays on land as the head baker in a cannery. A few times each summer, the Piersalowski men come ashore, and during those brief reunions between baker and fisherman, the pair dedicate the entire time to their compositions. All of which make up the band’s album All We Could Do Is Sing. “The thought of going into the cannery and seeing Cambria is just too much to handle,” Pierszalowski explains. “The only way we’ve found that we can relate to each other or to talk or to communicate up there is through music.” Goodwin claims these writing sessions are one of the only reasons they’re still together. “If you’re up there, there is nothing romantic about it,” she says. “It’s smelly and dirty everyone is tired and crazy.”

But all of that is coming to an end, for now. Instead of working another summer in Alaska, the duo is going to be spending the season doing something nearly as grueling: touring. “It’s going to be so, so strange,” Piersalowski says. “I turn into a different person [in Alaska]. It’s such a part of who I am that I can’t understand how I’m not going to do it.”