Alaska floating Port O’Brien’s boat
Words Barnaby Smith
All the young singer-songwriters America is producing right now have had enough of the world, it seems. If it isn’t Conor Oberst seeking refuge from the economic meltdown and existential confusion of modern times at his spiritualist community, Cassadaga, then it’s Devendra Banhart holing himself up in rural California or Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s general cantankerousness.
Van Pierszalowski perhaps tops them all. The guiding light behind Port O’Brien spends a quarter of each year on Kodiak Island in Alaska, helping his father, a salmon fisherman. Port O’Brien’s “folkish type of rock’n’roll” could not help but reflect the isolation, and the toil.
“Alaska is infinitely inspiring,” he says, “more than the landscape is the whole experience of working these incredibly long hours in incredibly uncomfortable conditions. But it’s such an incredible part of my life - three and a half months out of every year, but it feels like a year every three and a half months.”
Pierszalowski and his band, which includes girlfriend Cambria on banjo, actually come from Cambria, California. Yes, his lover has the same name as his hometown. It was here that he embarked on Port O’Brien (named after an abandoned cannery on Kodiak) informed by a childhood of Beatles records, an early adolescence of punk rock, a high school obsession with indie rock like Modest Mouse and Pavement, and an early adulthood of Neil Young. There wasn’t much else to do in Cambria.
“There are a lot of open spaces and not too many people,” says Pierszalowski. “It provided a lot of boredom. When I was in junior high it was like, ‘What the fuck do we do?’ so I started playing guitar.”
Pierszalowski went to study anthropology at Berkeley. Underwhelmed by the degree, he and his band were soon immersed in the Bay Area’s astonishing music scene.
“I really did start to feel part of a community,” he says, “with Vetiver and the more folk-acoustic bands in San Francisco.”
A formidably intelligent young man, while he evidently loves California (and also described Britain, while here supporting Modest Mouse recently, as “very very nice”) any discussion of his muse, or what drives him to write songs such as the marvellous new single ‘Close The Lid’, returns to what seems to make up a large chunk of his very core. Alaska is not only a landscape to stoke the creative fires, but offers a prism through which to deal with wider ideas.
“If you want to conceptualise something,” he says, “or frame it in a certain way, maybe to carry out a theme, it’s easy if you deal with a place rather than more abstract things. I’ve always focused on the environment, but more importantly, how that environment affects you.”
Alaska is Pierzalowski’s Cassadaga. Escape is the new inspiration of choice.
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