Van Pierszalowski, at one point on When The Rain Comes, sings about a feeling in his gut that’s telling him to shut the fuck up. This is bad advice from the guts, but throughout the record, there’s a sense that the Californian does listen to those guts often. There’s a natural walk, a gentle stroll to the music and lyrics that Pierszalowski and girlfriend Cambria Goodwin allow to flutter from them. Even without knowing anything about these two people, you can feel bodies of water and their accessories (piers, docks, boardwalks, boats, masts, salt water breezes, blinding water reflections, killing hours lolling with the waving undulations) in their folkish rock. Then when you discover that Pierszalowski gets most of his inspiration during the four months that he spends on the Kodiak Island in Alaska (also where Port O’Brien originates from) assisting his commercial fisherman father doing the same thing, the unaccosted gracefulness meeting an edge of Happy Hour’s blowing off steam energy can still be seen as the sky connecting with the top of the water far off in the distance. The music is dichotomous on numerous levels, but the songs can still be bundled together with a persistent nod easy nature. There are lungs being ripped out and momentary boiling of blood that’s not very neighborly, but then there’s the notion that spending a life living on a house boat eating frozen pizzas and setting out jars of iced tea to brew during a full daylight that comes through just as forcefully. Pierszalowski and Goodwin take an hour-long walk around the Lake Merritt in Oakland every morning and listening to When The Rain Comes there’s some of Will Oldham’s The Letting Go guitar strumming and there’s much of the same identifying personal characteristics of time and place that William Elliott Whitmore weaves into each of his songs about the Iowa dirt and the Mississippi River. I have a feeling that even with the hard manual labor and the 20-hour work days that Pierszalowski puts in during his summer of fishing that he returns to Oakland mentally kicking and screaming, having to wait eight more months to feel as awesomely connected to Mother Nature and her maddening beauty marks. He probably sees bears and nearly untouched wilderness when he’s in Alaska – at the same spot where his parents met all those years ago – for those short/long months and the rest of the year pines to return to them. Port O’Brien recently gained a new fan in M. Ward, who came to a show and then told his management to figure out a way to get them an opening slot for the Bright Eyes show at the sold-out Great American Music Hall. Superbness. – Sean Moeller

Five things that have been helping me through winter, as told by Van Pierszalowski
1. Walking around Lake Merritt
Cambria and I live together in Oakland, right across the street from the shoreline of the beautiful Lake Merritt. It’s amazing that such a beautiful and natural lake can exist within such proximity to downtown Oakland. We walk around the lake every morning. On the hour walk, we always stop at the same store and buy one bottle of water and one Super Lotto ticket, just in case. So far our total winnings: ONE DOLLAR.

2. Retro checks from the cannery
My financial situation always gets a little scary around this time of the year, as my summer fishing money starts to dry up. Luckily, though, the fishermen have a deal with the canneries, where if they sell the fish for more than their base price they have to compensate us for that increase. It’s always around this time of the year that people start talking about the possibilities of such a thing happening. It hasn’t yet, but the hope has been helping me keep my spirits up.

3. Ghosts of the Great Highway by Sun Kil Moon
I’ve had this album for a long time, but I’ve only recently really gotten into it. The production is so smooth, but it still retains a highly personal element to it. I was never really into Kozelek’s earlier stuff, but after hearing this album, I’ve been more able to get into it. We’re recording with his engineer in March at Tiny Telephone, and I am looking forward to hearing what we come up with together.

4. The X-Files
Cambria and I watch one episode per night. We’re now up to Season 6. The sexual tension between Scully and Mulder is so incredibly tense. I never watched it on TV, so I still don’t know if they ever actually fulfill their obvious desires, so nobody better tell me. Or there will be bloodshed.

5. Frozen pizza and iced coffee
My lunch pretty much every single day. Ain’t nothin’ better. Except maybe with the addition of a little ranch dippin’ sauce.

Port O’Brien Official Site