Website: http://www.portobrien.com

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/portobrien

Port O’Brien began early in the year 2005 as a folk-ish duo of Van Pierszalowski and Cambria Goodwin. The two penned songs while Cambria lived in the tiny Californian coastal town she shares her name with and Van lived in an apartment in Oakland (which was about the size of his name).

Shortly thereafter, Cambria moved to up to the Bay Area and within the next year, the project added a rhythm section, comprised of Caleb Nichols and Joshua Barnhart.
 Every summer, Van works on his father’s commercial salmon fishing boat, the Shawnee, on Kodiak Island in Alaska. The work is exhausting and the weather could be much better, but the contrast between the serenity of the wilderness and the rigorousness of the labor seem to cause quite a bit of musical inspiration. Meanwhile, on land and around the corner, Cambria also writes music while maintaining her position as the Head Baker at Larsen Bay. Her days can be even longer, and the work even more tiresome.

After both write parts and lyrics separately, they fix them together when Van comes ashore. In 2007, Caleb also joined the ranks at the cannery, and their cumulative effort while up in a latitude and longitude few of us may ever see resulted in the creation of the songs that comprise the band’s first studio-recorded album, All We Could Do Was Sing. Because when you’re working all day in the freezing cold, what the hell else are you going to do? Combining folk and indie rock, the lp made use of lush string arrangements, raw electric guitar, percussive banjo, pots and pans, a tight rhythm section, group chants and screaming, achieiving a feel that's at once diverse and cohesive.

In the summer of 2007, the band released The Wind and The Swell, a compilation of previously self-released songs, on American Dust Records. Around the same time, celebrated songwriter M Ward named the group as his Favorite New Band on Pitchfork. Since then, Port O'Brien have become a touring machine, traveling the globe playing with some of their favorite artists, including Rogue Wave, Bright Eyes and the Cave Singers, and Modest Mouse. In 2009, the group dropped their third record, Threadbare. Recorded at a friend's studio in San Francisco, the album was touched by the tragic death of Cambria's younger brother, a founding member of the band. The songs bear a weight that the arrangements and performances carry gracefully, making this the group's most accomplished release to date.