Poi Dog Pondering

Poi Dog Pondering started as one man's alias: Frank Orrall, in Hawaii, making music on his own before it swelled into something closer to a traveling village. The first proper lineup played its debut show at the Honolulu Academy of Arts in 1986, with John Nelson on percussion, Ted Cho on electric guitar and mandolin, and Abra Moore singing, and then the whole lot hit the road, busking on street corners across North America for a year.

They washed up in Austin, Texas, in 1988, picking up Dave Max Crawford on organ, trumpet and accordion, Bruce Hughes on bass and Susan Voelz on violin. That year's self-titled EP, home of "Living With The Dreaming Body", catches them at their most ramshackle and joyous: acoustic strum, fiddle, horns and hand percussion tumbling over one another like a street party that forgot to go home. Columbia came calling, and Wishing Like a Mountain and Thinking Like the Sea arrived in 1990, with Volo Volo after it in 1992.

That same year they moved again, to Chicago, and started folding orchestral arrangements, soul, electronics and house beats into the mix. Orrall has been the only constant. More than three dozen players have drifted through the ranks, and on any given night there might be anywhere from eight to a dozen or more of them on stage.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.