Hilo Hanakahi and The Wild Hawaiian

It began halfway across the Pacific ocean, when our neighbor sitting in the window seat began vigorously shaking Danielle awake, shouting "You won! You won!"

The flight attendant suddenly appeared and handed her a CD, the prize for winning a competition to guess the exact time the plane would be halfway to Honolulu from San Francisco. Being a mathmagician, Danielle had naturally computed the time down to the second. As he gave her the CD, the flight attendant had told us, "This is GREAT date music!!!"

We decided that the 4-hour mini road trip we were taking to Volcanoes National Park would be the perfect time to screen Danielle's prize. As we drove away from Kailua in the early morning light, we popped in the CD, hoping for some lovely background music, and were instead assaulted with a bizarre array of experimental sounds. I'm not sure what kind of social travesty that flight attendant normally subjected his dates to, but "The Wild Hawaiian" was definitely not romantic. We finally found a song that we liked on the sixth track, titled "Hilo Hanakahi" - laid back, rhythmic and vocally intriguing. We didn't understand the words, which were all in Hawaiian, but we felt ourselves relaxing into the soothing melody....until we noticed that there was a lunatic screaming in the background before each new verse. The crazy man would bellow "HILO!!!" And then the lead singer would softly follow with, "Hilo Hanakahi I ka ua Kanilehua..." Then the first man would scream, "PUNA!!!" and the vocals would follow with "Puna paia `ala I ka paia `ala i ka hala..."

We imagined a wild-haired man gesturing nonsensically and screaming from the top of a smoking volcano, or a drunk uncle trying to get on stage with the band at a wedding and half sing/half scream lyrics he didn't really know. We listened to that song on repeat for four hours, crying our eyes out laughing the entire time. Check out the youtube link to the song if you want to listen in.

This is how we imagine the Wild Hawaiian.