Moonpools & Caterpillars were a Filipino American alternative rock band based in California.

Lead singer Kimi Ward Encarnacion is known for being very energetic on stage. Jay Jay Encarnacion gave Moonpools & Caterpillars their distinct guitar sounds, which varied from ethereal chorusing to large, wall-of-sound distortion. Bassist Tim DePala and drummer Gugut Salgado were the other two members of the band. In part because three of the members of the band were Filipino, the band always had a presence on the Pinoy rock scene.

Before Kimi Ward entered the picture, Jay Jay Encarnacion wasn’t just the band’s guitarist, he was also the lead singer. Gugut Salgado, the band’s drummer, joked, “Jay was singing on the demo. We almost broke up actually because he wanted more royalties.” Kimi, who had started dating Jay Jay in the ’90s (and eventually married him), auditioned for the then-nameless band while sitting in the backseat of a car. Jay Jay said, “Kimi had always wanted to be in a band. We were driving, she was in the backseat and she sang along to Human League’s ‘The Lebanon.’ She had this really great, unique voice, and I invited her to join the band.”

Three months before they met Kimi, the band originally had a different bass player, a guy named Cris. His fate was changed by a trip to the toilet, where bassist Tim DePala was at that time and later replaced the former.

They released three albums commercially, The Pink Album (self-released), Lucky Dumpling (1995, Elektra Records), and 12 Songs (1998, self-released). Lucky Dumpling was produced by Richard Gottehrer. Their first album, The Pink Album, was a recording of a live show at Los Angeles’s Whisky a Go Go, where many of their early shows were played. The band’s music was featured in the movies The Baby-Sitters Club (1995), Wish Upon a Star (1996), and Frozen Stars (2003). Their song “Hear” was used in a 1995 VW Drivers Wanted commercial. Before the band disbanded, amidst the recording for what is now the “12 Songs” album (1998) Elektra had dropped the band from the music label due to its lead singer being pregnant with her first child with guitarist Jay Jay Encarnacion. The band finally disbanded in 1998.

In 2014, after a return to Whisky a Go Go, the band returned to the Philippines after a seventeen-year absence and were met by enthusiastic crowds – two gigs in Manila and one in Cebu City.