Blind Pilot: Folk On Two Wheels

By: Mike Bookey

Blind Pilot

There’s no denying that Blind Pilot has found some success over the past year and a half. But their route to this success is somewhat paradoxical. At times it seems this Portland, Oregon folk rock band has taken a meteoric rise into the mainstream, but from another angle, their trip has been a bit slow and unconventional. And here’s why.

Their album, 3 Rounds and a Sound, was released in the summer of 2008, but didn’t really hit the bloodstream of the buzz-creating, festival-going public until this past summer and fall. And there’s still some people passing it around to friends as a “new album.”

The band, which until last year was a two-piece comprised of longtime friends and former classmates at the University of Oregon Israel Nebeker and Ryan Dobrowski, also took it slow on their tours. Literally. They biked from show to show in their early days with only their instruments and a load of self-pressed CDs, oftentimes arriving in towns without any gigs booked. Sure, they had their bicycles jacked from them in San Francisco, but they were taking in the scenery and having a genuinely good time. Yet when 3 Rounds and a Sound hit shelves and the band had added a couple new members, they got out the bikes – different bikes, of course – and hit the road once again. This time, Blind Pilot traveled from Bellingham, Washington to San Diego. As they pedaled between towns, making more than 20 stops along the way, they dragged their instruments behind their bicycles in homemade trailers. This rewrote the definition of the overused music biz phrase “DIY.”

Blind Pilot Bike Tour

The last few tours Blind Pilot has embarked on have not been by bicycle, which is to be expected from an act that is now headlining sold out club dates and taking the stage at some of the country’s most prominent music festivals. Yes, the public was slow in noticing the band’s record, but Blind Pilot wasn’t in enough of a hurry to travel by automobile for their first tours either, and what this act has achieved in the past year is remarkable – massive online sales, gigs with acts like The Low Anthem and Langhorne Slim, and chatter on every music blog and magazine this side of Tiger Beat. Still, however, drummer and co-founder Dobrowski hasn’t ruled out taking the bikes out of the shed once again. But will they really, as rumored, tour Europe by bicycle?

“We’re partially serious. It’s a debate between some people in the band, and I think we would all really like to do another bike tour,” says Dobrowski, taking a break from a sound check prior to a Brooklyn show earlier this winter.

“I have some reservations about going over to Europe to do it,” he says. “Personally, I just don’t want it to become like a shtick that we were trying to do. That’s not the intention of a bike tour.”

He’s got a point. Some people do, indeed, call Blind Pilot “that band that toured by bike.” On the other hand, there are plenty of listeners who care nothing about the band’s mode of transportation but are deeply conscious of the frequently tender, always-tight folk rock the band creates. They also know of Nebeker’s silky voice, which, coupled with his pastoral lyrics, makes him one of the strongest vocalists to emerge from the explosion of American folk rock that flooded iPods during the latter years of this past decade.

Blind Pilot by Douglas Heine

It’s worth noting, again, that Blind Pilot calls Portland home, a city that is ripe not only with rock bands but folk rock bands. This is the city that gave us Blitzen Trapper‘s 2008 gem Furr and last year’s stellar Hold Time from M. Ward. But rather than get lost in the shuffle, which has happened to plenty of excellent Portland folkies, Blind Pilot has thrived in their location, transforming their duo into a sextet by adding excellent players from the Portland scene. In addition to Nebeker and Dobrowski, the band now also includes Kati Claborn on banjo and dulcimer, Luke Ydstie on upright bass, Dave Jorgensen on trumpet and harmonium, and Ian Krist on vibraphone.

“It became the six of us pretty easily because these were the musicians that we wanted with us,” says Dobrowski.

Blind Pilot may fit nicely on a bill with a folk revival band like the aforementioned Low Anthem, but in reality there’s plenty of divergence between the two acts. Where the new generation of revivalists relies on instrumentation and song structure that reaches back as far as a century for inspiration, Blind Pilot is actually quite modern. If you were to speed up some of their cuts and add some distortion, they’d be damn good indie rock songs. But they’re not sped up nor distorted, which makes this folk rock.

Blind Pilot (Nebeker left Dobrowski right) by T. Oliver

“I think there’s sort of an element of stripping things down to their basic form. But we’re more into pushing forward,” says Dobrowski. “We are into stripping it down and then rebuilding it; so that gives it a kind of folksy element.”

The sound heard on 3 Rounds and a Sound is not the touring version of Blind Pilot, but rather just Nebeker and Dobrowski surrounded by other musicians. The band was able to showcase the current touring lineup for the first time on record in late December when they released an exclusive iTunes Session – EP. The record features recordings of some 3 Rounds tracks, including the excellently emotional “The Story I Heard,” alongside the previously unreleased “Get It Out.” Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the EP is Blind Pilot’s excellent take on Gillian Welch‘s “Look at Miss Ohio.”

While some new fans are still wrapping their ears around 3 Rounds, this album will actually be two years old come the summer. Two years is a lifetime for a band like Blind Pilot that is just starting to make a name for itself in the larger touring scene. As is to be expected, there is a new full-length Blind Pilot album coming out. The band plans to head into the studio soon. As with the recent digital release, the next record will truly be a Blind Pilot album, bringing the touring band into the studio. Dobrowski sees this as the next phase of sorts for his band, even if he and Nebeker are still at the helm.

“It’s going to be exciting because there’s a lot more options,” says Dobrowski. “We started the last album with just the two of us and now we have all these great musicians to work with. I think we’ll probably try to get some ideas with just the two of us and then bring in everybody.”

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