Blind Pilot

Bringing their music to tiny towns along the West Coast by traveling on two bicycles is what made Blind Pilot’s humble beginnings the unlikely seed that would bloom into something much bigger. Israel Nebeker, singer and guitarist, and Ryan Dobrowski, drummer and percussionist, are the duo that pedaled for miles and miles on their first tour towing their instruments and camping gear from Vancouver to San Francisco to play their music for whoever would lend an ear. A truly inspiring story that holds many twists and turns.

As I spoke with Nebeker by phone, he was traveling on four wheels this time on an interstate somewhere between St. Louis and Columbus. From his stories about the band’s experiences which culminated in a masterful first album, 3 Rounds and a Sound, it was easy to understand Blind Pilot has seen their road and their journey much differently than other bands. From Nebeker’s quirky stories about playing a show for cyclists, truckers and stoned youth at a small town in northern California to his fascinating accounts of describing how a dream wrote a song, I could tell the moments engraved in his mind were mementoes to experiences that were undoubtedly both captivating and moving.

SSv: I keep reading you started your first tour on bikes. That seems like a crazy feat. Why did you decide to do a bike tour?

Israel Nebeker: It was just kind of one of those ideas that seemed a little bit crazy, and we weren’t sure if it would work at all. The more we thought about it, we were kind of like, “Well, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.” We really just tried it out to see if we could do it. I think we were really longing to get out of Portland’s winter because we have pretty long and gray winters, and also to try to get outside of the music we were a part of there. It’s [Portland’s music] awesome. I think it’s the greatest spot for music, but also it felt like a real good challenge to go out to small towns down the coast and just see if our music would work there too and just get completely outside of our comfort zone.

SSv: I’m curious as to where you would sleep and eat. Was that ever a problem?

Nebeker: It wasn’t a problem. It was a challenge that we had to think about every day. That was part of the fun of it. It was that we were so vulnerable, you know. We had shows set up in the larger cities, but in smaller towns – which there’s so many in between – if you’re going by bike, you’ve got to stop at most of them. A lot of it was just improvisation. That was the fun part too. We were just so vulnerable out there and just hoping we could find fortune, and it just always seemed to come. We would always meet good people that were into the idea or just respected that we were out there vulnerable, so they would help out.

SSv: Was there a moment, maybe a person, that sticks out in your mind from the bike tours?

Nebeker: Yeah, there’s plenty. [Long pause] We did two tours by bike and the first one was just at the very beginning of when Blind Pilot became a band. That tour, it started off pretty rough because we had no idea what we were doing. Ryan and I weren’t really huge cyclists or anything, so it was kind of rough going the first week. It just kept getting better and better, and by the end of it – it wasn’t our final destination – but we were in San Francisco. We didn’t know at the time that it would be the end of the trip because our bikes got stolen there. The trip kept getting better and better.

This girl found our Web site and was into what we were doing. She lived in a town with artists and writers and filmmakers. She invited us over to stay just for a couple of days and play at a couple house parties that she put on. She’s an amazing musician too and writes amazing songs. That was probably the best memory I have. Then, because we ended up getting our bikes stolen, it wasn’t quite as bad because the trip was just getting better and better up to that point.

SSv: Was there a point on the first bike tour that you thought Blind Pilot wasn’t going to work?

Nebeker: Right off the bat, it was kind of hysterical. We bought one book of maps, so it was kind of step-by-step there on the West Coast from Canada to Mexico, the route we wanted to do. We didn’t even bother to look at the book until we got to Vancouver, BC. It was a great effort to just get into Canada carrying CDs on us and obviously, musical instruments. If you don’t have the right papers, it’s really pretty much impossible to get through [into Canada]. Because we all had camping gear and bikes, we were like, “Hey man, we’re just on a camping trip.” We got through.

We play this really great show in Vancouver, BC. On the very first day of biking, we looked at our books and realized there’s no route to get to Seattle. There’s no straight shot from Vancouver. It’s just totally impossible. It ended up getting dark, and we didn’t want to waste a day of biking, so we ended up just doing what the book said which was biking almost 50 to 100 miles north and then cutting over to Vancouver Island and going down there. Our spirits were still pretty good, but within a week of still not playing any shows, and just biking, camping and carrying an absurd amount of weight that’s totally unnecessary, we were like, “Are we seriously doing this? This isn’t really working well.”

Ryan wanted to continue on bike and just do a bike trip. I think we spent the majority of the day just going back and forth over what we were going to do. We finally decided we would go back north again. This was in the middle of Washington. I said let’s go to Seattle, a great music town. We’ll find something. And we did. We decided to spend one more day going there, and we found a biking group that gets together every Thursday, and it happened to be the Thursday that we were there. We met up with them, and they invited us out to ride around the city with them, and then, end at the park drinking beer, having a bond fire and playing for the cyclists. But yeah, that was definitely a point where we knew this was kind of a crazy idea and worried about it not really working, but I’m glad we pushed on one more day.

SSv: When you were playing the smaller towns, where it was probably really intimate, what was that like?

Nebeker: It was by far my favorite part. It’s kind of scarier to play those small towns where no one really knows what to expect. They barely ever get music or bands coming through there. It always started off pretty awkward. We were playing, and people weren’t really paying attention. We really didn’t know what to expect. We were usually in a pretty bizarre setting, not like a music venue at all. By the end of it, we pretty consistently went through crowds and made lots of good friends and actual relationships with people there because it’s out of the ordinary for them, so it’s something special, and makes it that way for you too. So anyway, they were by far the very “worth it” thing to do.

SSv: Where did you end up playing in those small towns?

Nebeker: All kinds of different places. One show that sticks out was a show near the town of Weott in Humboldt County [California]. This campground there, right across from the highway, there’s a general store and a little barbeque patio. We were talking to some truckers who were stopped there and they were pretty gruff dudes. They asked, “What are you doing?” And we told them, and they said, “Shoot, play some music for us.” And we were like, OK, [Laughs] we’ll set up and played for some truckers.

We asked the little market if it was OK if we got out our instruments, and we gathered up some cyclists that we met up at the campground. They came over, and there were, like a couple of towns, these young kids pretty heavily stoned. We had a mix of these truckers and cyclists. It was great. We had a really good time. It seems like every show in small towns were in as equally a bizarre setting with something unexpected. You never really know what to expect.

SSv: An eclectic audience for sure. In the beginning, was performing ever hard for you? I know on the first bike tour it was just you and Ryan, and you added some people on the second one. Initially, was it hard for you to perform?

Nebeker: Yeah, for sure. And it was on the second one too. To me, that kind of makes the reward that much better. It was fun because you can’t really stand in front of people and play music and be miserable about it. You have to find a way to be happy and upfront about it. It was a pretty good reminder each day why we’re playing music, which is pretty much just that we would be doing it anyways. It’s just a bonus that we get to try to play in front of other people. Yeah, it was definitely hard and a challenge.

SSv: Is there a song on 3 Rounds and a Sound that you had to wrestle with a bit before you got it right?

Nebeker: There’s many. Some songs come much quicker and full right off the bat. “Story I Heard,” that one was a long time in the making. I started writing it in Portland. It was just a pretty rough idea I never really got complete, and I never really got the best parts of it until we moved out to Astoria. Several months later after starting it, I went out for a walk on the train tracks, and the rest of it came. That was frustrating to me I guess when you know there’s a good song in there that you just haven’t found completely.

SSv: That was definitely one of my favorite songs on the album. What did you wrestle with? Was it the lyrics or the music or maybe both?

Nebeker: To me, the idea I was trying to write about was kind of a big one at the time. It was something new to me. I had this chance encounter with a guy at a stop in Portland. It started off when he was asking for spare change, and I ended up talking with him for a long time. It was a great experience. Something with that experience stuck with me and got me thinking about something new I hadn’t before. I think I just really completed the thought until several months later.

SSv: I’m curious as to what inspired “Poor Boy” because after hearing the lyrics, they almost have a guilty feeling to them. Is there a story behind that song.

Nebeker: It’s one of the more bizarre writing experiences I’ve had. Sometimes, I’ll have song ideas or really simple themes I’ll dream about and then wake up. That’s where some ideas for the songs come from. But “Poor Boy” was like when I was having a dream where I was in a movie, like an actor in a movie, and I was getting to watch what we had made.

This song was playing over the soundtrack. It was like a montage of the theme, sort of like a tragic theme going in and out of different people’s lives and the way they were sort of connected. I knew it was like a Paul Simon song in the dream, but I realized at that point, “Wait a second. This is not a Paul Simon song. Wake up!” I remember full-on all of the instruments and everything. The first two verses of the song I remembered, and I just wrote it down and recorded it really quick.

At the time, I was living out in Astoria, and my girlfriend was still going to the University of Oregon, I was living out in a cannery building, writing songs and recording, just out there on my own. I definitely had some guilt abandoning this relationship for the pursuit of my own writing or just myself. I think that that comes through in that song. That’s interesting though. I never really hear that, but I’m glad that you heard that.

SSv: I read that you wrote a lot of your songs in an old cannery building. How much of an impact did writing songs in Big Red in Astoria have on your music?

Nebeker: I think it had a ton of effect on what came out on the album. It was definitely not all the songs, but half of them were written out there. When Ryan and I were living out there for the summer, it was the way we kind of came together and decided how we were going to play the songs. It definitely had an effect. It’s just a really romantic place to be. I just loved it. It’s very secluded. As small of a town as it is, it’s even secluded from that small town. It was a good place to not care about much except for the songs we were writing.

SSv: From an article I read, Big Red just seems like a great place for inspiration, but sadly some it was destroyed in a storm. Is there another place like that that you would to go to? Is there another place of inspiration?

Nebeker: Right now, we’ve been touring with the band for a long time. I think it’s something you’re longing for more and more – being back in familiar landscapes that are inspiring to me. I mean no that these ones aren’t throughout the U.S. When you’re on tour you don’t get to just fully experience them living out of your car. For me, I just like to retreat to the most personal place that I can and most of those places are spots in nature or at Big Red at the coast where I grew up. There are a lot of places I go to in Portland and usually, not to get the initial spark of the song, but to just push it out and do the work.

SSv: How do you want your next album to sound in relation to 3 Rounds and a Sound?

Nebeker: I really don’t know. The newer songs that are hopefully going to be on it are a bit different – going in a different direction. I really don’t know yet. I think we’ll probably find out when we record it. Because really on, 3 Rounds and a Sound, we had a pretty different idea of how it was going to sound going into it and what ended up happening after we started the process.

SSv: Is there anything you would change about it?

Nebeker: There was right after we got done recording it. It [the album] was basically for having something to sell on the next bike tour. We recorded it in a studio of an old friend. He did a really amazing job and was really creative. We didn’t have to ask him to change much at all. He heard it the way we did.

The first big thing that happened with it was that we got the iTunes single of the week, and that exposed it to a lot of people. I was immediately like, “Oh man. There’s so much I would have done differently on this album because it’s not perfect.” To me, there are all kinds of imperfections on it. Now that I’ve got to hold it for awhile and have gotten some distance from having made it, I think that that is probably one of its strengths too – the imperfections.

SSv: Can you pinpoint specifically any “imperfections” that you heard?

Nebeker: “Things I Cannot Recall,” I really wasn’t happy the way I sang it when we recorded it and that was one of the songs I wanted to re-record and sing again. After practicing it more, I just thought it was kind of weak the way I sang it. We even tried it again. Scott and Ryan were both like, “No. You sound better now. It sounds like you’re a better singer on the way you re-recorded it, but it’s not as effective in the song.” That’s to me, when I heard that song, sure I hear little imperfections in my singing, but I liked it.

SSv: It’s funny you say that because no one else hears the ‘imperfections.’

Nebeker: I guess it would probably be boring. I guess music is boring when it’s too perfect.

SSv: The way you approach songs for the new album, how do they differ from the way you approached songs on 3 Rounds and a Sound?

Nebeker: I’m trying to not let there be a difference how I approach it and keep the process the same, but it’s way different. When I wrote the songs for 3 Rounds and a Sound, most of them I wrote before we were even playing as a band as Blind Pilot. There were just songs I wrote for myself in my bedroom. I really am having to find new ways to keep that same space when I write because it’s hard to ignore the fact that more people will hear these songs.

Another huge difference is that I have to keep in mind that we’re playing with all these other great musicians now and that’s really fun. I guess a song that wouldn’t have worked with just me singing on guitar, might work really great with a full band, so that’s a pretty fun part of it too.

SSv: On this tour, what’s been your most favorite show and what made it memorable?

Nebeker: There’s been so many awesome ones. It’s been a really, really great time this tour. We just got done opening up for the Counting Crows in England that was a very bizarre experience. It was really bizarre because obviously, we never really played in stadium arenas before. Just the sound is so massive, it’s just a challenge to make friends with that sound. Also, their audience is a different demographic than ours. It actually really reminded me a lot of being on that first bike tour where nobody quite knew what to make of us. It was a job for sure to try to win people over.

This tour has been totally different. Every show, the crowd has been awesome. I think the settings are really beautiful old theatres. I like the set up this tour. It’s a more intimate feeling and just really supportive audiences.

One that stuck out was Missoula [Montana]. That was the first time we played with The Decemberists. It was really amazing to see their show for the first time and to play for one of their audiences for the first time too.

SSv: What are your musical ambitions on down the road?

Nebeker: I never really thought of that word ambition in relation to this project. I think it’s probably a big thing in my mind that separates this project from all the others that I’ve done and that Ryan’s done and any of us have done in the past. I’ve definitely played in bands that were really ambitious and really were sure they would be able to make this work and would work really hard at … I guess being ambitious. None of those [bands] for one reason or another worked out. It’s ironic that this is the first project that took off.

I’m still the same songwriter. The one thing that changed for me was that we were just trying get out of that phase of being ambitious and just have fun and affect people and move people and have that be the only ambition. I think that’s all we’re really going to try to keep doing. When you really break it down, that’s all that music is really worth anyway.

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