Last Friday marked the release of the first new album in eight years from the folk-rock band Blind Pilot. The record is called “In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain,” and for lead singer Israel Nebeker and Tucson-based drummer Ryan Dobrowski, it’s a big moment.
As Nebeker and Dobrowski told The Show on the phone last week, this album is very much a product of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the midst of separation and lockdown, they both found themselves reconsidering their relationship to their music.
Full conversation
RYAN DOBROWSKI: And, in that time, I really started to turn my focus back towards painting, and that was great. It was just a real quiet, solitary outlet for me.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah. Israel, how about for you?
ISRAEL NEBEKER: My main thing is Blind Pilot, so I haven’t been doing anything — except for just trying different ways to write songs. I just was struggling to write for a few years and then had some breakthroughs.
DINGMAN: Tell me about those breakthroughs. What changed?
NEBEKER: It’s a mysterious thing. Like I was — I will absolutely do my best to explain it, but I know that I don’t understand it completely.
Songwriting, like most artistic endeavors, is a conversation with a deeper or higher source or self, and it just wasn’t — that channel wasn’t wanting to be open, and songs weren’t wanting to come through. And I tried a lot of things that were very deliberate and direct about songwriting. I pivoted at some point and just started improving myself and my life and I just found that the songs showed up and said, okay, now we’ll come through. It is a safe place for us to be.
DINGMAN: You’re making me think of — I used to be an actor and you’re making me think of one of my favorite acting exercises, which was if you were trying to conjure a certain amount of emotion in a scene, instead of just trying to think about a time you cried, you should think about the room that you were in when you started crying and just try to get a tangible sense in your memory of the physical characteristics of the room, and that that would prompt the emotion. And I feel like I hear some of that in what you’re describing with this songwriting process
NEBEKER: Absolutely. Yeah, that feels right on to me. It’s a difference between — I think in our language that we have for creating, our language often revolves around the notion of artifice and craft and what we can force and make to happen. But what you’re describing, I hear a lot of trust in that if you tap into the right space, the right thing will happen.
And that’s definitely how songwriting feels to me.
DINGMAN: Ryan, for you, when it comes to painting and drumming, do you feel, as an artist, any connection between those two practices?
DOBROWSKI: I’m not a terribly busy drummer. I like to play to the song and the strengths of the song, and I take a similar approach in painting. Like I don’t try to over fuss with details.
I’ve tried many things from the time when I started painting, and for a while, it was similar to drumming, I guess. You just want to see how far you can push your technical skills. And so I was doing almost photorealist work for a bit.
But, even though it was technically maybe impressive, it didn’t feel right to me.
DINGMAN: Yeah. I’m looking at, one of your paintings right now, which I think is called “Winter Sun.” And there’s these big swaths of a golden yellow, for example, and then a bluish color in the background, and it’s painted in this repeated set of what look to be very small strokes.
And it’s really interesting to hear you describe incorporating rhythm into your painting and then imagining you rendering those strokes in a rhythmic fashion. Is that a fair inference to make?
DOBROWSKI: Yeah, for sure. And that repetition becomes almost trance-like. Within the paintings, it creates this visual vibration.
DINGMAN: Something I feel like I hear you both talking about a lot is either coming into for the first time, or perhaps returning to a sense of trust in your creative intuition. Is that something that feels fresh, like a rediscovery, or is that something that you’ve both always trusted throughout your musical careers?
NEBEKER: I feel like I’ve held that concept throughout my time writing songs, but it’s a funny thing because you hit something good, it resonates with you. You’re so happy that it came to you and through you. And then you just want to do that again. You try to make it happen, and then you have to remind yourself again and again, like, no, that’s not how it came. I wasn’t trying to do that. I was listening.
DINGMAN: Yeah. I wanted to ask you both about some of the lyrics on the new record that were really resonant to me. The first one is, “What can you do with a heart you will lose?” Tell me a little bit about what’s behind that sentiment for you.
NEBEKER: I think when I wrote that song, I was at a spot where I was teaching myself how to play banjo. My dad played the banjo. My great grandfather played the banjo. I have all these banjos that I inherited. And so I was thinking about things that stay, and I also was in a time of transition and losing a relationship, and I was thinking about things that we’re all bound to lose. Acknowledging everything you come from, everything that will continue after you, and you get this time and what are you going to do with it — it was in that spirit that that line came.
DINGMAN: But that’s really lovely, and I mean, if I’m not mistaken, the continuation of that lyric is, “What can you do with a heart you will lose? I want to see what you can do.”
(“Pocket Knife” plays)
I was very moved by that and it felt of a peace with a couple of other lyrics from the record. One is,”Fire is warm, but it burns fast.” On those songs, and really throughout the record, a sense of kind of the fleetingness of experience.
NEBEKER: I definitely have been in an experience in the past year or two of being in that place of noticing how the things that feel permanent and tangible in this life seem to really take me out of being present with truly permanent things.
Things like our stories, our lineage, the things I stress about and worry about take me out of that actual permanence.
DINGMAN: Ryan, I’m curious for you as a drummer, when you’re listening to the songs that Israel brings in and you guys are developing them together, how much are you thinking about themes or emotional content in terms of how it informs your playing?
Is that something that you’re consciously doing or are you listening more rhythmically and musically?
DOBROWSKI: Certainly Israel’s vocal delivery usually echoes the sentiment of the lyrics. So, you can fall into that and create this atmosphere around the vocal. And as a drummer, that’s the main thing that I listen to.
NEBEKER: This is really fun for me to hear about. We never talk about this stuff. We’ve never had a conversation in the band where it’s like, what’s this song about? Like it’s just never come up, and yet, you know it on an intuitive level even if you can’t pinpoint why it feels that way.
(“Just a Bird” plays)
DINGMAN: Well, Ryan Dobrowski and Israel Nebeker are two of the members of Blind Pilot. Their new album is “In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain.” Thank you guys so much.
DOBROWSKI: Thank you.
NEBEKER: Thanks for having us.
