Bio : Blind Pilot

The first Blind Pilot album in eight years, In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain emerged from a period of artistic crisis and the radical transformation of their creative ecosystem. “I went through a few years where I wasn’t able to write—I tried therapy, I read books on writer’s block, I went on writing trips, but nothing was helping,” says Israel Nebeker, frontman for the Oregon-bred band. After stepping back and reimagining his songwriting approach, Nebeker challenged himself to write an entire album in a month, then brought those songs to his bandmates with a newfound sense of receptivity. “I told myself that whatever songs came through in that month would be for the love of the band and music we make together,” says Nebeker. “Instead of being controlling in the studio, I wanted to let the songs live and breathe with the band as an entity. By the time we finished, it was the most joy we’d ever had in making an album together.” 

Produced by Josh Kaufman (The Hold Steady, David Wax Museum), In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain brings a potent new energy to the elegantly composed folk/indie-rock of past LPs like 2016’s And Then Like Lions. In a profound step forward for the band—whose lineup also includes drummer/co-founder Ryan Dobrowski, bassist Luke Ydstie, and multi-instrumentalist Kati Claborn—Blind Pilot’s fourth full-length unfolds with an exquisite fluidity, fully harnessing the undeniable chemistry they’ve shown in sharing stages with The Shins, Andrew Bird, and Gregory Alan Isakov and performing at major festivals like Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo. “In the past we’ve always been very serious and intentional about the process, but Josh often encouraged us to throw away our preconceived notions of what the songs were supposed to be,” says Nebeker. “So much of the album came from all of us playing live together, listening to each other and trusting our instincts, and really getting to the core of the song,” Dobrowski adds. The result: the most revelatory expression yet of Blind Pilot’s palpable reverence for music as a connective force. 

Mainly created at Dreamland Recording Studios in New York, In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain takes its title from a vision Nebeker experienced during a shamanic drum journey in Norway. “Part of the purpose of the trip was to reconnect with the ancestral line that was severed when my great-great grandmother immigrated to the U.S.,” says Nebeker, who has roots in the Sámi community (a semi-nomadic people indigenous to northern Scandinavia). “That vision involved my most immediate ancestors beckoning me along a path that went straight into a mountain, and I knew right then that the mountain represented the origins of all of us. It’s funny because I wrote many of these songs without fully understanding them, but when I listened back later it hit me how much of the album is about ancestral lines and connection, gifts passed down and ties that persist.”

One of the first songs sketched for In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain, “Jacaranda” opens the album on a moment of lovely effervescence, gently tumbling forward on full-hearted harmonies, luminous guitar tones, and gorgeously frenetic textures. “I started working on that song during a trip that Ryan and I took to Mexico City,” says Nebeker. “We were in a park hanging out under these giant jacaranda trees in full violet bloom, and it turned to a song of thanks to him for being so patient with me.” Next, on “Brave,” Blind Pilot sustain that momentum and deliver a soaring rock song propelled by an indelibly soulful vocal performance from Nebeker. “We’d gone to Mexico because we were invited to play at a conference for people around the world who were involved in some remarkable work for humanity and the environment,” says Nebeker. “I found myself in a conversation about the caravan of migrants coming up from Central America, and some of the participants were talking about creating a campaign to educate Americans and try to generate support for caravan. I didn’t really know how to contribute to that conversation, but finally I got the idea to write a song that looks at ideas of ownership and othering, and what it does to our collective mentality when we tell a group of people, ‘This is our home, not yours.’”

While much of In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain embodies a tender exuberance, Blind Pilot point to a song called “Just A Bird” as a particularly joyful moment in the recording process. A radiant piece of folk-pop, the sweetly wistful track builds to a beautifully off-the-cuff call-and-response exchange in its final minute—a detail improvised by Nebeker, Claborn, and Ydstie in one of the track’s very first takes. With Dobrowski supplying a fantastically loose groove, “Just A Bird” ultimately inhabits a carefree spirit that sharply contrasts the emotional complexity of its lyrical sentiment. “That song came from being in the early stages of a relationship that was moving faster than I was ready for, and then being met with anger when I expressed some hesitation,” says Nebeker. “It’s a song that’s essentially trying to connect to another heart, but it’s also calling out the other person for asking for something that just wasn’t the truth of us yet.”

Before recording In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain, Blind Pilot met up in Nebeker’s homebase of Astoria in fall 2023 and spent several weeks developing the batch of songs he’d penned that summer. “One of the reasons why I’d lost my path with music was that I was struggling with a lot of fear surrounding expectations of who I was supposed to be as a songwriter and bandleader,” says Nebeker. “But by writing the album in a month, I felt free to let go of those expectations and stop questioning what was coming through. It ended up shifting the whole dynamic of the band, and brought a playfulness and mutual appreciation that felt thrilling from the start.” Despite their years apart—during which time Nebeker created a solo album, Dobrowski focused on his painting career, and the remaining band members performed in myriad side projects—Blind Pilot quickly rekindled their easy camaraderie and embarked on a brief run of headlining shows prior to joining Kaufman at Dreamland (a residential studio whose structure once housed a 19th century church). While Blind Pilot intends to tour principally as a quartet in support of the record, the album includes contributions from longtime trumpeter/keyboardist Dave Jorgensen and vibraphonist Ian Krist. In bringing the album to life, the band worked with a rich palette of instrumentation (including banjo, upright bass, Wurlitzer, clarinet, dulcimer, trumpet, violin, vibraphone, mandolin, synth, and more), handling each track with equal parts extraordinary care and unbridled spontaneity. “These days it’s so easy to manipulate every single aspect of a recording, so that you end up with what feels like an overly Photoshopped picture of someone you love just the way they are,” says Dobrowski. “I’m a believer in leaning into all the little subtle flaws that make something feel human, and working with Josh definitely allowed us to embrace the beauty and vulnerability of those imperfections.”

Looking back on the creation of In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain, Blind Pilot reveal an exceptional fondness for the making of “Coming Back”—a soul-baring piano ballad that provides the album’s centerpiece. “I started tracking that song by myself at the piano, with the rest of the band in the control room,” Nebeker recalls. “We turned the lights off and I felt all alone in this big old church, and the performance that came out was stronger than I’d expected. I was completely untethered from the band during the recording, but when I went back to the control room they were all so emotionally engaged. They could’ve just been scrolling on their phones but instead they were all very present with the song, and that felt really wonderful to me.”

For both Dobrowski and Nebeker—who formed an early iteration of the band as college students in the mid-aughts—those moments of ineffably closeness serve as the lifeblood of Blind Pilot. “For me making this album felt like celebrating being together and still feeling that deep connection that’s been a throughline for our entire adult lives,” Dobrowski says. “One of my very favorite things about music is the way it not only connects us as bandmates, but allows us to connect to an audience—and then within that audience, people end up connecting with each other. It’s this powerful thing that’s unlike anything else, and in a way it’s kind of like magic.”