Blind Pilot’s Israel Nebeker takes us deep into the making of the band’s fourth studio album ‘In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain,’ an intimate indie folk record of human connection and community, empathy, ancestry, and understanding.
Stream: “Brave” – Blind Pilot
Human connection has always been at the core of Blind Pilot’s music.
It’s been that way ever since Israel Nebeker started down the music path in 2008, writing and recording songs in his hometown of Astoria, Oregon. “I didn’t want to be anybody’s boss, I didn’t want to be a leader,” he recalls. “I just wanted to be. I wanted to have community in music.”
And so Nebeker invited every musician who inspired him into Blind Pilot; at one point, he says, the number of participants grew to 14 people. “It was just like, if you can show up for rehearsal, cool, if you can show up for the show, cool, if you wanna sing, sing!” he smiles. Out of that collective spirit grew a tight-knit sextet comprised of Nebeker, Ryan Dobrowski, Kati Claborn, Luke Ydstie, Dave Jorgensen, and Ian Krist; for the next decade, the band brought their special brand of indie folk music all over the country, headlining national and regional tours, playing countless festival stages, and releasing three acclaimed studio albums via ATO Records.
“Each album I see has been a progression of me stepping more into a position of leadership and saying, ‘Okay, I have a responsibility here to make sure that the songs come into fruition in the way that I feel the intention,” Nebeker shrugs. “Sometimes that’s at odds with what the band wants to do, and sometimes they totally just get it right away.”
Blind Pilot had just wrapped up three years of on-and-off touring, following their 2016 album And Then Like Lions, when the COVID-19 pandemic brought everything to a standstill – and for a long time, Nebeker struggled to find inspiration. He says he spent five years writing songs for ‘the next’ Blind Pilot album, only to end up pivoting at the last minute – turning those songs into a solo record (set to release next year) and committing to making the next Blind Pilot LP in a month.
“This was a different kind of a writing process for me,” he chuckles, admitting he’d never written this much, that quickly before. “For whatever reason, that month or so, I was able to just be present and listen, and it worked. This was last summer, and these were the songs that came through. I was very intentionally talking to, having ‘conversations’ with the songs – like, whatever you bring through, that’s what I’m gonna put on a record. I’m not gonna censor anything. I’m not gonna try to mold you into being what I want. It was very much a fever paced acceptance of the flow, what was coming through, and the main intention was that I wanted to give Blind Pilot as its own living, breathing entity a chance to shine. I wanted to put the emphasis less on the songwriting and more on the band and what we do together. The funny twist and miracle of it was it ended up being one of my favorite collections of songs I’ve ever brought forth into being. It’s just funny that it worked out that way.”
Freshly liberated from his own creative stagnation, and with a new batch of songs in tow, Nebeker longed to get back to the band’s communal roots, and to take a more holistic approach to whatever made together next. “That’s always been my biggest dream,” he says. “Since the beginning, that was what I wanted it to be. It’s not about our egos or who’s more important and who’s not it’s just, what does the music wanna be? We’re all in this process together.”
He left them on the stairs of gold
Matsumoto crossed the world
Heard it on the southern wind,
blew the seeds into his hands
Blooming with the color of a miracle
Meet me on the same park bench
When the trees hang their purple heads
I’ll be playing the same song,
the beat you were working on
Singing, “Don’t be long, don’t be long”
I won’t be long. I won’t be long
Played it raw, played in true
When I was young enough to lose
Saw it shine ever brighter
When I was young and on fire
When I was young and on fire
– “Jacaranda,” Blind Pilot
In Blind Pilot, everyone works together in service of the songs.
And so, in the summer and fall of 2023, the band members gathered together, first in Oregon and later at Josh Kaufman’s recording studio out in Woodstock, New York, to work on the music that would ultimately become their fourth studio album.
“I just wanted it to be, here’s some brand new songs, I don’t even know what they are yet, let’s figure it out together… everyone’s opinion is valid, let’s just see what happens when we hit record,” Nebeker explains. “That’s a really big reason why I wanted to work with Josh Kaufman, because his process is exploratory! His process is, ‘Okay, this is what we think the song is, let’s find out what the song really is and explore until we find it, and we’ll keep the mics on and the tape rolling while we’re doing it.’ So to me, to showcase the band as an entity meant really valuing each member and their opinion, their instincts, what they felt, and never saying ‘no’; just saying, ‘yes, let’s try that,’ ‘yes, let’s go further with that.’ This group of musicians, their instincts, I trust them. I think when we entered that space with a not-knowingness, holding a kind of respect for the mystery, that’s the best way it can be.”
The end result of this interactive, collective journey resulted in Blind Pilot’s most beautiful, colorful, cathartic, and compelling album to date: Released August 16th via ATO Records, In The Shadow of the Holy Mountain is an intimate and vulnerable indie folk record of human connection, born from human connection.
“I didn’t know that there was a through-line in these songs while they were coming,” Nebeker admits, laughing. “I was just trying to write an album’s worth of songs in a month, and I was just like, ‘Yes, everything, whatever, I’m gonna make you in a song, come!’ I didn’t realize that there were any through-lines and motifs happening in the story of the songs, and as a collection, I didn’t realize until literally after we recorded, after it was mixed, after it was mastered… I was listening back with some friends, and it just hit me so hard, that there are stories here about my family, stories about my story as it relates to ancestors. There’s stories about place that we all struggle with as a human race. A lot of it was relating to ancestral lines, place of home, where our place is here in this time, in relationship to the stories that have brought us forth.”
“I wrote the album in the summer, and in the fall, I took a trip to Norway to retrace the footsteps of my ancestors who are Sámi, indigenous to Northern Scandinavia. It was this really wonderful experience for me, personally, that I was listening to the songs that wanted to come through. I took that trip and I went to learn about the musical tradition of Sámi as well… On that trip, I had an experience with a Sámi shaman. He took me on a drum journey, a ceremony, and invited me to listen for ancestors, listen for visions. And the vision that came was of this mountain. And I knew that it was, well, the source of where we all go back to. I was on this journey seeking connection to my more immediate ancestors, and they showed up in this vision and they beckoned me to come with them, but they wanted me to see the true meaning of this search. The seeking is to find connection, not just to them, and not just to my own line, but to see that that connection brings connection to all of us. So that’s where that title comes from.”
That spirit of connection can be heard in all eleven of the record’s songs as Blind Pilot celebrate the ties that bind us – all those things, both good and bad, beautiful and painful, that connect us to one another in this lifetime.
“I think it feels like a reset in a couple ways,” Nebeker observes, acknowledging the fact that it’s been eight long years since the band’s last release. But “it also feels like a reset because it’s tough finding success as a band,” he says. “I think it’s tough to have an intention that is so strong that you want to bring work into the world and share it, and then to learn that you have to interface with an industry that is corrupt or strange or hostile… There’s all these things to contend with, and you have to protect your work against, and no matter how hard you try, it really can change that trajectory of the initial intention. This feels like a reset of that, because I think back to 2008, when we first started, there was such an intention of community, of trust, of love, of openness, encouragement to each other, and we’ve always held a thread of that to some extent, but never as much as I feel now.”
“And I hear that in this album. I hear this exuberance and love that we hold for one another coming together in the studio and recording that. And my hope is that that will hit people. They don’t need to understand what that is. It can just feel… good. But I hope that it’s something that is worth the wait for older fans, and I hope it’s something that carves a new path for this band, too.”
In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain is achingly heartfelt and emotionally nuanced, yet refreshingly lightweight and breathable: An expressive and energizing record you can play on repeat ad nauseam. From the sweet revelry of album opener “Jacaranda” and the radiant passion of immigrant anthem “Brave” – an enchanting song breaking down borders and constructs like ‘home’ – to the dreamy warmth of “Don’t You Know,” the charm and churn of “Just a Bird,” the powerful perspective shift (being alone vs. lonely) of “Faces of Light,” and the tender, visceral yearning and catharsis of album closer “Believe Me,” Blind Pilot imbue their latest album with both a musical and a spiritual light.
Ultimately, Nebeker couldn’t be happier with how this music came to be – and if even a small sliver of that communal spirit and connective energy reaches his audience, then he’ll be more than satisfied.
“I don’t think it’s my job to hope how people are moved by music; I think music works on a much deeper level than conscious, and my only hope is just that people are moved. If they’re moved in any way, then I did my job. That’s what I hope for,” Nebeker shares.
“This album has been the method to which I have entered into a new, much brighter chapter in my life. And it’s also been the modality, how I’ve learned; it’s been an instruction for how to move forward. I’ve learned so much about my relationships with my band, about the power of sight, of love, of belief in one another through making this record. I’ve learned a lot about holding that same sight and love and belief for one’s own path, for me, for my own path, through making this record and writing these songs the way that they came.”
Experience the full record via our below stream, and peek inside Blind Pilot’s In The Shadow of the Holy Mountain with Atwood Magazine as Israel Nebeker takes us track-by-track through the music and lyrics of the band’s long-awaited fourth album!
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:: stream/purchase In The Shadow of the Holy Mountain here ::
:: connect with Blind Pilot here ::
Stream: ‘In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain’ – Blind Pilot
:: Inside In The Shadow of the Holy Mountain ::
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Jacaranda
That song came on a trip I took with Ryan down to Mexico City in 2019. The initial idea of it, like the pulse of it and the chord progression and the melody, a little bit of the melody. We both were excited about it. We were there in Mexico City in the springtime. We were in a park under the blooming Jacaranda Trees. I had never seen them before. They just mesmerized me and I said, okay, I’m gonna give me a month. I’m gonna write this song. What? And he’s always so good about it. He was patiently just like, all right, well, maybe you will, maybe you won’t. I think it was the first song that I wrote. It was in this writing block. And when I wrote it, I was researching Jacaranda trees, I was researching the botanist that came from Japan that brought the Jacaranda tree to Mexico city.
He has a really interesting story. But what emerged in the song was it started to become a song of appreciation for Ryan, who I started this band with. And for other people in my life who have waited on me, I have a very strange sense of time. Time can pass very quickly for me. I can also get a lot done in a short amount of time. It just moves different. And I’ve people that are close to me, I’ve tried their patients a lot throughout my life in this particular way, and in this time of a long break from putting out new music. It was a song of appreciation for Ryan and my band, for waiting and not pressuring me, just trusting that when it comes, it’ll come and that will be right. It’s pretty amazing to me. The idea of having that much patience for somebody and it felt like the right tone to start the album with a ‘hello again.’
Brave
“Brave” actually came from the same trip as “Jacaranda,” and that one was almost fully formed when it came. We got invited to come be part of this like workshop retreat, networking event of leaders from around the world that are working in fields of helping humanity, helping the world, helping environment. And I, part of the conditions of, we were hired to come down and play music for it, but the condition was, we had to be a part of the 10-day thing.
And it was pretty intimidating. It was like there’s like one of the heads of Doctors Without Borders. There’s the guy who’s the head of the satellite program at NASA, and I’m a musician. I’m here to play music. And it was just a lot of like interactive discussions about giant world issues that I felt way out of my element with. I got assigned to a group that the task was to come up with a PR campaign that would help the caravan of immigrants from South America, coming north at that time in 2019. And the I wrote that song after 10 days of not being able to contribute much to the conversation, just listening and absorbing these brilliant people, I was like, well, I wonder if I could write a song for this group and for this issue that we’re working on.
So that song came I shared it with the group. And that’s where it came from, this concept of when it comes to home, when it comes to land what is ours? What is mine? What is where do we belong? And where do we not, it was an intention of breaking down those preconceptions of, this is mine, not yours. You don’t belong here. This is my home, not yours. I think that’s a sickness. I think it creates so much violence and hardship in the world. And I think the real truth of it is that we’re all together and it never actually hurts anyone to invite people in.
Pocket Knife
My grandfather, my dad’s dad, one of the symbols that stands out in my mind of the character who he lived as was he always had a pocket knife in his pocket. It was always at the ready. He was a very handy person and I think I was just thinking about my memories of him, just this really wonderful person and memories of him as a child and he had a playful perspective on life. He used to say happiness is a choice. And if you wake up in the morning and you say, I’m gonna be happy today, you can find a way to do that. And I think I was sort of calling in that perspective, that mentality with looking at my own life and while in contemplation of next steps and next paths to come forth. And it’s a really different experience to get overwhelmed, to either get overwhelmed by all the possibilities and all the hardships and all the difficulties that are coming your way feeling stuck or just looking at life in total possibility. It’s just whatever you choose. It’s so yeah, that’s where that song came from. That’s a little vague, but mostly, yeah, about choice of path and lessons I learned from my grandfather.
Don’t You Know
“Don’t You Know” is the only track that I wrote after my trip to Norway and after having that vision. So there’s that line that made it into the song about ‘In The Shadow of the Holy Mountain’ and that was a song I had a dream about a relationship that I was in at the time. I dreamed that we had a daughter and it was the concept of having a child. It was more profound than it had been before in my life after taking this trip to Norway, seeking connection to my ancestors that have gifted down stories to me, down life to me. The concept of passing that on became more significant after that trip.
That song came out of that, and it was a fun way that it came. I was rehearsing with Luke and Ryan. We were rehearsing to go into the studio, getting songs ready and it was 10 songs. And then we were just messing around and I was playing some chords and humming some tunes and they stopped and they’re like, what’s that? I said, I don’t know. And Ryan, he was just like, ‘Well, Luke and I are gonna go get some coffee. We’re gonna be gone, we’re just gonna give you an hour or two, if you wanna write on that.’ And then it was a very smart thing to do, because that song came all at once.
Just a Bird
It’s funny, this song to me, there are two distinct sentiments in the song for me. And one of them is pretty wide open, open-hearted perspective on relationships. And one of them is just petty and stupid. And I think it’s a sentiment addressing the feeling that I sometimes have in a relationship, where I crave closeness with people more than anything it’s all I want is to find how close of connection can exist especially in romantic love, but also in all of community. But I was in a relationship where there was frustration on a woman’s part. That it was not moving quicker, faster and more intensely the direction she wanted it to go. And the song came as sort of like a sentiment of well, that’s where I want it to go to – like, that’s why I’m here, but that’s just not the truth of us yet. I can’t make what’s not true, true, so if you need to give me an ultimatum about either we’re here or we’re not, that’s okay.
Coming Back
“Coming Back” ultimately feels like an optimistic sentiment. Even if it is a little bit strange harmonically and a little moody. I bought a piano right before the pandemic shut down, which was really lucky. At first it seemed like, oh, what have I done? I’ve parked a car inside my house! (This is ’cause it’s a nine-foot grand piano.) I just got a really good deal on it from a recording studio in Portland that was liquidating. But then through the pandemic, I retaught myself to learn piano, which I hadn’t really played since I was a kid.
And that was the first song that came on it that was not a guitar song that I was translating to piano. It was like, oh, here’s a song that I can’t play on guitar. This is a piano song. And it was just that that line, everything’s coming back to me. Everything’s coming back. It came from just that snippet in a dream. I was hosting a house show with Haley Heynderickx, another wonderful musician. She’s a dear friend. And a lot of our friends were there in my house and this wonderful house show the night before. And I woke up with that. And so I went back down the piano and was just playing that part. Haley came and sat down and was like, what is that? I think that for me personally, I’m not sure exactly what the song is about.
I think it has a feeling of, although we know this life is finite, it’s very tangibly, so there’s this feeling of the eternal mixed into it. There’s something of that in that song. I don’t know quite how to describe it better than this song does. There’s also that sentiment of coming back, it just literally, there’s so much that I felt far away from, in recent years from my path in music and really just being in a state of trying to create momentum again to not even just with literally putting out new music, but even just creating momentum toward wanting to be back on that path. That that song came, at that time.
Faces of Light
I’ve struggled with depression throughout my life since I was a kid. It’s a hardship. I think it’s also, it can be a gift, a sensitivity. But I was really in a dark place when that song came. I was just in a particularly dark, dark one. And it was a song I wrote to myself. At least I thought it was. I wrote that, and it felt like a comforting sentiment. It did snap me out enough. I stayed up all night writing it. In the morning, my mom was visiting town. I met up with her and a friend at a restaurant in Astoria. And the clouds had parted; I felt lifted. This song had brought me the sentiment that I really was needing to be reminded of. And then while we were there in the restaurant, an old friend from my childhood walked by that I haven’t seen in decades, walked by. And I didn’t quite recognize him at first. He was really, really, he just really looked struggling. And it was apparent he did not have a place to sleep. And he was in really rough shape.
And I ran out after him. I talked to him, and he told me what’s going on in his life. He’s like, “Yeah, my father dealt with this mental illness. It can be hereditary, but I don’t have enough money to go get tested. But I think that I have the same thing. I’m really struggling. I don’t really know what to do. I’m trying to figure out how I can get to Indiana, where I have a group of friends, and they told me that the healthcare system there is better, and I could maybe get help.”
And it just broke my heart so wide open, it tore me up because this guy was such a beautiful person in our childhood. He still is such a beautiful person. And he’s really struggling to just get simple help, just get care from his people, from his world. And I realized in that moment, oh, this song is not for me. I’m doing pretty okay. And so that was a good lesson, that timing. But yeah, it’s just, I think that the time we live in, the world we live in, we’re so isolated. We’re so separate, so easy to fall into the illusion that we’re alone, and that we’re not connected to each other. We’re not interconnected in one fabric. It’s so easy to go along with pretending that we’re all separate, that we don’t need each other, that we’re just islands. And that’s what that song is about.
One Drop
Ryan and his wife Lauren moved to Tucson, Arizona, where she’s from, a few years back. I was on a house show tour, me and my dog, and we stopped in to visit them for a little bit. And they showed me around the desert. I was amazed. I feel like I had never gotten the beauty and spirit of the desert before that trip. And I saw something in the desert that was so amazing to me that I hadn’t seen before, which is, it’s so incredible what life does in the desert. With just a tiny drop of water, it can create life, it’s amazing what plants do, what animals do to survive – and with not being provided that much easy sustenance, hardly any at all.
Lucky
Sometimes I’m reluctant to share the story of where this song came from, because I don’t know that it’s entirely accurate to what the song is, where it ended up, because I didn’t write it. It’s the one song ever in our Blind Pilot history that I didn’t write on my own. It was a collaborative effort with Luke and Katie, and we were, one stormy night in Astoria. I was hanging out at their house, and we decided to play a drawing game called Immaculate Corpse, where one person draws up the head, another person draws a body, another person draws the legs, and you don’t see the other person’s thing until it, until you see it all together. And it’s like, oh, what a funny figure this is, it has polka dot legs and strange torso.
And we decided to do that with songwriting: “So let’s just think of a theme to write on. We’ll hold a melody and let’s go our separate ways and write versus, and then come back together and see what happens.” So the whole thing was written in, I think three rounds of 15 minutes. And we, it was just for fun. We weren’t expecting it to be a song that we would keep. But the theme was, there was this really strange occurrence happening in Astoria at the time, which there was an arsonist lighting fire to houses, and it was terrifying. Just going around to neighborhoods and, it was such a scary idea, while you’re sleeping, you could wake up to your house being on fire. And I said, well, I was really interested in why would someone do that? What would drive someone to, do that? Just such random, horrific violence. It’s easy to just dismiss it as a pyromaniac and just totally messed up, but I just wondered the ‘why’ of it for that person. I know it’s madness… in there’s no why for that violence, but I was interested in exploring the mindset of a person like that. And I imagined a person, when I wrote, so we each took turns with the verses and then I wrote the chorus there too.
We were in the middle of the game, and I said, ‘Wait a second, hold on.’ And I just went in the next room and I felt this chorus coming through, and it came. To me, that sentiment is like, if I’m not accepted as part of society, if I’m not accepted as a valuable member, and I’m being told that nobody cares about me, then I don’t care about anybody else either. That was the sentiment as it came through. For me, it’s a pretty dark sentiment, but I find some hope in it. I find some hope in the compassion for understanding where people come from when they are driven to violence. It’s not because that’s the natural course of the human condition. It’s because of the sickness we share as a society. And I think there’s hope for me in taking responsibility for that.
Bitter Water
I have a tendency to be an intensely nostalgic person. And it makes sense ’cause I love story. I love holding meaning of story. And I have a general sense of longing for the sweetness of connection. And I think ultimately nostalgia exists in this realm of recognizing that sweetness of connection that you held in the past that you won’t hold again. But really just my freaking iPhone showing me pictures from years ago. And it just being such a trigger; why would you show me that? Look how happy I am there at that time, and I’m never gonna be there again.
And that’s lost now. And why would you do this to me? I hate this. That experience started that song, but really, I guess it went into introspection about what I ultimately feel about nostalgia about old photos about the reason I don’t really want to be shown random old photos by my phone is just because I don’t think I need them. I think that it’s so much better to be present in this moment and looking forward where we’re going. I think somewhere in that song is a wrestling with feelings of aging as well, and in a world that overly romanticizes youth and gives too much credit to youth. That’s a part of it too. It’s a love-hate song to my iPhone.
Believe Me
The significance of this song came to me after I wrote it, after we recorded it when I was listening back. I knew that it held a charge. I knew that it held certain expression, but I didn’t really understand what it meant to me personally until that moment. It came to me almost fully formed in a dream I had, where I was part of, I was in a congregation of new age hippie, kind people around. And Ram Dass was playing guitar and singing to us. [laughs] And he was singing that song and it was the song when I woke up, I knew it was a song about the sameness of everything the dark and the light, the good and the bad. It’s all that, an illusion that we’re not the same thing and we’re not all speaking the same thing.
That’s what I thought that song was about and I thought, well, I remembered that he was, the things he was, listing. It was a list of all the elements of small and large in the universe and the world. It seemed random, the randomness was the significance. So I thought, okay, I’m just gonna come up with 50 random couplets of random things that just popped into my head. And it was really just stream of consciousness, a meditative state on my deck, looking out into the woods and just writing everything that came just as fast as I could. And then at the end of this long list, I took my favorite lines and I cut them up, from, I had a typewriter. I cut them up with scissors and in literally 10, 15 minutes, I just arranged them into what felt kind of a story and said, okay, good.
That’s the song and then had to learn how to memorize a random order of lines that were cut up and arranged. And it’s so funny because after we mastered the album and I was listening back, this was the song that felt the most significant to me personally I hear my grandfather and my grandmother, their wounds that my family still holds. I hear my own wounds in my life that I hold. I hear, the story of, my family and I didn’t, it’s so funny ’cause it’s just funny what our brains, what our minds can do. Because I called up my sister, I was deeply affected by it – I could hear all this story of ancestral lines. I hear my own story within the context of my family, the things I still am carrying that are my own and also are passed down.
And I called my sister and I said, “Hannah maybe this song is about this and this.” And she said, “Well, of course. That’s what I thought when you first shared it with me. Really, you didn’t know that that’s what that song is about?” Of course! It was a really wonderful and strange experience to write that song in such a random way and then hear the message that I was trying to get told to me after going through the whole process of learning it with the band and touring it and recording it and all the times that I played it, and then finally just heard it at the end.
It had the feeling of, at the end of a book, my favorite kind of endings of the books are where it simultaneously brings in a meaning to each part, but also holding mystery not where it’s just pat and this is what the book is about and now you’ve read it. But just it’s an embracing of the many elements, but holding still a respect for the mystery of it. And that song just, it feels like that to me. A lot of the other songs I hear as part of it, and it has a simplicity, but with its intention of incorporating the many random elements of this life, it has this bigger perspective feel.
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