Blind Pilot
A Burst Into The Upward Reaches
Jul 15, 2009
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Go On, Say It
original version appears on 3 Rounds And A Sound
This was the first song I wrote when Ryan and I started playing together again, and it always reminds me of a rainy time in late Portland winter, playing music in Ryan's basement bedroom, and scheming for what would be our first bike tour. The song is definitely about leaving and watching important things leave. It's definitely about the pushing/pulling still sensation that is the moment you still have the past in front of you, but the future is making itself very real as you move toward it. I painted houses at this time and on the trips that I couldn't make on a bike, I'd share van rides with another painter -- a wonderful old addict from New York who whistled and danced in his old sagging coveralls as he rolled on the paint. He had painted his whole life and he was one of my favorite people -- my savior at a job I couldn't love and also my deterrent from painting my whole life like him. Come to think of it now, this song could easily be about him as much as me. I don't have a daughter. I never was on this drive, leaving a family behind. I never saw him eat anything but wonder-bread bologna sandwiches and he thought there were ghosts living in his van. Whenever we went through certain open fields of Portland, his van would start to sing and speak in one of the strangest ways I've ever heard -- not through the speakers. The painting van would somehow pick up stray radio-waves and actually conduct the sound through the stripped-down metal casing we were riding in. I didn't have the heart to tell him it wasn't ghosts.
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I Buried A Bone
original version appears on 3 Rounds And A Sound
I still have a hard time making sense of this one. I don't know completely what the song means and a few people have told me strongly what it MUST mean. I can't say any of them are wrong.
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3 Rounds And A Sound
original version appears on 3 Rounds And A Sound
We decided to change up the instrumentation completely while recording this song at Daytrotter. It might be the only song we've done where I don't play guitar. Ian helped Ryan on the tom tom and I picked out the chords on a ukulele.
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The Story I Heard
original version appears on 3 Rounds And A Sound
I broke a string so I perused through the many lovely electric guitars at Daytrotter and ended up playing the song that way, on an electric. Jo Jo is a man from Jamaica that got me to sing Bobby McFerrin with him at the top of our lungs while I waited for a bus in Portland that would take me to my waiting-tables job. He was homeless and I only saw him once again, when he didn't remember me but thanked me for knowing his name. It took me a long time before I realized this song was something about judgment. By that time I was living in Astoria and I was walking on the train tracks, just thinking about this man and me and just walking and walking until before I knew it I was miles outside of town, in the woods on these tracks. I put something together and the whole rest of the song came flooding in until it was finished there, and I balanced all the parts and words in my head and on the tracks until I got back to my typewriter in Astoria.
Israel Nebeker, the lead singer of Portland, Oregon, band Blind Pilot makes me think often of the dangling string of a balloon bursting away from an unwilling, recently disappointed hand, racing toward the heavens as if there were a fire. The string becomes the thickness of a thread and then as thick as a period, then diminishes into nothing while the vibrant solid color of the escaping, round balloon remaining something that can be picked out of the air, still spotted up there as it nears the clouds close enough without actually getting to them. The string and its toting vessel get higher and higher in the sky, meeting with these new heights bluer and bluer colors and brighter and brighter lights, perfectly clear air. It's this drifting, out-of-control sensation of not being able to keep itself on the ground that Nebeker and his long-time collaborator/drummer Ryan Dobrowski seem to keep insisting in their music. It's helpless and it's also enjoying the ability to just free themselves from squirming, from fighting the journey and just burying themselves in the idyllic scenery that most would pay good money to experience. The skin on your arms starts warm and quickly appreciates and shivers from the brisker temperatures that soon turn icy and that's when the goose bumps get spooked out of the temperamental covering. Blind Pilot music is full of exhilarated weariness and the kinds of detailed insights into the subconscious and all of the other hidden regions of the mind and heart, the places that are full of whispers and the most impacting truths and discoveries. It makes you feel as if you're suffering from something pleasant or mistakenly pleasant, as if there's no real understanding about how you're supposed to feel about all of the little miseries and disappointments that are really just spices - the parts of the stories that everyone finds most interesting and provocative. "3 Rounds And A Sound" is a record that woos you with the same kinds of wounded, but walking tales of those various people who have no time table - they're willing to just go along with the winds and find themselves in whatever place, whatever bed and home, whatever emotion that should happen to them, for whatever reason. It doesn't mean that any of it needs to be overreacted to, but instead just dealt with and observed from a sort of protective distance and with a clear head about the greater picture even if that picture is scattered and squiggly lines. When Nebeker sings, "We were nothing more than caught up in our own lives honey, honey," it's both a good thing and a regrettable thing, as if the obliviousness and the focus are detrimental and entirely healthy, depending on who all is stuck in the web. It's possible to find oneself in a situation like this and it's possible to be lost, but there's still no substitute to getting to a point where troubles seem inconsequential and all that matters are the finer points. There's a lot of nonchalant mystery surrounding all of Nebeker's lyrics, which make up wonderful tales of people interacting and diving into each other's business in all kinds of ways, letting the results splash largely or lightly upon themselves. It's all meaningful interaction and it's growth and substance that makes a person more interesting and more worthwhile as a dinner guest, even if it's as a mysterious dinner guest, with eyes that tell so much in divulging so little.
Blind Pilot Official Site
Blind Pilot MySpace Page
