Talk to enough songwriters and you’ll hear a common refrain: They’re not quite sure where their songs come from. Call it divine inspiration, putting in your 10,000 hours or just being in the right place at the right time. The point is: These songs come from someplace beyond them.
Blind Pilot’s Israel Nebeker counts himself among this class of songwriter. After three acclaimed albums and a network of fans around the world, songwriting doesn’t always come easy. It’s outside of him.
The Astoria-based, folk/pop four-piece’s last record came out in 2016, and the band toured heavily through 2017. In the subsequent years, the live gigs slowed to a trickle. Sure, there was a global pandemic thrown in there, but the band also didn’t have any new material to tour behind. Nebeker, the group’s sole songwriter, was facing a serious writer’s block.
“I wanted to be writing the next album. I knew everybody was waiting on me,” both the band and fans, “but they [songs] just didn’t want to come,” he tells. “I tried a lot of different things — reading books on writer’s block and creative process and going to therapy — and all of that was helpful, but it didn’t shift until I just said, ‘OK, the one thing that I’m scared to admit is that the reason that the songs don’t want to come through is because their destination isn’t the best place for them anymore.'”
During these eight years, couple and songwriting duo Luke Ydstie and Kati Claborn released a slew of recordings as The Hackles. Drummer Ryan Dobrowski joined them and a few other pals for a one-off album as Hook & Anchor, plus he also spent considerable time painting and focusing on his fine art career. (He’s created the band’s artwork, T-shirts and posters over the years.) This left Nebeker on an island, a heavy obligation hanging over his head.
“It just felt like my duty was to create the commodity, like more merchandise for our band to sell. It has become this successful thing, and we need the product. And that felt pretty bad,” Nebeker said.
“Also, I had some work to do on myself as a person. The breakthrough was when I said, ‘OK, I’m just going to write a solo album and see how that goes.’ And immediately the songs started coming.” He wrote a solo album, traveled to New York and recorded it with producer Josh Kaufman (The National, Bonny Light Horseman, Josh Ritter).
But before he did that, “I made a deal with myself: ‘OK, I’m gonna go record this album as a solo album,’ which I’ve never done professionally before, and then ‘I’ll come back and I’ll write the next Blind Pilot album in a month. Whatever comes through, that’ll be the album.” It worked.
“Surprisingly, it was one of my favorite songwriting processes, and it came through really, really fast after, like, five years of waiting,” he laughs.
Released almost eight years to the day after, “And Then Like Lions,” Blind Pilot’s fourth record, “In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain” (also recorded by Kaufman in New York) is equal parts jubilation and relief — an exhalation that sees the longtime band back in full, buoyant form over 11 well-crafted tracks inspired by Nebeker’s memories and ancestral lines, subconscious connections with the objects and spirits that tie him to his past.
As Nebeker wrote online the day the album dropped: “The way we recorded this album was with the utter joy of exploration, the yes of appreciation for one another, and more love than I’ve ever felt in a studio before. It’s our favorite album that we’ve made, and we are so excited to share it with you today.”
Nebeker jokes about the album now. “It means a lot to me that my band waited all those years, and they didn’t say, ‘Hey, man, I don’t think you’re ever gonna write the next album.'”
To be fair, those “five years of waiting” were not just idle time. Nebeker’s great grandmother was Sámi, a semi-nomadic “reindeer people” indigenous to northern Scandinavia, and he visited Norway to retrace her steps. Seeking to reconnect with his roots while there, a Sámi shaman took him on a drum journey, inviting Nebeker to listen for his ancestors.
A vision came and “involved my most immediate ancestors beckoning me along a path that went straight into a mountain,” he says, “and I knew right then that the mountain represented the origins of all of us,” thus christening this long-awaited effort, “In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain.”
The Sámi people call songs yoiks, “and they regard them as their own spiritual entity, with its own desire to come through,” Nebeker explains. “Some people bring through more yoiks than others, and that’s recognized by the community. It’s more held as a concept of: This can come through anyone and it’s for the community.
“A good example of this is, in that culture, everyone has their own yoik. It’s their own melody that’s given to them at some point in their life, usually early in life, and that’s your melody. People only sing it when you’re coming up big in conversation, or they’re really missing you, or maybe they see you coming from far off they might yoik your yoik. That’s a thing that everyone’s given, but it’s really undefined, like how that happens. It’s not necessarily given by your parents or by the main yoiker of the community. It’s just known that your yoik will come — it’ll come through maybe a friend or a relative or a parent — but it will come to you.
“Because they hold it really loosely like this, they don’t talk about it. They don’t describe it as a craft, like you don’t write a song. It just comes through, and you listen to it and you hear it and then bring it. This concept resonates with me far more than how we talk about music, and it always has. So that was a trip to go there and learn this. It made me feel very connected to those ancestral roots
“When I talk about these concepts that I’m learning from Sámi culture with most of my songwriting friends, they get it. It’s like, ‘Yeah, of course. That’s how it is.’ We don’t really talk about it that way in our culture.”
From a band that started because Nebeker and Dobrowski “were into cycling and we wanted to ride our bikes down the coast and we wanted to bring music with us,” Nebeker says, “I do feel that this album reset that tone for us in a similar way, where it just has this spirit of adventure.”
After a long wait, Nebeker found his voice again by masterfully embracing the worlds beyond his control.
“My band was in a kind of a hard spot — I was in a hard spot — and I got a lot of help from my ancestors to break out of that and be on a new path that has felt really bright,” he reflects. “[I was] really helped by them along the way.”
This article appears in Source Weekly October 31, 2024.
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