It has been almost exactly eight years since Oregon-based indie-folk band Blind Pilot released an album—but not for lack of trying.

Frontman and songwriter Israel Nebeker spent much of that time battling a gnarly case of writer’s block. He didn’t compose so much as a verse for years.

“It was an absolute struggle. It was a pretty dark time. I think any kind of artist struggles with this [idea that] if you’re making, you’re an artist. If you’re not, then who in the world are you?” he said from his home in Astoria. “I was reading books on creative flow … and therapy and trying everything I could.”

Turns out Nebeker—who co-founded Blind Pilot with Ryan Dobrowski nearly two decades ago—just needed to open a second channel for his songs, reimagine and reconstruct his band’s creative workflow, and overhaul the atmosphere that had developed around the project.

To understand how he got there, we have to back up to 2019, when Nebeker holed up at a friend’s yurt in New York and wrote a bunch of songs he believed would eventually comprise a Blind Pilot album. At the same time, Blind Pilot was changing in a way that is very common among long-running bands.

“When we started, [we] were all living in the same city. We were rehearsing a few times a week. We were playing shows wherever we could get them. There was a camaraderie that came with … doing it together,” Nebeker said.

“But life changes and grows. People have kids. They move across the country. They get interested in other projects or careers. Which is how it should be, you know?” he continued. “But because everybody has other things going on, it started to feel more and more like, ‘I don’t know how much this really feels like a band anymore.’”

Meanwhile, Nebeker was toiling away, trying to write a new album to follow the first three, which attracted critical praise and legions of fans far beyond the west coast. (They famously toured by bicycle in their early days.) The band’s dynamic felt imbalanced—at no fault of any one person, it should be noted—and that effected Nebeker’s songwriting.

Then, one morning last summer, he had an epiphany: He could smooth out all of the band’s issues, he believed, by turning the songs he’d written into his first solo album, then writing new songs for a Blind Pilot album very quickly, with a looser, less meticulous approach.

“It was a strange idea, because it took me like five years to write one, so why would I think I could do another in a month?” he said. “But the idea persisted, and I went for it, and it somehow freed me up tremendously … to let the band be its own living, breathing entity and let it guide the way rather than me being protective of these songs.”

That shift in thinking has changed the dynamic of Blind Pilot “in a beautiful way,” Nebeker said, as he has leaned into the communal aspect of the band and the contributions of Dobrowski, bassist Luke Ydstie, and multi-instrumentalist Kati Claborn.

The fruits of that month-long writing spurt can be found on Blind Pilot’s new album In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain, which comes out Friday, August 16 on ATO Records.

Eleven tracks long, it features all the elements that make the band special: Warm blankets of acoustic guitars; memorable melodies, and sumptuous harmonies. Nebeker’s reflective lyrics and wholehearted approach to songwriting provide just enough punch to put the “rock” in folk-rock when the time is right.

In other words, Holy Mountain sounds like Blind Pilot—rested and revitalized with new energy and a fresh perspective.

“We haven’t been this excited to put out an album since our first one,” Nebeker said. “I don’t know that we’ve ever had as much fun putting one together, and we all feel great about it. We can’t wait for it to be out in the world.”

---

Blind Pilot plays Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi on Fri Aug 16, 8 pm, SOLD OUT, 21+ and will hold an in-store signing and performance at Music Millennium on Sun Aug 18, 3 pm, FREE, all ages.