Blind Pilot (Oregon)

If you search the web and check out Blind Pilot’s Facebook page, you’ll see increasingly plaintive and unanswered questions from everywhere that ask: “When are you going to play [insert my town]?”

Well, for those within earshot, we can happily break the news that in July of 2015 one of Portland’s favourite bands, Blind Pilot, will be performing live at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival. Tell your friends – Facebook and real-life!

Yes, from the musical hotbed that is Oregon’s biggest city comes both a critic’s darling and an indie fan favourite.

Blind Pilot’s homespun folk-rock sound captured imaginations and introduced the world to an important new songwriter, lead singer Israel Nebeker, whose fresh approach to literate chamber-pop music was both emotional and impressionistic. Newer songs ranged from funky to energetically drum-heavy to traditionally folky, but always featured the same Blind Pilot-esque, storytelling sound that continues to attract listeners. 

They starting as a duo doing a West Coast US tour on bikes in 2008, and expanded to a sextet doing a West Coast tour on bikes – and national momentum was built. Their non-stop schedule only picked up steam with the release of We Are The Tide in 2011. Along the way, one of their songs was picked as iTunes Single of the Week, NPR did a story and named one of their albums to their yearly Top 10, appeared on Letterman and on Ellen DeGeneres’s 2013 birthday show as her favourite band, and toured Europe and the US, sometimes in their robin egg blue van.

So we wait with eager anticipation the next page in Blind Pilot’s story – coming in July to a Jericho Beach folk festival near you!