Interview with Blind Pilot’s Ryan Dobrowski

by Sarah Crisman

Rising Portland-based band Blind Pilot stops by The Granada on Wednesday with The Low Anthem. The tour arrives on the heels of their full-length debut, 3 Rounds and a Sound (Expunged Records), which earned the band performances on NPR's Morning Edition and All Songs Considered. I caught up with Blind Pilot's Ryan Dobrowski before they launched their national tour.

Are you in Portland at the moment?

Yeah, we're just tying up the loose ends before the tour. It's kind of exciting, really.

That is exciting – are you bringing the bikes with you this time, or just going in the van?

We're in a van. There's not quite enough space for the bikes, what with all the gear. It's a pretty tight fit. We recently purchased a bus that we're getting converted to bio-diesel, and the conversion wasn't quite ready for this tour, so we're in the van for this tour. The bus is with the idea that we'll be able to bring bikes on tour and we'll be able to have a kitchen space and cook our own meals and not always have to eat at gas stations along the way.

You get to know the barbecue joints around the country pretty well that way.

Definitely.

You toured down the West Coast on bicycles – you wanted to originally go from Vancouver to Mexico, but ran into some issues on the way.

Yeah, we definitely had some issues on the first one. It's part of the reason we're in the van now. Things just sort of happened, we got dropped off in Vancouver and didn't really have a plan. Or maps, even, to get out of Vancouver. It was pretty tough going at first. There was one point where we almost went separate ways. Israel wanted to start riding north again, and I wanted to head in the direction of the goal, at least. Obviously we ended up sticking together and it worked out until we got to San Francisco and our bikes were stolen. It was a sad end to a pretty amazing trip. It was kind of fitting in a way. It was a bit of a shock; you get attached to your bike when you're with it so many hours a day.

I can imagine. Was it just the two of you at that point? You're a much bigger band now than you were back then.

There are a lot of us in the band now, but the project started with just Israel and I. We had played together when we were in college and spent a summer in England just playing in the streets. We reconnected when we got back to Portland and got back into that style of playing where it was just stripped down to us. There wasn't really a music scene to put the music against, it was just us. The traveling aspect of it was really important to us. I had the idea to do a bike tour just a couple years before I decided to ride my bike out to the Oregon post from my home in Eugene. That was an amazing time. It was always in the back of my head that I wanted to do another trip, and if I could bring music then it would be the best of both worlds. I brought it up to Israel when we started playing together, since he was into biking as well. It quickly became what the whole project was about.

Do you feel it changed the dynamic of the band by going through that intense experience?

It shaped everything we're doing now, because that's where we started. That quality of life may seem hard for a lot of people, but it was so rewarding in a day. Even when we can't find a show, and we're just playing to a small room who weren't even there to listen to music. But it was so fulfilling and rewarding because we've just ridden 60 miles down the coast and you can feel that in your body. It's really simple, but quite great. We're trying to adjust things accordingly now to cover more ground. We need to be in a vehicle, but being in a van is not nearly as inspiring as being on a bike.

It says a lot about the instrumental arranging and the dynamic of your band that you were able to go from a two-piece to a nine-piece band. That your music lends itself to such instrumentation really speaks volumes.

Israel and I will from time to time just step back and be blown away by how this project started with just the two of us, and now it's turned into what it is and we have all these great musicians playing with us. It's all happened very naturally; we've never had to force anything, or get desperate over anything. We just hear these songs and all these parts and went into the recording studio with all these people and it just kind of clicked. We didn't set out to be a giant band.

It just blossomed into this; lovely. Well, we look forward to seeing you at The Granada.