Blind Pilot is a band of well-worn shoes, figuratively and literally. Their songs are the stories of seekers and lovers setting off down long, dirt roads, passing under hanging stars, tramping wooded hills and curling up beside welcome campfires or beneath piled blankets. They are songs with an earned grace and lessons as dear to the heart as capillaries funneling hot blood to the brain and limbs. Most Blind Pilot songs start softly – acoustic picking, Israel Nebeker’s easy, endearing vocals, a toe-tapping rhythm – and casually build to a gentle chug, like a dependable train pushing across the immense, American landscape. Soon come the full band harmonies belted out soulfully but not showily. It’s from-the-heart music meant to love on first listen and for faraway, changing times.

Like an obvious influence, Paul Simon (not to mention Simon and Garfunkel), and one of the year’s current buzz bands, The Head and The Heart, Blind Pilot play a brand of music about as far away from hipness as a young band can when finding an audience. They bear no pretensions. Take note of “Oviedo” and “Half Moon” here: what you hear on this session is what you get live and on record. These are gentle songs with sophistication and rewarding harmony that will stick in your head and beg for repeat listening again and again through the coming weeks and months.

Blind Pilot built a small, adoring fan base a few years back in no small part thanks to their particular live ethic, bicycling from town to town playing gorgeous folk Americana and earning word-of-mouth praise. They recorded this session on a recent November Saturday in the endearing confines of The Earth House in Indianapolis, where they played a full set that same evening. The Earth House, a past church complete with old, wood floors, a towering ceiling, muted lighting and a prevailing hallowed aura is perhaps the most ideal setting for Blind Pilot’s comfortable, tender sound.

I first saw them in a no less welcoming, if less sacrosanct, venue a few years back on a different, far more frigid November evening at the Mercy Lounge in Nashville, TN on the first day of a new stretch of my life. It was November 4, and I had every last belonging I couldn’t do without packed into my Sonata as I set forth westward to my invigorating, still unknown home in Austin, TX.

I had been obsessed with Blind Pilot’s debut 3 Rounds and A Sound for much of that year; Israel Nebeker’s words had flooded my mind almost daily with ease. At the time, I was fighting day 9 of a dominating pneumonia and suffering from coughing fits by the minute with a 20 hour drive still ahead of me en route to my new home. I made my first priority to see Blind Pilot live on night one of my journey, and I vividly remember every detail of the night: the pneumatic agony, the brutal midnight cold, me holed up in the front seat with a flashlight and a novel, fighting the conditions until the Cannery bars opened. I remember how Blind Pilot’s ensuing set made me feel totally at home in a foreign town, able to fight the weakness and forget the terrible discomfort in my chest and be wholly in love with what was ahead. “Oviedo” (sounding as glorious in this session as it did then) and “3 Rounds and a Sound” had been my favorites and were thankfully astonishing that night. The song that has stuck with me to this day though was the majestic elegance of their cover of Gillian Welch’s “Look at Miss Ohio”. Blind Pilot in those 5 minutes is still one of the most memorable live performances I’ve enjoyed in the years and hundreds of shows since.

Now, the lyrics of “Half Moon” strike me just as urgently:

I chalked a line south down the coast going where my thirst was open for the things I don’t know, going where I wasn’t paying for the hurt that I owed… It’s not hard to live like a ghost. I just haunt all that I’ve wanted and leave what I don’t… Hold high how faint your reasons, don’t forget you come from nothing. That wind is calling my name. I won’t wait or I’ll never get on.

I adore this band. I hope, if you don’t already, you come to now thanks to this session.

Recorded and Mixed by Jeff DuPont
Filmed and Edited by Daniel Arthur
Written by Justin Wesley

MP3 Downloads
Blind Pilot - Half Moon
Blind Pilot - Oveido