Oh man can I tell you. This show was like three weeks ago and I'm still in awe of it. So a couple Wednesdays ago I drove up to the city with Kirsten and we saw Blind Pilot at the Great American Music Hall. I was pretty familiar with their album, but it hadn't gotten a lot of rotations until the week before, when we had that record rain storm and I realized that they were the perfect music for such weather.
I don't remember the opening band very well, they were called Mimicking Birds and I wasn't very impressed by the clarinet or the female vocalist. Yes, I'm really harsh on lady singers. I'm sorry, I am. But just wait...
So then Blind Pilot came on and it was pure awesomeness. Israel, the lead singer and guitarist, had such a clean, pure voice. The band was super tight, even with six people on stage: the upright bassist (I think his name was Luke), the trumpet/weird acordian thingy guy, the drummer (Ryan, who founded the band along with Israel), the guy on the glockenspiel (or vibraphone?), Israel, and the girl, who played banjo, ukulele, and sang backup. Now this chick could SING. Her voice was the perfect complement to Israel's, and the whole band just melded so perfectly, and cleanly, and the result was this awesome crispness that you don't always get at live shows.
The songs themselves glimmer so prettily, too. They always seem to transition in the right way at exactly the right moment, and there's this poetry behind them that hits you really quickly, right behind the eyes. It's kind of the same aching beauty as Iron and Wine, but more upbeat.
The crowd was totally digging it, too. There was a section on the right side of the floor that the banjo girl referred to as "the Portland yellow pages," which I guess meant they were a bunch of friends from Portland, since that's where the band is from ("well, we don't own a house there but our mail goes there and a lot of our friends live there," said Luke the Bassist).
There was also a guy behind us who kept whooping at the band. We talked to him before the show, actually, because we were trying to figure out how to get closer to the front, and he was encouraging us to go forward, like "I've seen these guys twice before and they're AWESOME, you're going to love them." He was right, and also definitely a leader in getting the encore going.
The band played all the songs from their album, and they tuned a lot in between. You could tell they felt kind of awkward about it because there was a lot of silence and giggles from them as they tuned. But it was cute and you could definitely hear the reason for the tuning when they started playing again. Before he started "3 Rounds and a Sound," Israel went up to the mic and was like, "I wrote this song when I had just broken up with a girl and was really torn up and broken hearted about it. And now people play it - pretty frequently - at their weddings." Everyone laughed and as he said it I knew what song he was talking about. Hearing them play that song live earned the price of the ticket right there. It's so beautiful and sad and - to use a Salinger word - heartrending.
Then as their encore they played a song called "We Are The Tide" which featured the girl banging on steel drums and this awesome build up. Oh! Also, earlier in the night they did a cover of Gillian Welch's "Look At Miss Ohio" that was absolutely marvelous. Check it.
The night was amazing and it was worth driving a little more than two towns from me and working the next morning on only three hours of sleep to hear them.
But then, of course, I realized they were playing in Santa Cruz the next night, so I dragged Brittany along with me to the Rio Theater and we caught the last half of their set the next night. It was just as beautiful but the crowd was radically smaller and less energetic. It was cool though because they actually came out afterwards to the merch table and I got to talk to the girl and the bassist for a second. Such sweet folks!
See this band if you get the chance. And look up their album. And that should sell you on the whole thing.
