Hugging Highway 1: Blind Pilot’s Bicycle Tours

NPR Morning Edition’s Ari Shapiro provides the below:

The band Blind Pilot literally rode a pair of bicycles to success. The folk-pop outfit, formed by singer-guitarist Israel Nebeker and drummer Ryan Dobrowski, has taken two bike tours, playing its music all along the West Coast. The first of these two tours was supposed to run from Vancouver all the way down to the Mexican border. Unfortunately, the trip was cut short when the band’s bikes were stolen outside San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art.

“It was a fine ending to that tour,” Nebeker tells Morning Edition’s Ari Shapiro. “Ryan took it a bit harder than me.”

“Yeah, because Israel got his bike back,” Dobrowski says. “He found it on Craigslist for sale, so he bought it back for like $50, and I lost my bike forever.”

They recently finished a second bike tour with a couple of additional bandmates, hugging Highway 1 down the coastline. One of their most memorable scenes occurred at a tiny grocery store in Leggett, Calif. As the group played, a crowd began to gather around it, including a handful of unexpected onlookers.

“It was great, because all these truckers said that they’d seen us for the last few days,” Dobrowski says. “We were playing music and having beers at this little grocery in the middle of the woods.”

Finish story here.