THE BOY PILOT BLOG

To surrender

2010-02-14T21:54:00.000-08:00

I'm listening to a song from a new record called "I Surrender". It's a beautiful mix of emotion and spirit. It encompasses, for me, the three parts necassary to piece together anything honest: 1. heartbreak 2. worship and 3. vengeance. Ahh so frequently these three will work in tandem or in hostility to one another, vengeance leads to heart break, heart break leads to worship, and so on cyclically and cyclically until they form something new every time, like throwing 52 playing cards off a balcony, like tossing paint around an empty, dry wall; this is how it feels to write songs. And they hurt and they cut deep to be made. But they are beautiful, refined pieces of gold when they are complete. We (BOY PILOT) are making this record. Every week we go in and press record; we are never sure what the outcome will be, but we go in unabashed and unashamed. There are feelings then that tug at the heart, feelings that make you want to prove yourself to the world. Feelings that want the people who God placed on your path, hear the cry of your heart, to have your hearts cry out together. I have this dream sometimes, this image in my head; it's of me and this other person, this person is broken and weeping and looking to the sky, I am unsure what to do so I just place my hand on their face and cry with them, shed tears and I don't even know what for. It's a vision I have often, it reccurs to me when I see the homeless, it recurs to me when I hear about a 13 yr old person getting sexually transmitted sickness, it recurs to me when I hear someone talk about buying things that will hurt them, when I see women and men looking for love in one another and finding only heart ache and then, nothing but argument. This vision occurs a lot and I don't quite know how to remedy it. Music is like the tune that keeps the demons away, keeps the monsters at bay, but this image still remains when the songs are done, when the stage is cleared. I find myself making inward commitments to the homeless folks I see on the streets. "One day, I am going to find a way to help you with more than just money. One day I am going to help you get a job, find a home, have an honest conversation with you in a warm place of your own, underneath your own beautiful ceiling, help ya have faith again..." One day, one day, one day...When will this day come? When will the power of love diffuse the will to power? I don't know. But mark my words, that day is coming soon. Believe this with me, see this with me and it will happen. Again, the few will be called to change the world and to let the change start with them. A few will reject the modern and twisted interpretation of Adam Smith. A few will actually take the scriptures seriously when they say "the first shall be last and the last shall be first." That song "I Surrender" is still playing in the backdrop of this vision, it helps me make sense of it, helps me work towards it's completion. I pray that is what these songs are to you as well, that they would help you work towards your completion. This is just the beginning, "Day by day, brick by brick," as my friend Mau says, "is how the Great Wall was built". This is true. So for now, we build.

Hidden, Broken Circumstances

2010-01-04T01:58:00.000-08:00

Are we awake in the wind? We are such broken people sometimes. Sometimes we bear the weight of circumstances we can not control, like swimmers against hungry seas. I am heart broken most of the time. Oh, how the hurricane of money has ripped us from our families and our passions. Oh! How the love of money has ripped us apart...Oh! How the repercussions of an overly ambitious father are felt ten fold by the children! Our hidden, broken circumstances are sold for profits! They are treaded over in the rush to some empty opportunity. God forgive us! Forgive us our greed, My greed. It stings me now to think of it. We are indeed beyond cliche solutions and debates online are we not? What now? What are we when our spending power is exhausted? We are people. servants. children. lovers. fathers. dreamers. thinkers. passionately alive. believers. sinners bought. purposefully redefined and redefining. Does it make any sense to engineer new things that can be crushed and thrown in the wind? We are souls! We are souls! We are souls! we are sold. we are sold. we are sold. We are beautifully designed; we are disgustingly marketed to. Good God I wish not a one was out in this bitter winter cold. I want to do more than wish; I want to work and not profit for a purpose. In our sick world, our abusive, coercive world; am i supposed to be a new voice? Or rather an endless reverberation of the Christ's sermon on the mountain? Imagine the difference that could be made in spirit and in stomach. Let us not imagine for Lennon's time has passed; now we must work. Now what use is anything else in this world if we don't? Find who we are and find what we were called to be? Find humility like a solid gold doorway.

-david j. of BOY PILOT

Intersectionality

2009-12-30T02:32:00.001-08:00

I've been thinking a lot about the intersectionality of people, faith, and politics. No house party, or convention, is complete without the awkward and polemical feelings these types of conversations at times can provoke. I'm up at 5 in the morning reading interviews, articles, philosophy, and scripture, and the right balance within this intersectionality has never seemed so clearly close and so vengefully hidden. We had a concert a couple weeks back for a beautiful place called Covenant House. They are people who care and so we decided to love and support them, even managed to ship off about 20 coats to them just in time for the bitter wind. But a piercing question that keeps me up at night is this: Is it enough? What happens when that coat rips and Paul or Jane or Maria is still on the street? Am I just a band aid pressed firmly against a broken levy? What is left to do? or perhaps to believe? Jesus is such an honest figure. He seems to rise up and out of every lunchbox and picture frame we paint him in, up and out of every thing we've used his name to sell. I want more than what they tell me He is. I do. And so it's Christmas Eve and I'm sitting in the waiting room of a youth shelter biding my time till the head of PR shows up and we can talk. She doesn't show, the front desk tells me she'll be by around 8 for Mass. I tell her ok, thanks. As I sit there stories pile up all around me. People with sons, and vengeful girlfriends, and homeless tears fill the space around me. I'm wearing gloves with holes for the fingers so naturally I feel a bit more like I belong. Some of the guys say hello to me, they seemed so worn down by life but yet they still reached out to me to say hello; I treasure them for that. I drop off the coats and the food and I leave. Irony presses itself on me, bitter sweet painful irony on Christmas Eve. Is it enough? I don't know. I'll do what I can for now.....

-David J. of BOY PILOT

In the Beginning...

2009-07-02T21:12:00.000-07:00

If you're here reading this, you are a devoted BOY PILOT music listener and that's awesome in my opinion. SOO much is going on both seen and unseen; it's hard to even fully capture in one blog post everything. One thing I will say is that we are working towards something that's simliar to a fire through a looking glass. There IS something there like somber glow of things to come. For now we are incredibly grateful for the awesome people who have supported us and have actually shown interest in coming to our shows!...that's means so much to us in so many ways.

There's a feeling that occurs get when one talks about something (or someone) one is in love with. That fire just beyond the looking glass somehow seems so much closer to the heart when we abandon doubt for belief. Everyday BOY PILOT thinks and creates and breathes to do something that will matter in the LONG RUN; to make a difference in the fallen world that will actually point towards Truth. These coded feelings and subtle messages translate into reality in a few ways...hence:

1) BOY PILOT is a band FOR THE PEOPLE!

2) BOY PILOT is a band that loves to connect and work with non-profits who actively seek a better world

3) BOY PILOT owes everything it will ever do to God and His son.

4) BOY PILOT wants to be the kind of band that DOES whatever is needed to meet a need.

5) Finally, BOY PILOT wants to say one day that it helped severely lessen poverty, depression, homelessness, suicide, hunger, and a host of other plagues too ugly to exist in such plentifulness here on Earth. Hows that for big, hairy, and audacious? Eh? Want to help?

ONE DAY, when the fences that contain us are not so HIGH, we will be able to build a house and play a concert the same day, minimizing the difference between the two actions. Linking them in our own little humble way. We thank you for reading and we can't do it without ya...

-dave from BOY PILOT

www.boypilot.com

(shout out to andrew colarusso; his bloggin skills are SICK! It's like he's Guthrie and we're Dylan...)