For 11 years, Seattle singer-songwriter David Bazan wove desperate tales of death, deception, and occasional joy under the name Pedro the Lion. Recently named one of the “Top 100 Living Songwriters” by Paste magazine, Bazan’s often ironic narratives on faith, hypocrisy, and social justice frequently gain him comparisons with legendary author Flannery O’Connor. Over the course of their history, Pedro the Lion rose to indie rock royalty, seamlessly shifting gears between slow, acoustic hymns and loud, catchy anthems of modern discontent.
In January, Bazan officially laid to rest the Pedro moniker after the amicable departure of Tim Walsh, the only other member in the constantly rotating lineups of both Pedro the Lion and Headphones (a keyboard-based band formed in 2004 which Bazan also fronts) still standing. Bazan’s newly self-released EP, Fewer Moving Parts, is the first to use his own name, and may be his best songwriting to date. Containing five songs performed in two different arrangements – one acoustic, one with full instrumentation – Fewer Moving Parts will have to tide fans over until his full length solo debut, tentatively due next year on Jade Tree Records.
Whereas his earlier albums sought to communicate very specific messages, Bazan has relaxed this approach in recent years, as evidenced by the comparatively looser feel to Pedro the Lion’s final LP, Achilles Heel (Jade Tree, 2004). Purposefully crafting work to convey one particular meaning is “just the opposite of what I think attempting to make art is about,” Bazan said in the Food for Thought café of Washington, D.C.’s Black Cat club before a June show.
Bazan, clad in his unchanging attire of a black t-shirt and jeans, said he started to learn this after the release of Pedro the Lion’s Winners Never Quit (Jade Tree, 2000) – which he calls his “attempt at taking a shot at the … so-called righteous establishment” – and while writing PTL’s Control (Jade Tree, 2002) following Seattle’s turbulent World Trade Organization protests in 1999. After reading up on the WTO and globalization, Bazan decided he would “make just an overtly political record. And then, as I started getting into it, I realized, ‘Well, that’s not a really good way to go about doing anything. I know that I care about this stuff a lot. I’ll just go ahead and write songs and let my subconscious sort it out.’” These days, said Bazan, he doesn’t “set out to hit a particular mark.”
“I started to put a lot more stock in the idea of writing being a process of discovery rather than a process of communicating some concrete idea that you have,” Bazan said between sips of Heineken. “I believe that if there’s something that I feel strongly [about], that it’ll find its way out in the most appropriate way that I couldn’t hope to manipulate. That stuff tends to come out automatically in a lot more pleasing nature.”
Bazan’s desire to leave some breathing room for the meanings of his songs may stem from the negative feedback he received about his writing when he was younger, particularly from Christians. Much of the discomfort with his work stems from the sincerity with which his first-person fictional narratives are written, even when the narrators display despicable behavior. “The tendency toward dark subject matter and sort of morbid evaluation of things has always been with me,” said Bazan, “but I was just – up until a certain point - afraid to really express it. I had a lot of people giving me their opinions about it: ‘This is kind of what we think you should be doing.’ That pressure still was there and it still was informing.” In response, Bazan said he “actively tried to write happy songs. Even the songs that I was writing earlier on, they were just saying, ‘Well, where is this coming from? Shouldn’t you be writing happy songs?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know. Maybe I should.’”
After failed attempts at lighter subject matter, Bazan settled on songs that might sound happy, but navigate bleak thematic terrain. “I like writing really nice, kind of up tempo, like, poppy sounding songs with a real sort of dark lyrical content to it,” said Bazan. “That’s just so pleasing to me.”
Still, a continued thread in all of his work is hope in spite of - or because of - bleakness. “There’s something about calling a spade a spade that is satisfying, and I think puts you at peace with your surroundings,” Bazan said, citing the denial and escapism he feels is embedded in Western culture. “Knowing how things are and stating it plainly as you understand it and not hiding anything, being transparent yourself and wanting, you know, the dynamics of culture and politics and situations to be transparent to you … to me, that’s the process of attaining some peace,” even in the midst of a seemingly hopeless scenario, said Bazan.
The desire to reflect truth as he sees it rather than the expectations of fellow parishioners has made Bazan the subject of both controversy and titillation in the “Christian rock” world. The new book Body Piercing Saved My Life: Inside the Phenomenon of Christian Rock (Da Capo Press) began as a Washington Post article by author Andrew Beaujon about Cornerstone, one of the largest Christian arts festivals in the country, and dealt heavily with the line between the sacred and the profane that Bazan seems to walk in his music and personality. While performing Pedro the Lion’s “Foregone Conclusions,” a bouncy, twangy narrative on fundamentalism and the assumptions people make, the crowd goes wild when Bazan curses on stage, Beaujon writes, highlighting the tension Bazan has known throughout his career. The same aspects of his work which many - Christian or not - find exciting are a cause of outrage for others.
The longstanding “Question and Answer” portion of his live show, which allows for ongoing dialogue between the listeners and the performer, has been important to Bazan throughout his career, perhaps in part because it allows for misunderstandings and assumptions – say, about his role in Christian music – to be cleared up. “In Christianity, it’s real easy to get away with not paying attention, because everything’s based on sort of this stamp of approval system,” Bazan said carefully about the Christian music industry. “A lot of progressive things aren’t going to work for that business because the dynamics there have everything to do with the Christian bookstore owners and the potential complainers,” said Bazan, mentioning specifically the threat that some Christians have felt his work to be. “Ultimately, unfortunately, I think transparency in general is threatening to that … way of thinking. It’s a sad cycle to me. I just wish that people didn’t have to live with that.”
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