David Bazan has always been one to choose his words carefully. For nearly three decades, he’s chronicled his complicated feelings on faith and growing up in the church, not only in acclaimed indie rock band Pedro The Lion, but also in various side projects as well as his own solo releases. The records he made have always felt like time stamps marking Bazan’s internal turmoil at that moment. But when he revived the Pedro The Lion name for 2019’s Phoenix, it was with a specific end in mind: Write five concept records about each city that he’s lived in, tracing the moments that have brought him to where he is today. Whether it’s lessons he remembers from his father—a music pastor in the evangelical Pentecostal church—or getting his first drum set, discovering underground music, and/or understanding his awkward teenage sexual urges, no gory detail has been spared. This year, Bazan delivers the third installment in this series titled Santa Cruz, a record that spans an entire decade of his life.
A noted perfectionist, Bazan has historically used shame and self-doubt as motivating factors. But this time, he began feeling the pressure he was putting on himself. “I realized this is a broken system,” Bazan recalls. “There was a mean-spirited pressure. So this time, I just thought: ‘You’ve got to find a way to just have fun. This is like your next record. It should be fun to make this thing.’”
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), Cassette, T-Shirt/Shirt,
After years of writing lyrics in cramped practice spaces, Bazan figured out a way to make a new environment to help relieve the tension between him and his ambitions. He created a makeshift writing station for himself, lugging a desk into his bedroom and pointing it directly into a closet, sandwiched between two shelves designated for laundry hampers. Like an isolation booth at Ichiran, the new setup allowed Bazan to cut out all distractions and pinpoint moments of growth in the album’s 11 autobiographical vignettes. “With music, I can be playful,” says Bazan, “With lyrics, I’ve never been able to. The stakes seemed so high. Failure seems so humiliating. This time, I just had a much better vantage point on it all. I could really just start messing around and playing in a less judgmental way, It yielded probably half the lyrics on [Santa Cruz].”
Many pivotal memories were knocked loose during this practice. In the album’s first single “Modesto,” Bazan recalls working as a vacuum cleaner salesman. The position didn’t suit him—“I only sold one/ She couldn’t afford it/ She wrote the check/ And burst out sobbing”—but one day, after asking his co-worker Jim if he knew any cool bands in town, Jim played him Grandaddy’s song “Taster.” Hearing Jason Lytle’s lo-fi pop experimentations inspired Bazan to start writing the material that would become his early Pedro the Lion releases. That story continues in the lively “Spend Time,” where Bazan recalls trying to tell his extended family that he was going to make a run at being a musician. His mother pulled him aside and reassured him that it was okay to chase these natural artistic urges, to not let them be stamped down by the heavy boot of capitalism. In a way, that moment is Pedro The Lion’s origin story.
“It’s pretty easy for me to expose myself in most cases, and certainly in song,” Bazan says. “But when I’m starting to tell somebody else’s story, or how my story reflects on another person, I feel really squeamish. I took a year off from writing Havasu because it reflected on my parents in a way that I didn’t feel comfortable doing. I took a year off to do personal therapeutic work to try to get to a place where I felt comfortable telling my own story. Along with that, I have a strong impulse to want to include moments of grace and the very helpful, supportive, and wise things that my parents did, because it was really important to me. That moment with my mom was huge for me, and I want to give credit to them. Secondarily, I realized that this is the story of me turning the corner and basically starting Pedro, and if there wasn’t some reference to that in this timeline, it just seemed like kind of burying the lede. It all came together and it was driven by that really crucial moment where my mom stuck up for me when I wasn’t able to do it.”
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), Cassette, T-Shirt/Shirt,
Musically, the record is filled with big blasts of analog synth, atop Bazan’s deep-set drumming and guitarist Erik Walters’s wiry leads. It’s a stylistic choice that Bazan feels mimics the urban environment of his time in the Santa Cruz area. After touring the album, Bazan will be putting this project on hold to release a new record by his long-dormant synth rock project Headphones, which included Frank Lenz of Starflyer 59 and T.W. Walsh. When he picks things back up, he will take us to the town of Paradise, California where he spent the following 20 years after his time in Santa Cruz.
“It’s going to be more [about] the promised land of adulthood,” he says. “For a Christian kid, you get to get married, you get to have sex, I get to do my job, and no one’s really telling you what to do in the same way as growing up. I always had this promised-land feeling, that it’s ahead. With the next record, I enter the time in my life where ostensibly I am entering the ‘promised land’ and it turns out differently than I expected. There is a ‘paradise lost’ aspect to the way that it will end.”
As someone who is constantly searching for truth through music, Bazan is an avid and curious listener. He has as much admiration for the righteous fury of Detroit’s poetic post-punk greats Protomartyr as well as the character studies of Owen Ashworth. Here is what David Bazan shared with us from his Bandcamp library.
Protomartyr
The Agent Intellect
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), Cassette
“They might be my favorite band. It’s like pop music in an extreme way, but not in a way that people who like pop music would [associate with]. There are these nods to pop phrasing and with the way that Joe [Casey]’s phrasing is. His sense for hooks is incredible. They’re one of the few bands that, when I see them play, I feel something that I can’t help but describe as—and I really don’t like this word—something ‘spiritual.’ It just hits on a deeper level than a lot of rock ‘n’ roll. The first song I heard was ‘The Devil in His Youth.’ The first 50 times I heard it, for some reason, it was not even the lyrics, the opening strains of that guitar lick feels like church to me. I’m framing this in my own terms, it’s my own baggage, but it feels so positive to me. It feels like this cathedral of something real in that tune.
“There’s something so unhinged about [their music]. Something in the way they present it, it’s not that it feels nihilistic, but then what is being transmitted is so much care or consequence. They really are the top. I can’t think of anybody who’s really doing what they’re doing. Every other record has got the thing they do just in a different timbre or a different approach. They’re very creative. It reminds me of listening to Fugazi record by record, where the formula itself isn’t really that different, but you find different things to do with it in ways that are memorable.”
Gia Margaret
There’s Always Glimmer
Cassette, Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), T-Shirt/Shirt
“Gia [Margaret] and I met in 2015, and we played a show together. She is a friend of my friend Owen Ashworth [Advance Base, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone] and then she came to a show with Owen, and we were talking about music a little bit, and then I heard this record. The songcraft, the emotion, and the sounds are so well done. It took me to places. Some of the songs are about relationships and ambiguity. I was blown away by it, and by the vulnerability and honesty that comes through on some of the lyrics. After that, we started to become buddies and realized that we had a lot in common musically. It was one of those things where she was a huge Pedro fan when she was in high school. I got to know her tunes more and more, and then she lost her voice and made a couple of ambient records. But this record just keeps coming up for me. It’s very grown up, in a way. I wasn’t listening to a lot of music that dealt with emotions, relationship themes, and self-doubt in this way. It felt like she was a kindred spirit. Since then, we’ve become really good buddies and made a little bit of music together, here and there.”
Advance Base
Animal Companionship
Vinyl LP, Cassette, Compact Disc (CD)
“I just saw him [Owen Ashworth] play, and he played this one song [from Animal Companionship] called “Christmas in Nightmare City.” My God, it’s a magic spell. His compositions are so uniquely him, as is his vocal delivery. Then the lyrics he’s writing are these short stories or character studies. When I first toured with him in 2007, he had this song called ‘Edith Wong‘ that was so evocative and so real. I was hanging out with him after [a show], and I was like, ‘When did you know this person? What city are we in with this song? I want to know more about her.’ He was like, ‘Um, this is something I made up.’ He’s such a vivid chooser of details. Some of his songs on previous records have helped me. He has a song about how long a curse is going to last with one of his characters [‘Summon Satan’], and it was the first time that I realized, ‘Oh, I’m dealing with a curse here. Whatever has been going wrong with me for all these years, it’s kind of a curse, and I need to understand it so that I can break it.’ He’s a helpful person.”
Chris Cohen
Overgrown Path
Compact Disc (CD), Cassette, Vinyl LP
“I met Chris [Cohen] a couple of times in person. I was such a huge Deerhoof fan, so I knew his name from their liner notes. When this [record] came out, it blew me away. The imagination in every tune… He’s so fluent in things that are really over my head, in a way that’s like seeing somebody do magic. Lyrically, that song ‘Rollercoaster Rider,’ I feel like is a metaphor for being in the music business. There’s this line where he says, ‘The mountainous potential/ You spend it all at once.’ It’s so personal but is also obscured. I got hooked on it that year. It was one of three records that I listened to over and over again, and I still go back to it. I can’t believe how fresh it is, every single time. It’s a top favorite record of mine. He drummed on the tour for it, that I did not get to see, but I saw a bunch of YouTube videos of it where he was the drummer and sang and had a few people filling out the band. When I was first figuring out if I was going to go ahead and really try to drum on this tour, there were a few things that I connected with, and one of them was watching him do that. It was a beautiful thing to see, and I was hoping that I could do a version of it that was true to how I play and sing.”
Bedhead
Beheaded
Vinyl LP
“When I first heard Bedhead, I think it was not dissimilar from when I first heard Granddaddy. Because it was a pace, spaciousness, intentionality and mood that felt native. It felt like it had already existed within me. When I heard Bedhead, it was like, ‘Oh, this is the sound of this feeling that I have.’ I was at my friend Jonathan Ford’s house, and he was playing them in the background. He always had bands like Gastr del Sol that were sort of on the edge of things that I knew about. He was playing Beheaded, and I was like, ‘What is this music?’ and he was shocked. He was like, ‘You haven’t heard Bedhead?’ I said, ‘No, what is that? Is that a band?’ And he was like, ‘Oh my God, your music sounds like Bedhead to me.’ I got that record, and I got the Dark Ages EP. I put them on, and I just couldn’t stop listening to them. I was obsessed. It was the space and the harmony. It felt deconstructed, somehow, from the music that I was listening to. Everything is broken down, split apart, and spread out. It also feels like it’s music that works really well in the desert, where I was spending a lot of time at that point in my life.
Blonde Redhead
Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons
“I first heard them in a record store with the record Fake Can Be Just As Good, which is kind of a noise-rock record. But what hooked me with them is they have the textures of Sonic Youth or Unwound, but harmonically, they were doing something their own. Even on Fake Can Be Just As Good, with the song ‘Water,’ there’s this descending harmonic figure that’s really Beatles-y. I was really hooked on them when this record came out. I knew in advance that Guy [Picciotto] of Fugazi had produced the record, which was very titillating for me. I put it on and the choices that they were making—there is very little low-end, and it was like they reimagined their band in a way. There is very little distortion in some places. That first tune [“In Particular”] is this weird journey. The groove is stunted. For them, they’re a three-piece band, and the way the drummer [Simone Pace] writes and composes drum arrangements is very methodical and also groovy in this way. He has these themes and hooks that he builds in and peppers through. There’s theme and variation in the drum parts, but then he’s doing these things that are very technical. I still can’t quite conceive of how he came up with these things, it seems like a lot [of the parts were] multitracked, and then he learned how to do them all on his own. Then there are the lyrics and the melodies. The piano song [“For The Damaged Coda”] is bumper music on everything 25 years later. It’s crazy! My kids know moments from that record just from it being around on TikTok. Then they went on to morph into other versions of their band that if you listen to Fake Can Be Just As Good or 23 or whatever, it’s all completely different. They were already this imaginative band that was going to recast themselves in new ways every time with similar tools. But with this one, they made music from another planet. It felt like they made something so weird, and it also sounds like Guy and his side of Fugazi is in this record, in a way. All of the chunk is gone, and it’s all of these upper-frequency guitar lines that are intertwining and making these weird, tense shapes. I listen to it over and over again. It’s timeless.
