Seattle's David Bazan has been a sort of poster child in the indie rock circuit for the post-modern movement. Rock music has gotten smarter, more articulate and often downright deep. Part of this evolution is evidenced in the discourse created through lyrics and sometimes even between performers and audiences. In the case of David Bazan, his former band, Pedro the Lion, wrote stripped-down songs about pain, human failure, and Jesus Christ.
The son of an evangelical minister, David was a devout Christian when he broke into the indie rock scene and he wasn't scared to talk and sing about it. Songs like 'Amazing Love' directly addressed his gratitude to a God willing to offer his only son in a flawed and broken voice. The lyrics on several of his first albums reflected his faith, sometimes almost coming across as painful hymns. However, later in the career of Pedro the Lion, which released four full length albums and five EPs between 1998 and 2004, David Bazan changed his mind about his faith. For fans it was a very public transition.
In addition to Pedro the Lion, Bazan has also toured with the bands the Headphones, Paperback, the Undertow Orchestra and many others. So fans watched as he went from answering fan questions at the original Pedro shows through his spells of telling drunken jokes between songs with the Headphones and aggressively taunting "Christian fans" the last time he was in Jacksonville with Paperback.
Probably the most interesting thing about Bazan's many bands, he is usually the songwriter and often plays every instrument on the recordings. Pedro the Lion rarely had the same lineup for two tours in a row and on most of their albums he recorded every instrument. So David Bazan's solo stuff is not unlike Pedro the Lion. It still has that intimate closeness and painfully frank emotions that have been his trademark under every moniker, although his newest songs do seem to be a little cheerier than past albums, even when he is discussing God's cruelty.
EU caught up with Bazan as he was on the road passing through Pennsylvania.
EU: What is the difference between David Bazan and Pedro the Lion?
Dave Bazan: On recording, there isn't very much difference. The majority of the Pedro catalog I recorded by myself or with the help of one other person, but I played the majority of the instruments on most of the records and on a couple of the things with Pedro I played all of the instruments, but with David Bazan records, I play all of the instruments. Live, Pedro the Lion was always a band, at least me and one other guy, and David Bazan, at this point, has always been me playing a guitar live. When I tour the upcoming album it will be me and a bunch of other guys helping me present the record, but for the time being it is just solo shows.
EU: Do you feel obligated to be a little more authentic when it's David Bazan than you would when writing behind the guise of a band?
DB: No, not at all. In fact, to my mind, one can be just as authentic writing fiction as autobiography. In fact sometimes I would say you can be more authentic when writing fiction, because as a person you are much more than your history. There are all of these aspects of subconscious and your personality and imagination and they are informed by things that you read and things that you see in the news and things that you consume that didn't necessarily happen to you; that aren't a part of your history, but they make up your you. If you stick simply to your history, you don't have an opportunity to express what I think is a vast majority of your personality and your taste and your thoughts about things. So I don't feel any obligation to be more autobiographical under my own name, but it has happened to come out this way. Which is weird because I've been writing the other way for ten years, it's hard to know what to attribute the change to.
EU: Do you feel that your songs focus on weakness or human inability?
DB: Yeah, definitely. It's funny, I think very early on in my songwriting life I believed in the depravity of man and that idea has everything to do with man's relationship with the biblical God. Most of the supposed joy that comes around seems artificial and seems more like escapism than it does real joy. It didn't feel like an authentic thing to write about. There wasn't this wealth of joy that I was trying to express. Over the years I stopped believing in that idea of the depravity of man. It's just way easier to fuck up than it is to not. There's so many more opportunities to mess a thing up than to get it right consistently. And there is a lot more failure to write about than there is real joy. And it's so hard to capture joy, for me, in a compelling way that translates.
EU: Is the level of honesty you project in your music difficult to perform over and over again, or does the repetition make the subject easier to diminish?
DB: Ideally, if I'm able to be fully in the moment like I like to be when I'm playing, you are thinking about these things again and again, but they change over time and I develop different associations than I did initially when I wrote the song. It doesn't always happen that way, but ideally I am thinking about the theme and the lyrics and interacting with them in that moment. It's not hard. It makes it enjoyable. It makes something that could be just routine, enjoyable.
EU: Is it more of a challenge to write a concept album, like Control, than your more stripped down work?
DB: Yeah it is more difficult. Less so with Control than Winners [Never Quit] because I didn't realize Control was a concept record until I got most of the way through, then I finished the last twenty percent of the lyrics in such a way to tie the loose ends together. But with Winners I realized what the story arc was after I'd written three of the songs and then I tried to puzzle-piece the rest of the bits in and that was pretty difficult. This record that will come out on Barsuk later next year, isn't a concept record in that way but there are a lot of thematic elements that go throughout the record. So I've kind of abandoned the idea of trying to write a linear narrative, but the work still seems to lean toward being conceptual sometimes.
EU: Live, do you still do the question and answer between songs or after sets?
DB: Yeah. I didn't do it in Headphones, because I would just get super drunk and tell dirty jokes, usually, instead of Q and A, but now I don't drink before I play so I do not allow myself to tell those dirty jokes any longer in my sobriety, but with the Bazan stuff I do the Q and A still, most nights.
EU: How do you feel about the Christian Rockers coming out to your shows and talking about your faith with you?
DB: Well, usually I get the sense that it is somebody attempting to manipulate that question and answer period to talk about faith in a way that evangelizes people. It's not always that way, sometimes it's a genuine question…But having grown up Christian I know that there is this forwardness and entitlement that Christians feel to be able to break into any situation with that discussion. It's ostensibly for the purposes of "spreading the word," and that colors it a little bit. I don't dislike those questions in this context, but if somebody is looking for an honest answer, I feel like I can usually tell… Sometimes it feels like people ask: "So is there any historical figure that really inspires you? Not just your music, but your life?" Yeah, I do know what you mean and I'm irritated by it. We're not on the same team, bro.
EU: How does your father feel about your music?
DB: He likes it. My parents have been remarkably supportive throughout the entire process. My dad suggested that I quit college to focus my attention more on the band, which is just ridiculous. This is the kind of dad that would bust my balls about getting Bs in high school. Once I finally did quit working and tried to just make, I can't say a living, I was bringing in about four thousand dollars a year at the time, but someone at an extended family gathering at Christmas asked me what I was doing and I had recently quit school and I said I was giving guitar and drum lessons, which I was giving like one drum lesson and one guitar lesson every couple of weeks. My mom pulled me aside and asked why I was doing that. I was doing the band for a living and she I said I should just tell them that. "Don't tell them something that you think they'll understand and think is valid." They've always been really supportive and come to every show that is in their area. They were concerned about the lyrical tone, but more just that everything was okay and that I was doing well.
EU: What has changed between singing songs like 'Amazing Love' to the newer stuff referring to a cruel God?
DB: I don't believe in Christianity. That's a big difference. I mean, I'm off the reservation, as it were, so one of the things that made a song like that compelling to me was the basic mathematics of the gospel, and most of those things don't even make any sense to me anymore. The idea that I've somehow offended God... If he exists, he made us how we are, and so I didn't choose to reject God or be alienated from him. I don't know what to make of it all, none of that makes any sense to me. The authority of the Bible, hell, all of your sort of fundamental Christian beliefs. I don't buy it.
EU: Would humanity be as hateful and violent without religion?
DB: Yeah. By and large religion is just a product of human beings trying to quantify wonder and to keep it for themselves and to lord it over people and a mechanism through which fear can be used as a motivator to get people to do all sort of things and to assign some people power and strip power from other people. I think there are really valid sentiments and ideals in the Bible. There are really valid sentiments and ideals in Buddhism and Islam. But human history tends not to be an example of those ideals. It tends to be an example of cruelty and greed. I think that the institutions of religion really tend to stem from those things. I think that those institutions exist because of cruelty and human greed. Not necessarily that they were handed down from on high and intending to stop the flow of cruelty and didn't succeed at doing it. The idea of neighbor love, empathy, which is how we talk about it, that's all we can hope for. That's in the Bible, Jesus talks about that.
EU: Do you pray with your daughter?
DB: We pray at the dinner table. I don't want her to know anything about it, but from an academic perspective, the Bible is the subtext of Western civilization, so it's really important that she knows it and understands it, but I don't want her to think that its God's word in any way. It's not really going to happen that way because my wife believes and they go to church together every Sunday and she's in Sunday school. We pray at the dinner table. I barely know if God exists. I still perceive that he does, but it's difficult for me to know if that's just my imagination for twenty-nine years. My impulses are to differ to that all-seeing eye. That idea. I was getting gas yesterday and I perceived that he existed, so I said "Hey." I don't know what to do about that. On the one hand, it feels like I'm short-circuiting some discovery process by "talking to God." On the other hand, if I just ignore it, it feels wrong. Like there is this intimacy with this being that I've cultivated for my whole life that I am now turning my back on and betraying. So I definitely don't pray in any conventional way, myself, so certainly not with my daughter. But my feeling about the dinner table is that gratitude is a really important idea and sentiment. So I asked my wife if we could just not pray to Jesus and we could just simply pray to God and she thought that was great.
EU: What can people expect from a David Bazan show in St. Augustine, at Café Eleven?
DB: It's gonna be me and a mildly distorted electric guitar. I'll be playing six or seven new songs, a bunch from the old Pedro catalog, a handful from the new EP, some Headphones songs and maybe a cover or two.
David Bazan's Cold Beer and Cigarettes comes out on Barsuk Records sometime in 2008. Go to davidbazan.com to hear some of the songs from his most recent EP.
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