David Bazan’s eyes are closed. His right foot, clad in a faded black Converse Chuck Taylor All Star low top sneaker, taps a rhythm on the hardwood floor. He’s strumming a cherry red electric guitar and singing a song from his latest album, Strange Negotiations. An intricate piece of wall art, spelling out the musician’s surname in black and turquoise yarn, adorns the wall behind him. Forty or so twenty-somethings stand in the kitchen, lounge on furniture or sit cross-legged on the carpet in front of him.
Evidently, no one in attendance finds it the least bit strange that the acclaimed singer-songwriter is performing in the living room of a tiny duplex in the Hampden neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland. Instead, the small audience is completely captivated by the music: a slow and somber version of “Wolves at the Door” that is virtually unrecognizable from the album track.
Following performances of “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushed Tin Box,” a Radiohead cover, and “Selling Advertising,” a song from his debut solo EP, Fewer Moving Parts, Bazan solicits questions from the assembly. When asked about “Wolves at the Door,” he explains in a hushed tone, “There’s a dynamic that’s been happening since the late ‘70s in politics, where the conservative party has gotten working-class people to vote against their [own] economic interests, election after election after election, all the while indoctrinating them with the idea that if they just keep doing that, that everything’s gonna get better. And it just gets worse and worse for them all the time.”
Albert Einstein so eloquently defined doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results as insanity. David Bazan, like most folks, would apparently agree with that definition. But he’d sooner call anybody who did that “a goddamn fool,” as he does in the chorus of “Wolves at the Door.”
Prior to the show that night, David Bazan told me that politics were a major theme on Strange Negotiations.
“Early on, I noticed that there was a little bit more political content,” he said. “The things that were on the forefront of my mind as I was just going through my life, as far as societal [stuff], were just the economic collapse and then the collective response to the economic collapse [as well as] the rise of the Tea Party.”
Strange Negotiations is not an exclusively political album, however. The songs on the record—which range from noisy, riff-based rock songs (“Wolves at the Door” and “Eating Paper”) to gentle, harrowing ballads (“Virginia” and “Won’t Let Go”)—explore universal themes such as love, loss, guilt and personal responsibility. The variety on Strange Negotiations is not unlike any of Bazan’s previous material. In fact, in a single three-minute song, he’s liable to cover the hardships of marriage, the worries of parenthood, the struggles of overcoming alcoholism and the difficulties of losing one’s religious faith.
“In the end, I’m just gonna do what comes out,” he says, “[and] I’ll try to edit things in a way that make them good.”
—–
David Bazan was introduced to music at an early age. His father was a music pastor. His mother sang in the church choir. As a result, his exposure was almost entirely Christian in nature.
“I was pretty thoroughly insulated,” he says. “I remember my aunt gave me the Cassingle of Billy Ocean’s ‘Caribbean Queen.’ I heard Michael Jackson songs, but only in Pepsi commercials.”
When Bazan was in seventh grade, he made what he calls “the best trade in the history of the world,” swapping the clarinet he’d been playing in school for a drum set. It was around this time—when he switched from a private Christian school to a public school—that he became more immersed in secular music. He soon discovered Jane’s Addition’s Nothing’s Shocking, Living Colour’s “Cult of Personality” and the Beatles.
“My friend’s dad had Beatles LPs,” he recalls. “We had heard in church camp that if you played ‘Revolution 9’ backwards that it says, ‘Turn me on, dead man.’ So we found the White Album specifically to do that. Once we realized that that was sort of dumb, we just started listening to it. I remember just freaking out at how amazing it was.”
As a student at Shorewood High School in Shoreline, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, in the early 1990s, David began tuning in to his local modern rock radio stations, where he first heard Nirvana, the Cure, Depeche Mode and Pearl Jam. He joined the Columbia House Music Club and purchased albums by the aforementioned bands as well as records by Fugazi and U2. It was also around this time that he picked up a guitar and began writing songs.
“They were just horrible,” he admits.
But he enjoyed the craft, and because he felt that he was at least capable of writing songs—stringing chords together and composing lyrics—he stuck with it. Eventually, he improved enough to begin sharing his creations.
“Right off the bat, people seemed to like the songs,” he says. “I was going to church a lot—heavily involved, not just, like, going—so I was in a bit of a cultural ghetto that a lot of silly horseshit is praised as, ‘Oh, yeah. That’s great.’”
That supportive environment, whether the compliments he received were genuine or not, at the very least encouraged Bazan to continue songwriting. He recruited a pair of friends, Travis Smith and Nick Peterson, and put together a band called Christopher Robin. In college, during a hiatus from the group, he recorded a number of four-track demos that were a little less conventional than the songs he had written for the band. This is what he first called Pedro the Lion.
Bazan, joined by a constantly evolving cast of musicians, released four full-length albums and five EPs as Pedro the Lion between 1997 and 2004. The band’s earlier material featured sparse musical arrangements with generally acoustic instrumentation. Its latter work tended to be heavier and more sonically rich. The strength of Pedro the Lion, however, was always Bazan’s first-person narrative lyrics, in which he sang about everything from road rage and unfaithful spouses to unscrupulous politicians and touring bands flipping their vans. Given his Christian background, spirituality was also a frequent topic of interest, and as a result, the band was often invited to perform at churches and Christian music festivals.
“I always hoped desperately that I wouldn’t have to be a part of the Christian music industry,” he says. “We did play Cornerstone and one or two other Christian festivals, but besides that, I really didn’t want to play in churches, didn’t want to play Christian shows. I just wanted to play shows at bars and have the records in Tower Records, so that if people who are Christian wanted to interact with us, they had to come out of the cloister.”
When Pedro the Lion did perform at churches and Christian music festivals, the experiences were more often than not decidedly unpleasant. On one early tour, Bazan recalls being complimented on his “ministry” by a promoter at a church show, only to be informed that the turnout wasn’t as great as he had anticipated and the band would not be paid. This happened approximately every third night, according to Bazan.
Other offenses were far more egregious. At TOMfest—a now-defunct annual Christian music festival held in Camas, Washington—he remembers that attendees received a packet of materials that included a blatantly homophobic sticker.
“[It] had the bathroom silhouette man and the bathroom silhouette woman holding hands, and it said ‘Straight Pride,’” he says. “From stage, I was just like, ‘What the fuck? This is your idea of Christianity?’ It was mind-blowing.”
Not surprisingly, Bazan eventually refused to play any more Christian shows. He subsequently softened his stance somewhat over the years, but outside of performing at Cornerstone and playing the occasional Christian college show, he’s made no concerted effort to cater to his Christian fan base.
In 2005, as a diversion from his main act, Bazan and his chief Pedro the Lion collaborator, T.W. Walsh, began a new project called Headphones. Headphones was originally intended to be an outlet for Walsh’s compositions, with Bazan providing vocals and playing drums, but midway through the recording sessions, Walsh had second thoughts about the project and abandoned the idea. But because the duo had already made a commitment to deliver an album to David Dickenson and his Suicide Squeeze record label, Bazan commandeered the Headphones band name and commenced recording his own material.
The eponymous Headphones record, released in May 2005, sounds unlike anything Bazan had ever done before. His lyrics remained clever and poignant, but in place of the guitars and bass that characteristically decorated his indie rock music were analog synthesizers and an electro-pop sound. While Headphones received generally positive reviews, both album sales and attendance at the band’s shows were disappointing. What is perhaps most noteworthy about the Headphones project, however, is the rift that developed between Bazan and Walsh during the recording sessions.
“Walsh and I, who were kind of like the producers of the record, decided, ‘OK. We’re gonna have [Frank Lenz] play drums because he’s fantastic, and then our sound guy is gonna engineer and mix the record,’” Bazan recalls. “Initially, Walsh was gonna wear both those hats, but we kind of delegated him right out of any concrete way to participate in the record. So he would show up every day, but just feel useless and resent that.”
Less than a year after the Headphones record was released, Pedro the Lion would cease to exist. Bazan has a difficult time identifying exactly when and why he decided to drop the Pedro the Lion moniker, but his brief falling out with T.W. Walsh, his increasing dependence on alcohol and an ongoing philosophical and spiritual cataclysm were all contributing factors.
Although Pedro the Lion was always essentially David Bazan and whatever musician friends happened to be around at the time, he admits that he felt “freer” as he embarked on a true solo career.
“I don’t know what the pressure was or where it would have been coming from in regards to Pedro the Lion,” he says, “but when I got rid of that [name], I just thought I could do anything.”
In 2006, Bazan released Fewer Moving Parts, an EP that features five songs recorded both electrically and acoustically. The album includes some of his best work, and Bazan confesses that all in all, it’s his “favorite thing” he’s ever done. Lyrically, the singer-songwriter offers a critical analysis of Pitchfork Media, who in a 2000 review of Pedro the Lion’s Winners Never Quit criticized Bazan for having a “neckbeard” (“Selling Advertising”); delivers arguably his most literary song, in which a wayward father encounters the wrath of God (“Cold Beer and Cigarettes”); and issues a pointed political criticism of the United States’ foreign policy and the state of the country (“Backwoods Nation”). On “Fewer Broken Pieces,” the centerpiece of the EP, Bazan discusses his “reasons for going solo,” providing a self-deprecating account about how he doesn’t think that he’s “better off alone” and how he, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, “love[s] to let [his] friends down.”
In 2009, David Bazan released Curse Your Branches, his first full-length LP. It is not hyperbole to say that Curse Your Branches is one of the most brutally honest, autobiographical albums of all time. On it, Bazan grapples with a growing disillusionment with his Christian faith, a drinking problem and the alienation that those issues created between himself and his family.
“I didn’t choose to tackle all of that stuff deliberately,” he says. “My subconscious was kind of being really stubborn and not really letting any other kinds of things emerge as I was writing. It was just like, “Oh, here’s another song about this.’ Finally, I realized, ‘OK. This is the moment where you have to write about all this stuff.’”
Curse Your Branches is chock-full of heartbreaking lyrics that make for an emotionally exhausting listening experience. Album-opener “Hard to Be” begins in the Garden of Eden, with an incredulous Bazan singing about the dubiousness of original sin. In “Bless This Mess,” he’s troubled by the expectations of being the spiritual leader of his household while struggling with a reliance on alcohol; arguably the single most affecting lyric on the record is sung toward the end of this song, when Bazan crows, “By my baby’s yellow bed/I kissed her forehead and rubbed her little tummy/Wonderin’ if she’d soon despise the smell/Of the booze on my breath like her mom.” In the bluesy “When We Fell,” the singer envisions informing his mom about his recent loss of faith: “If my mother cries when I tell her what I have discovered/Then I hope she remembers she taught me to follow my heart.”
As Bazan was writing Curse Your Branches, he would often play the songs for his family. While sharing the personal compositions with those closest to him was sometimes difficult, the process was ultimately cathartic for everyone involved.
“They all knew the record pretty well before it was released,” he says. “For my wife, it was nice, because some of the songs that kind of recounted problems with drinking and things, she was able to realize, ‘Oh, we’re past that now. This is a devastating song about a time that is in the past.’ It made her realize that we had kind of gradually entered into a different phase. So that was nice.”
Because Bazan was obviously struggling with the most serious of issues, he found his family to be completely understanding and accepting of his beliefs.
“Everybody involved,” he says, “my parents and my wife, I think they could tell the amount of respect that I had for everything that I was writing about, how sincerely I was approaching it and how seriously I was taking all of it. It wasn’t just, ‘Eh, I don’t believe in God anymore.’ It was really important for me. So that made a lot of the potentially difficult things a lot easier, to the point that my dad played piano on the last song. The very last strands of music on the record are just my dad playing us out.”
—–
Back in the living room, David Bazan is over-sharing. A young male fan asks him what his favorite vegetable is. “I like asparagus,” he answers. When another male fan chimes in to say that asparagus affects the smell of urine, Bazan responds: “I know it does, but I think I’m OK with that. Piss smells kind of bad anyway.” In between laughs, he confesses, “I have a jug of it in my van.” Following more rousing laughter: “I wish that was a joke.”
This leads to a conversation about why David Bazan has a jug of piss in his van. “At night, I don’t want to get up and put my pants on and walk into Walmart or wherever I’m parked to go to the bathroom,” he explains.
This leads to a conversation about where David Bazan sleeps and his life on the road. “I sleep in my van,” he says. “I have a super sweet new mattress. … The memory foam has begun to remember.” He’s also got a rice-cooker and a toaster in his van, which he calls “amazing.” In fact, one of his greatest pleasures on the road involves eating “good, crusty bread,” toasted with butter.
This leads to a conversation about the economics of touring. “The band tours are great,” he says, “but they don’t make me any money, really. I can make three- or four-thousand bucks, sometimes six-thousand bucks, on a band trip. But that’s six weeks that I’m gone, and I’m a grownup. I have a lot of bills, so that doesn’t begin to cut it. The way that I make my money is on house show tours, because I don’t make money off of records anymore.”
Earlier on in the show, the dialogue between Bazan and his audience was more trivial. Apropos of nothing, he declared his love for Adele’s 21. He told the crowd what podcasts (“WTF with Marc Maron,” “Radiolab” and “This American Life”) and audiobooks (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” “Harry Potter” and “The Hunger Games”) he listens to on the road. He talked about traffic and the weather. He was recommended obscure, underground bands to listen to (Mono, Gregor Samsa and Explosions in the Sky) and books to read (Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We”).
Toward the end of the set, Bazan performs a compelling version of the elegiac “Priests and Paramedics,” a Pedro the Lion song in which a domestic dispute leads to the death of the husband character. “‘You’re gonna die,’” he sings. “‘We’re all gonna die. Could be twenty years, could be tonight.’” After the final note of the song resonates, Bazan makes an awkward joke and takes a song request before a voice in the crowd asks him about his hopes. This is when the conversation becomes more serious.
“It would be great if I could live ‘til my kids were at least in their mid-20s,” he responds. “When I was singing [“Priests and Paramedics”], the idea that on this tour I could die tonight, that’s a real thing. It’s very possible. But [my kids] would be screwed. I suppose we have a term-life situation, but I need for them to be better set up before I go. That’s what I hope. I hope that nothing unexpected happens. I’m working on it. I’m working real hard. They’re a big deal, those people.”
Bazan ends the night with a spirited performance of “Strange Negotiations,” another track from his latest album that’s ostensibly about the current economic crisis. After his set, he hangs out for a bit, chatting with fans. I shake his hand before I leave and thank him for being so generous with his time. He wishes me a safe trip back home. I do the same. His hope is my hope; I hope neither of us die tonight.
