Musical Impulse Through Crisis and Conflict

“I think being creative should be a process of discovery, rather than a process of expressing your hopes and beliefs.”

 

“I needed a break from the methodology I had been using as Pedro the Lion.”

David Bazan’s music has always been about more than just the music. As the man behind the notable indie band Pedro the Lion, Bazan used his songwriting to spread the Biblical message, while examining his own faith in Christianity. But his religious skepticism and honest evaluation of the difficult questions led to his dissociation from evangelical Christianity and a bout of destructive alcoholism, stemming from the hardship and confusion of rejecting the beliefs of his family and friends. Since then, he’s shed the Pedro moniker and embarked on a new creative process meant to explore the ever-present questions that riddle his mind, while denouncing the conflicting and disparate theological teachings on which he was raised. David Bazan glows in the aftermath of his philosophical progression with a complexity and introspective essence in lyrical content that should turn the heads of anyone who has ever contemplated the prevailing human condition.

“There was a lot of concern among people I knew that you get one shot at a music career. But, it was something I needed to do for other reasons – more because my workflow, creative life, and time management were a total disaster. I needed a break from the methodology I had been using as Pedro the Lion. It represented the way I was working at the time,” says Bazan about the decision to end his flourishing career with Pedro the Lion in 2005.  With this decision came the risk of losing a significant fan base and ending his career altogether, but Bazan insists, “There was a lot of concern about that, but not by me. I needed to prove people wrong.” His instincts were proven right with the success of his first full-length solo effort, Curse Your Branches, which received overwhelming critical praise and was even considered by NPR as “an album of great music and great humanity.”

Curse Your Branches elicited strong reactions from listeners, some of whom couldn’t listen to it because “it meditated on too dark a set of feelings,” according to Bazan. However, Bazan maintains that the songs were created from the same impulse from which he created the Pedro repertoire, revealing “It’s the same sort of honest song, where I was asking really hard questions, and as I got older, the nature of the questions began to change. My personal motivation, my drive to be creative and participate in song craft has been the same. It didn’t feel like switching gears to me, as it maybe did on the outside. It felt like a natural progression.”

Before Branches, Bazan came from the mindset that his music should carry a message, but since his recent revelations, partly as a result of working on his first solo record, he refined the basis of his songwriting to examine his inner world rather than preach about it. He explains, “I think being creative should be a process of discovery rather than a process of expressing your hopes and beliefs. Every now and then I express something I believe, but there will be a nuance on what I say that I believe. It reveals something about me that I didn’t know, which is scary, but I’m really happy, because that means I’m being truly creative.”

Though it took over three years for him to dig out of the mess surrounding his life during the days of Pedro, Bazan quickly churned out a new set of songs after 2009’s Curse Your Branches. The new album, Strange Negotiations (Barsuk Records), is an impressive evolution of cathartic and ruminating themes, kindred to his previous work. However, Bazan attests that this album concentrates less on religious themes and more on political ones. He admits the two are unfortunately intertwined and reflects on his perspective, saying, “The music is a little bit more direct, musically and lyrically. To me, it’s a pretty angry record at times, but in the end we’ll figure out how to coexist, especially when it comes to family, and to function even higher than that if we can. The ability to work it out – that’s what the record is kind of obsessed with. It’s a very direct album that expresses a lot of things that are constantly on my mind.”

The songs on Strange Negotiations carry an epic quality, equally painful and thoughtful while focusing on personal contemplation without losing the greater meaning and relevance to life and worldwide issues. “People” and “Virginia” are two tracks that offer a solid example of this facet of Bazan’s songwriting. Starting out starkly, with only a guitar and Bazan’s rich voice before drums pummel in, accentuating the frustration emitted from an intense melody, “People” is a song that speaks to the fragmentation of humankind. Bazan began to notice this most prominently after the September 11 attacks in New York, when the division between sets of ideas became very pronounced, making it more difficult to talk to people about politics.

“Virginia,” on the other hand, features a slower tempo embellished with gentle guitar strumming and alluring keys. The song sticks to a personal narrative based around a deceased friend named Virginia.  Bazan opens up about the song, confessing, “‘Virginia’ is about a male friend of mine who died. It’s been a few years now, but my heart went out to his parents and family. I didn’t want to exploit it, and I didn’t want to make such a direct reference to their son, so I went with a nickname we had for him. Switching it to a girl’s name gave it a different dynamic that was interesting and made it more accessible to people that didn’t know that guy.”

The recording process also differed on Strange Negotiations. This is the first time he’s recorded with the rhythm section [Andy Fitts (bass) and Alex Westcoat (drums)] from his live touring band. He’s also playing with simpler song structures and a lot more repetition, both lyrically and instrumentally. Bazan explains that the skeleton of his songs changes from record to record, and on the latest album, the structural arrangements were completed before the recording began. He clarifies, “On this record, the skeleton was just the bass and drums together. We laid that stuff down and the guitar parts, in a lot of cases, came much later. I’d be working on those days after we recorded drums and bass. I knew the vocals, drums, and bass, but the other parts were a little bit up in the air.” The end result is a beautifully cohesive record crafted by a group of musicians who have clearly become intimate with each other and the music.

Having total control over his art has been important to Bazan from the start, and he finds the current state of the industry interesting in terms of the ease of self-production and digital distribution. He comments further on the expansive DIY ethic in music, “You don’t need a gatekeeper to make a record and get it out. I’m running into people all the time who are pretty successful recording artists, and they’re making a living making music that no one has ever heard of. I think smart people are keeping their ears to the ground to figure out how to navigate it. If you’re a real artist, and it’s not just a bunch of hype, it’s a great thing.”

His recent string of living room shows are an extension of Bazan’s DIY mentality, leaving out the club promoters and venue policies entirely to ensure the artist gets more than a fraction of the profits. Bazan recognizes the benefits and limitations of this approach in music, pointing out, “I never started a record label or booked my own shows. People better organized do that for me. Some venues are in it for the same exact reason I’m in it, whereas the motivation for others is money. The likeminded ones say ‘fuck it’ and we just do it ourselves. Bring your own PA, work in spaces that aren’t corporate venues – Fugazi-style. It’s tough to really do everything yourself. Allies like a manager or record label you’re really likeminded with – that’s the key.”

Bazan also acknowledges Seattle’s role in helping him develop into the musician he has become. “There are a lot of good people around here that are really creative and I guess maybe not nurturing, but inspiring. Every month there’s a new band going about it a little bit differently and challenging you to not be complacent. Just to make music and to really go for it. That’s the kind of town Seattle is. It’s a climate where I feel like I’ve been able to make music around a lot of smart people who are really trying hard.”

Though Bazan’s music and the history of his career are compelling, disconnecting from religious and spiritual matters when talking to him is near impossible. He realizes that these topics are going to come up in interviews and that he’ll be asked about his current belief system. Ultimately, he doesn’t think it matters in terms of who he is as a musician, but also admits, “I really don’t know. I guess I would officially be called agnostic, but that seems harder than what describes me. I fought really hard to be able to think my own thoughts about all those things. I’m collecting as much data as I can about cosmic concerns. I don’t feel like I’m defined by it, like I used to be. It’s a big deal, because I’m constantly thinking about these things and having conversations about them, but not in the obsessive way that maybe I used to.”

Bazan keeps this provocative dialogue going in song and is happy the discussion is happening, especially from a more challenging perspective. “Any honest participant in a conversation like that is going to be helpful. I’m still so interested in that conversation. I’m still fascinated by it.”

www.davidbazan.com