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Aarik Danielsen

Riding West with Pedro the Lion

We might be gliding the asphalt gray from within the confines of a pickup cab, some late-’80s woodie station wagon or deep inside the box-shaped heart of a sedan. My unfocused—perhaps hyper-focused—imagination cannot define these details just out of reach. 


But I can tell you this: I ride beside a young David Bazan and, through hot window glass, we share our witness. Miles of desert blur into still other, untold deserts before the land cashes in every favor to the north and west and the vistas take on a bayside glaze. 


The winding, sun-streaked highways before us stretch into “Santa Cruz,” the newest Pedro the Lion album and third since bandleader Bazan revived the project. “Phoenix” arrived first in 2019, followed three years later by “Havasu.” Each release marries knotty indie-rock textures and documentary focus, retelling Bazan’s personal history starting with his youth. 


 
Pedro records charted an unbroken course through the heart of my religious experience, like a confirmation class in the good, the bad, and the ugly. 
 

Like the songwriter, I toured Arizona and California between birth and 18, though my family plotted its course in reverse. Grant me four albums to chronicle early life: “Vallejo,” “Vista,” “Show Low” and “Mesa.” Beyond the close, inked stars on our maps of the American West, “Santa Cruz” revives an old familiar feeling, that maybe Bazan artfully plotted his points just for me. 


“It’s Hard to Find a Friend,” the first full-length Pedro the Lion album, found my ears a few years after its 1998 release. Relative to the band in 2024, the set is a minimalist’s paradise: darkly planing electric guitar, plenty of room between the high and low ends, Bazan efficiently playing the lean drum set photographed on the record’s cover. 


Beyond mere aesthetics, something about Bazan’s voice shook me, and beautifully so. Murmured lyrics conversed with scriptures, hymns, and customs of the white Evangelical church, but from a strange vantage point: a part and yet apart, as if Bazan sang from a back pew or unswept corner of the fellowship hall. 


Pedro records charted an unbroken course through the heart of my religious experience, like a confirmation class in the good, the bad, and the ugly. 


“It’s Hard to Find a Friend” dug around the assumed roots of masculinity and what we talk about when we talk about redemption. Later, the bleak rock and roll noir “Control” toppled every idol I once built to sex and marriage while “Achilles’ Heel” feinted toward the West of Bazan’s more recent albums, crafting sketches of every circuit preacher and elixir salesman out to win new territory for Christ, already counting up all their foregone conclusions. 


Bazan sounded a baritone not unlike my own voice, experiencing God through silence rather than suspicious ecstasy; willing to believe in something real but afraid of leaving too many footprints on the world. 


Shelving the band for a time, he made cool soul music of an unusual sort on records I cherish just as much. And when he refreshed the band with a new maiden tour starting in nearby St. Louis, I made my way there, heading east this time, to marvel alongside Bazan at where we both ended up. 


This present Pedro triptych relates Bazan’s origin story, piling up miles and conversations, songs and circumstances that led—inevitably, we both now recognize—to every expression of faith and doubt, of disillusionment and aligning yourself with whatever beauty you come across in this world. 


In 11 songs and just under 36 minutes, “Santa Cruz” transmits another chapter through a fashion resembling stream-of-consciousness, as if Joyce plucked his first electric guitar off the wall of some California dimestore. The album forms an exercise in radical honesty and radical compassion for who you were before you knew better. 


 
Artists uniquely account for gaps in the written record, and for their implications.
 

As such, “Santa Cruz” becomes music for kids from any time and state who worried over competing definitions of the unpardonable sin or becoming a footnote in one of Screwtape’s letters; who fumbled their CD stacks, fearful of music’s awful, awesome power; who just wanted to get God and angels and demons right


“This won’t stay hidden forever / But it has to stay hidden for now / Maybe trading stories / With a future friend,” Bazan croons on album opener “It’ll All Work Out.” And you and me and every longtime listener feels like a friend anticipated. 


Bazan sifts all these scenes in buzzy synth tones and spacious grooves; with agile basslines and tense piano passages a la Wilco’s “Bull Black Nova”; with amps turned up before harnessing lullaby softness; through a magical, mysterious vein of pop the Beatles and the desert fathers could hold in common. He paraphrases the Bible, grants the city of Modesto more melodic dignity than it’s ever known, cradles his own future with a key change. 


“Santa Cruz” looses all the possibilities of autobiography as confession and a casting forward. Standing before a microphone in the present tense, Bazan sings about how the past penned his future story. And he bridges these times and all their attendant selves with refreshing, precise sensitivity. 


Religious historian Diana Butler Bass once tweeted that, perhaps, we should let the poets handle our theology; read more than a sentence of mine, and you know I’m on board. But why stop there? I want to cede them our histories too. 


Artists uniquely account for gaps in the written record, and for their implications. All across her luminous memoir “You Could Make This Place Beautiful,” the poet Maggie Smith sounds a crucial chord; writing about her divorce, she admits there is no one, pure perspective on her marriage but never diminishes her own voice or view.


In his recent collection “Above Ground,” poet Clint Smith keeps gently directing our eyes to the margins of the page, to racial and social histories that rarely make the body copy. 


On these last three albums, Bazan keeps a similar pace. He rewrites his own history, not in the interest of making himself look better or taking a revisionist’s stand. Able to sit back, take in as much of the timeline as possible, then sing, he explains himself then to himself now and forgives who he was when he stood between them. He lifts landmarks and lessons necessary for mapping a different way through the world. 


 
Every mile shows me the twinned powers of change and contemplation, the beauty of looking hard at yourself in the mirror and then walking out the door softer.
 

Bazan and I don’t always cut the same path. His solo passage through the 2010s documents a divergence from Christianity. I once wrote that I feel too old, too far in to surrender my beliefs; this is either a tragedy or a pilgrim’s perseverance, depending on which Pedro the Lion record you love most. 


But as I also wrote in this space, a hard-to-believe seven years ago, Bazan owes me no belief and I owe him no doubt. All any of us owes each other is understanding; in “Santa Cruz” and elsewhere, understanding radiates in waves. 


I want to keep riding shotgun, to stow away with whatever iteration of Pedro the Lion travels on from “Santa Cruz.” Every mile shows me the twinned powers of change and contemplation, the beauty of looking hard at yourself in the mirror and then walking out the door softer. David Bazan sings through spaces of my life that still demand understanding and this engenders a deep trust. 


Why stay in the car? To borrow, then bend a Pedro lyric:  I can’t say it like I sing it /  And I can’t sing it like I think it / I can’t think it like I feel it. And everything I feel about the matter and the music is in this essay.



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