In a pre-streaming age, I often learned about new bands through an artifact known as the sampler. These CD compilations—or in earlier years, cassette or LP—typically comprised an album-length collection created by a record company to share new songs from their roster of artists. These comps were often cheap, released by labels with limited access to mainstream radio play in order to get music into the hands and ears of both skeptics and fans quickly and cheaply. They could also be used as promotional tools: A new single from the label’s one huge act would get listeners hooked, while lesser-known artists padded out the tracklisting. Something like a commercial-free Spotify playlist in physical form.
I loved label samplers, and I bought them in bulk in high school and college. In the early days of the Internet, it wasn’t easy to learn about the newest and shiniest indie rock bands, and not all of us had cool older siblings who could show us zines or lived in larger cities with rock venues and college radio stations. It was even worse for those of us who wanted to learn about Christian rock that wasn’t Stryper, Petra, or even DC Talk. The only REAL Christian rock magazines for many years were Heaven’s Metal and True Tunes.
Thus, samplers were the best way to discover Christian alternative rock acts that were closer in style and tone to the secular indie music I learned about from my non-Christian friends. And like I said: they were cheap.
On Christmas break in 1997, I purchased the Tooth & Nail Rock Sampler Vol. 1. It was only my second visit back home after spending my first semester away at college. I needed some new music desperately, and this album became the Holy Grail for my developing aesthetic. It caught my eye on the strength of the bands I knew—Starflyer 59, Joy Electric, and Plankeye—but after hearing “Nothing,” also included on the compilation, it didn’t take long for Pedro the Lion to become one of my favorite artists of all time. Led perpetually by David Bazan and a rotating cast of friends, the band upended what I understood about folk, rock, and alternative music. The pretense of the verse-chorus-verse-chorus song structure was there, but not always in the same arrangement. Also, the intimacy and immediacy of the lyrics with the jangly indie rock was a refreshing palate cleanser after the overdriven heavy guitar rock I loved in high school. The ideas were very much of-the-moment or ripped-from-my-journal, which was very new to me at the time.
As such, the music of Pedro the Lion gave me a basis of comparison when friends played the music of Pavement, Small Brown Bike, and Mineral. Talking about such artists made me feel like I had real inroads into commenting on popular music. It also helped me show others that I wasn’t subservient to mainstream alternative and pop radio. I listened to cool music.
Pedro the Lion’s core songwriter David Bazan used disaffected weirdos to tell dark morality tales that borrowed heavily from metaphorical storytelling of the Flannery O’Connor variety. And since he came from a Christian background, I found him an appealing resource for explore music and literature that didn’t have a high Jesus-per-minute quotient, but still came from a place of relative Christian beliefs.
Bazan was also the artist who helped me finally connect with the blue-haired punk rocker who became one of my best friends. We worked together at a Christian bookstore named The Christian Source in The Woodlands, Texas. I honestly didn’t know what to think about him. It wasn’t his outward appearance that fascinated me. It was his inward attitude. He possessed this devil-may-care verve I’d never associated with a Christian. He liked music—a lot—but I couldn’t make any inroads to bands we had in common. He didn’t like classic rock of any sort, much less most of the standard Christian alternative fare. He talked about bands like Avail, Fifteen, and Jawbreaker, stuff I’d never even heard about in college. I spent the first several months of us working together trying to figure out some common thread in our musical backgrounds.
Eventually, we found the missing key to unlocking our friendship, and it was Pedro the Lion. Thanks to him, I found out what happened to the band after it left Tooth & Nail. After the original quintet broke up, Bazan signed to Made in Mexico, followed by Jade Tree. My friend gave me copies of It’s Hard to Find a Friend and The Only Reason I Feel Secure, each of which was instrumental in discovering even more new music, including Death Cab for Cutie before most of the rest of the world met them.
Essentially, the music of Pedro the Lion served as the soundtrack for much of my twenties, and I was in the car a lot. I drove to and from school, work, church, home, and everywhere in between, including concerts across Houston, Austin, and Dallas. Through it all, the art of David Bazan was always there with a dark metaphor, an important bit of world-weary wisdom, or a channel for my angst and ennui about my fracturing religious beliefs. And he has continued to be an avatar for evolutions in my own religious, cultural, and sociopolitical thinking deep into the 21st century.
But Control stands at the center of it all. Released in April 2002 on Jade Tree, it’s the ideal introduction to Bazan’s storytelling oeuvre, and not just because it’s his best work. Whereas 2000’s Winners Never Quit told the story of a corrupt politician, Control deals directly with the intense highs and lows of marital infidelity. Its album-length story chronicles the depths of depravity to which humanity dips when it chooses to pursue its basest passions instead of improving the world. He sings about sneaking around, the peaks of sexual ecstasy, the intense fear of getting caught, the pains of the consequences, and the drudgery of everyday life. As I wrote earlier this year, “From sad-sack andante to pissed-off allegro, the 10-song record speaks to sex, religion, infidelity, passion, and destruction with zeal. It’s the human condition in 40 minutes.”
Musically, It’s a pitch-perfect example of second-wave emo right as acts like Thursday were birthing the third wave. Bazan provides crunchier guitar riffs than ever before, backed by pounding drums, deep bass lines, and his first real dalliances with synthesizers. “Options” kicks off the album with a signature understated Pedro the Lion sound, complete with sleepy vocals that deliver crushing conversations between a couple falling out of love. The energy kicks into overdrive with “Rapture,” a gritty tune about illicit hotel room sex that’s as far away from End Times theology as possible (“This is how we multiply/Pity that it’s not my wife“). “Penetration” takes those themes up a notch with thundering toms and a heavier rock intensity.
On “Indian Summer,” we get the first real hint of where Bazan will take his personal aesthetic in the subsequent decades. A whimsical synth wheezes underneath syncopated drumming and deep bass, as the lyrics discuss disaffected politics featuring the phrase “corporate cum.” With “Progress,” we retreat to old-school Pedro the Lion aesthetics, but “Magazine” swings back to the new direction, all while lambasting media and advertising culture that preaches external perfection while ignoring “what lies beneath.”
Bazan begins to draw his sad and sordid tale to a close with “Rehearsal,” as the divorcing couple confront each other with harsh words about their actions. “Second Best” is a classic slowcore dirge, as a plucked minor-key chord progression slowly creeps up its intensity as the wife comes to grips with her lot in life. The story reaches its denouement with the diptych of “Priests and Paramedics” and “Rejoice,” as the wife murders the husband in the former and the narrator bemoans the depravity of humanity in the latter.
While I can’t speak for him personally, I think Bazan and I have taken very similar spiritual and philosophical journeys out of our evangelical pasts. He just gets to contend with it publicly as someone who makes art for public consumption. The songs of Control resonated with me in 2002, and they hit even harder now. While I no longer relate to the evangelical Christianity or conservative politics of my youth, I do want to stand up for what’s right and true in this world while also acknowledging that shitty people often do shitty things. This album provides a darkly poignant reflection on what can happen when people give into their impulses in the heat of the moment without considering the costs or their impact on the world around them.
To be clear, David Bazan isn’t perfect, and neither am I. But his music has gotten me through some really tough spots in my life, so I appreciate him more than he knows. I just hope he’s OK with that. And every now and then, I unearth that 28-year-old sampler album and revel in the nostalgia.
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